Vachon Imagined

My grandfather, whenever I used the word “never,” would often correct me—logically, affectionately, gently, as he was so good at doing. A Midas touch, that man. A lawyer, always looking for the next strategy, the right timing, the right proof. He taught me about the word “never.”

It gave consolation to the weak, the fearful, the proud. But what it also gives is disillusionment. Ah yes, that pesky little soldier behind every certainty that whispers, not so fast.

Working in law enforcement, I have learned many things, but two stick out the most.

Those who love are often blind to their loved one’s capacity to harm.

And over time, I have learned something even more uncomfortable than that.

That what I look at long enough begins to look back.

That what I study begins to enter me.

That what I am tasked with recognizing in others does not stay neatly contained in “them.”

It moves.

It seeps.

It reshapes perception until the line between observer and observed becomes less stable than I once believed.

Criminality, justice, harm, intention—these things are not just outside of me. They are concepts I must hold carefully, because in holding them too rigidly, I risk becoming shaped by them in ways I do not notice until much later.

The work requires discernment. But it also requires surrender.

Because there is a way of becoming what you examine too closely. A way the mind begins to mirror the very patterns it is trying to correct. A way justice itself, when held without humility, can become something heavy and distorted inside the one who carries it.

This is what makes the work both necessary and dangerous.

It is also what makes it human.

Teaching me, the so-called law enforcement person, that at heart I’m not so different. That I too contain the same capacities I am tasked with recognizing in others.

That realization makes things complicated. Difficult, even. Because it means that when I look at someone’s actions, I am also brushing against the edges of my own.

I find myself thinking about how judgment is never fully clean. How proximity to another person’s choices reveals something uncomfortably human in myself. How justice, while necessary, is never as simple as the language we use to describe it.

My grandfather believed deeply in the law. He believed in its ability to equalize people, to bring structure where there was chaos, to bring justice where it did not exist before.

And now I understand, in a more complicated way, why he loved it so much.