Vachon Imagined

My son recently drew me a picture that said, I love you to pieces.

It was a heart broken into many pieces, each one carefully drawn and colored. It hangs proudly on our wall among all of his other creations. Some of his artwork I immediately understand. Others feel like those exhibits where you have to stand in front of them for a while before they reveal themselves. But this one stayed with me.

It made me think about what happens when someone breaks our heart.

Not the romanticized version we often tell ourselves, but the deeper fracture beneath it.

When someone breaks your heart, they do more than wound your feelings. They disrupt your identity. The person who believed they needed no one suddenly discovers a desperate need for another. The confident person becomes uncertain. The independent woman finds herself waiting for a text, an approval, an affection that arrives only on someone else’s terms.

A shadow is revealed—not because the other person created it, but because their presence illuminated what was already there.

The loneliness.

The dependency.

The need to be chosen.

The fear of being abandoned.

What feels like heartbreak is often the collapse of an image we carried about ourselves.

The pieces are not only pieces of a relationship. They are pieces of an identity.

And yet there is something beautiful hidden within the breaking.

Because the heart itself was never divided.

Only the story was.

We come into this world whole. One life, one intelligence, one heart expressing itself through countless forms. But over time we forget. We begin searching for love instead of recognizing that we are made from it. We seek completion from others because we have lost sight of the completeness that was already here.

Then life, in its strange wisdom, allows our identities to crack.

Not to destroy us, but to reveal what remains when the stories fall apart.

The pieces scatter.

The image dissolves.

And beneath it is something that was never broken.

Perhaps this is what the greatest teachers have always pointed toward. Not becoming worthy. Not becoming lovable. But remembering.

Remembering that before anyone approved of you or rejected you, before anyone stayed or left, before anyone told you who you should be, there was already something whole within you.

And perhaps the deepest form of love is not giving someone what they lack, but reminding them of what they have never lost.

To stand in the presence of another human being and, without words, help them remember that they are already complete.

Already ordained.

Already loved.

Already whole.

Just as they are.

Just as they have always been.