Vachon Imagined

All people are driven by emotion, which is to say they are driven by life itself.

Whatever name you place upon that movement—love, fear, anger, joy, grief—is your experience of life, not life itself. The labels come later. Life arrives first.

Perhaps that is why it is so difficult to capture. It moves too quickly.

Ask any parent.

The days are long, but the years are short.

I often look at my son and wonder who that baby was. The one who now stands before me as this remarkable young man whose heart beats with a rhythm that existed long before he became what we call a person. Before he had a name, opinions, ambitions, or fears, there was life moving through him. There was motion. There was feeling. There was something alive seeking expression.

All people are driven by this force.

You know the feeling. You have something you need to say, and if you do not say it, your whole body feels as though it might burst into flames. That is energy. That is emotion. That is life in motion.

And just because we lock it away, call it crazy, label it dangerous, or condemn it as something dark, does not mean it disappears. Life does not vanish because we refuse to acknowledge it. It simply finds another way to express itself.

Often at our own detriment.

At our own peril.

After years of studying criminal behavior, there is one case I return to again and again: Ted Bundy.

The mere mention of his name creates images in people’s minds. That is human. That is natural. That is life responding to experience.

Yet what has always stayed with me is not Bundy himself, but something his longtime girlfriend, Liz, once said. I am paraphrasing, but she described his love as light and his absence as darkness. To have his love was life itself; to lose it was to enter another world entirely.

We all know that feeling.

To stand in someone’s warmth can feel like salvation. For a moment, we are free. For a moment, we are seen. For a moment, we are loved.

But when faced with someone’s coldness, rejection, or indifference, we often spend years seeking resolution from people who cannot provide it.

No apology can undo what was done.

No amount of money can restore what was lost.

No award, achievement, or attention can rewrite the past.

Life and death live within every person.

Not as opposites, but as possibilities.

Anyone who truly understands this would never dismiss any part of themselves. To exile a feeling is not to destroy it. To deny a wound is not to heal it. What is buried remains alive beneath the surface, influencing the one who carries it and everyone who comes into contact with it.

This is why understanding matters more than judgment.

Today lives inside yesterday.

Tomorrow does too.

The person willing to lay down certainty, to look honestly at what lives within them, and to seek understanding rather than condemnation, discovers something remarkable:

Life was never the enemy.

The danger was believing that what we refused to see had disappeared.