Vachon Imagined

When I first became a mother, nothing was so pervasively obvious as the pressure of being a mother.

Oh. My. Goodness.

The pressure not to work. To breastfeed. To have another child. To do everything right.

Of course I wanted to give my son the best life possible—a better life than mine—but the more I focused on all the things I was supposed to do, the more I lost sight of what is truly important to a child: presence, time, attention. The noticing. The safety. The ability to feel secure in their home and, therefore, in their own skin. To face adversity and discover triumph. To cautiously face fear and discover freedom.

Through motherhood, it became abundantly clear to me just how much pressure women face—not only as mothers, but simply as women. That tiny but monumental space between our legs has become the subject of some of the greatest controversies the world will ever know.

Who can produce and who cannot.

Who is brave and who is not.

Who is powerful and who is not.

Sexuality—the very force through which all life arrives—has become one of the most contested subjects of all.

The Madonna who longs to be a whore.

The whore who wonders why she cannot be the Madonna.

The woman who wants to explore her sexuality without being accosted or demoralized by people who claim to know God, yet often seem not to know themselves.

And so many women search for their own kind. Surely another woman will understand. Surely another woman will know what it means to live in this body, to carry these expectations, to navigate these contradictions.

Sometimes she does.

Sometimes she doesn’t.

Because women are human.

They can be compassionate or cruel, courageous or fearful, liberated or controlling. They can reinforce the very beliefs that wounded them. They can become gatekeepers to the same cages they once longed to escape.

Not because they are women.

Because they are human.

The same is true of men. We search for tribes, identities, and people who will finally validate our experience, only to discover that every group contains the same miracle and the same problem: consciousness expressing itself through human beings.

A word can build a life. A word can destroy one.

And life, in all its forms, continues to unfold: chocolate croissants, babies being born, babies dying, people loving, people murdering. There is no permanent solution to any of it. No law can end violence forever. No doctrine can erase suffering.

Only a person willing to surrender their hatred can stop a hateful act.

Only a person willing to meet themselves can stop punishing what they are.

Dichotomies are not opposites so much as invitations. Invitations to watch ourselves. Invitations to see others as ourselves. Invitations to release the preconceived notions built from centuries of religion, fear, shame, and conquest.

We are not something to be ridiculed.

We are something to be loved.

Yet what we condemn in others is so often what we have condemned within ourselves.

The body bears the punishment.

Consciousness bears the punishment.

We shame desire and then wonder why intimacy feels dangerous. We shame vulnerability and then wonder why connection feels impossible. We shame our bodies and then spend a lifetime trying to escape them.

What we call judgment of others is often consciousness at war with itself.

People at war within themselves.

This is the part that is so often missed. We become fascinated by the battle outside us and overlook the one taking place within. We point to the sinner, the criminal, the liar, the whore, the coward, the oppressor, never noticing how quickly our attention moves away from ourselves.

Not because we are evil, but because self-examination requires something many of us have never been taught.

Self-control.

Discipline.

Vulnerability.

Honesty.

Confession.

The willingness to admit what is true before we rush to condemn it in another.

It is easier to attack what we see outside ourselves than to sit quietly with what we find within. Easier to build an identity around being right than to admit we are conflicted. Easier to preach than to confess.

Yet confession is where freedom begins.

The moment a person can honestly say, “I know that fear. I know that jealousy. I know that desire. I know that hatred. I know that longing,” something changes. The war loses momentum. The enemy is no longer out there. The enemy was never another person at all.

It was our refusal to see ourselves.

And until we are willing to do that, we will continue punishing our own consciousness, our own bodies, and calling it justice.

We will continue denying our own humanity and calling it virtue.

We will continue waging war against ourselves and calling it righteousness.

Until at last we realize that what we have been hearing all along was not the voice of God, but consciousness divided against itself—

calling itself God.