Vachon Imagined

I started writing during COVID.

Locked indoors with my autistic son doing preschool for ASD online, and myself working as a Deputy Director of Intelligence for a federal law enforcement agency. The world outside had narrowed into screens, schedules, containment, and responsibility layered on responsibility.

I was working 14-hour days, often with my son home beside me, trying to hold structure where there wasn’t any. Everything felt circular—work folding into caregiving, caregiving folding back into work, days blending into one another without clear edges. It was hard, in every sense of the word, to put it lightly.

And I wrote.

At first, there was nothing back. No likes. No comments. No acknowledgment that anything had been received at all.

What I saw instead was comparison.

I would read other writing—pieces I didn’t experience as deeper, or more precise, or more honest than what I was putting into the world—and yet they were met with applause. Shared. Celebrated. Liked into visibility. There was an ease to their reception that I couldn’t quite locate in my own work.

And mine stayed quiet.

No applause. No recognition. Not even from my own mother. At home, even my husband’s response would land more like confusion than reflection—something like, what are you even saying?

It would have been easy to stop there. To let comparison become a verdict. To assume silence meant absence of value, or worse, absence of worth.

But comparison only has power when it is mistaken for truth.

And the truth is simpler than that.

You are going to see other voices move differently through the world. Some will be instantly received. Some will be misunderstood. Some will be overlooked entirely. That does not determine what they are.

Or what you are.

Because writing is not a ranking system—it is an act of creation. And creation, by its nature, is not asking for permission to exist.

So if you are reading this as a writer, or as someone who creates in any form, the invitation is simple, even if it is not always easy:

Keep going.

Even when it feels invisible. Even when it feels exposed. Even when it feels like no one is responding in the way you hoped they would.

Because you—like all writing when it is honest—are a kind of magnificent creator. Not to be evaluated first, but to be encountered. Experienced. Lived with for however long someone is willing to stay with you.

And if writing is the vehicle through which that creation moves in you, then there is nothing more complicated required than this:

Just write.

Just keep going.