Vachon Imagined

There have been times I’ve hated someone so deeply it almost felt like a skill set—like it should’ve come with a job description and benefits. Honestly, it even makes sense I ended up in law enforcement, because sometimes it feels like the universe hires you to wrestle with the very thing you’re secretly fluent in.

That’s the irony: the things you’re trying to “handle out there” are often the same things you haven’t fully made peace with in here.

And hate is clever like that. It doesn’t just sit neatly pointed at someone else like an arrow in a target. It leaks. It bends. Eventually it turns on your own perception, and suddenly everything gets distorted—your judgment, your tone, your memory of events, even your ability to see neutral things as neutral.

It’s like wearing tinted glasses you didn’t realize you put on, and then insisting the world has changed colors.

At that point, you’re not really seeing the person clearly anymore. You’re seeing your experience of them, multiplied, replayed, sharpened, and re-litigated in your mind like a case that never closes. And the longer it runs, the less room there is for anything else to breathe.

The real twist is that hate doesn’t stay “over there.” It turns inward. It tightens your world. It starts editing what you can notice, what you can trust, what you can feel safe in. It doesn’t just block love for others—it blocks clarity for your own life.

And the cruel part is that it feels like control, when it’s actually contraction.

So you end up in this strange paradox: trying to hold onto certainty about someone else while slowly losing sight of your own peace.

At some point you realize the target was never stable. It was moving because it was partly made of you.

And that’s when things get interesting—not because the feeling disappears, but because you finally notice what it’s been doing to your vision the whole time.