Vachon Imagined

Constitutional law is something I had to study with rigor while earning my PhD in Public Service and Criminal Justice. But long before that, I was already familiar with the idea that law shapes everyday life.

I was raised by it.

My grandfather was an attorney. My father was in law enforcement. In both cases, law was not abstract—it was lived. Even they were not outside of it. My grandfather had ethical and legal boundaries that, if crossed, would mean disbarment. My father, too, operated within systems of rules that extended beyond personal preference.

But even the law, as structured and formal as it is, cannot fully protect people from themselves.

Because there is another kind of “law” we all live by—less formal, more invisible, and often more powerful. It’s not written in constitutions.

It’s called entitlement.

And it is far more universal than most people like to admit.

A child feels entitled to food, comfort, care. And rightly so. That early sense of entitlement is not inherently wrong—it is part of being human and dependent. As adults, we don’t lose entitlement so much as we refine it, justify it, hide it, or project it.

We feel entitled to respect—especially when we offer respect.

We feel entitled to dignity, integrity, safety, and a lack of abuse—particularly in moments when we are simply showing up as ourselves, breathing, existing, participating.

Sometimes even when we have not “earned” anything in the transactional sense of behavior, performance, or social agreement.

And that, too, is part of the complexity of being human.

What I will say is this: constitutional rights are powerful. They shape systems, institutions, and consequences. They are necessary. They are also, in a very real sense, external structures placed around human behavior.

But no external structure undoes what happens when we are out of alignment internally.

Because nothing regulates behavior more intimately than how we relate to ourselves.

This is where a different kind of discipline begins—not legal discipline, but psychological and emotional awareness. The ability to recognize that we can follow rules without becoming ruled by them. We can respect systems without identifying as systems. We can participate in structure without becoming prisoners of it.

This is the deeper practice.

Not rebellion against law.

Not blind obedience to it either.

But the capacity to live within frameworks—legal, social, relational—without losing contact with the part of us that is not defined by any of them.

And paradoxically, the more grounded we are in that internal clarity, the more responsibly we tend to move within external systems.

Not because we are controlled.

But because we are no longer confused about what we are.