Vachon Imagined

Parenting my son isn’t just rushing to his side when he says he’s hungry—which, for some reason, he usually says to me and not his dad.

Ah, but he’s already learning who does what.

And I embrace it as part of his experience, part of what he now knows as normal.

The interesting thing about normal is that we come to believe our experience is simply the way the world is. The mind gathers information, organizes it, and presents it back to us as reality.

Ah yes. Stimuli gathered. Stimuli placed.

The brain loves efficiency.

In many ways, this is the foundation of prejudice. Not because people are inherently cruel, but because they are human. We all use our experiences to make sense of the world. The problem arises when we assume our experience is universal.

Our experience teaches us about life, but it does not necessarily teach us about someone else’s life.

For example, I was sexually abused during the first thirteen years of my life. The effects of that experience did not remain in childhood. They spread into adulthood through sexual harassment, belittling, overpowering dynamics, and violence.

As abstract ideas, many people can acknowledge that these things exist. But acknowledgment is not the same as understanding. Often, people struggle to grasp experiences that have never touched their own lives.

This is where empathy enters.

Empathy says, “I am willing to suspend my experience long enough to touch yours.”

It does not require agreement. It does not require that I have lived exactly what you have lived. It simply asks that I make room for the possibility that your reality is real.

This is where prejudice begins to dissolve.

Not through argument, but through identification.

I identify with you, not against you.

I honor your experience rather than diminish it. I resist the temptation to make your reality smaller so that mine can feel larger.

That is one of the greatest gifts we can offer another person: recognition.

A moment of understanding.

A moment of peace.

A moment where someone feels seen rather than judged.

And perhaps imagination plays a larger role in this than we realize. Much of what we know about one another depends on our willingness to imagine experiences we have never had ourselves.

Thought arises.

Thought passes.

Life continues moving.

And somewhere in that movement we learn to honor ourselves. As an effortless byproduct, we begin honoring others too.

Not because we are trying to be good.

But because we recognize that every person is living inside a world shaped by experiences we may never fully understand.

And that understanding itself is a form of love.