Vachon Imagined

When a person’s sexuality is shaped before their sense of self has fully formed, it can become deeply confusing.

Desire arrives early in life as something natural, something alive, something inseparable from the body. But when it is met with shame, distortion, control, or misunderstanding, it can become disconnected from the person experiencing it. Not because desire itself is wrong, but because it was never given the space to be understood.

A child does not yet have language for what they feel.

They only have experience.

And experience, when not held with care, becomes confusion.

Across generations, sexuality has often been burdened by silence, restriction, fear, or expectations shaped more by cultural discomfort than by understanding. For women especially, desire has frequently been confined, moralized, or filtered through what is acceptable to others rather than what is true within themselves.

The result is not protection.

It is distortion.

Immaturity in one generation becomes the foundation for immaturity in the next. People grow into adulthood carrying fragmented relationships with their own bodies, their own desires, and their own boundaries. Then they meet one another from within that fragmentation.

And the cycle continues.

Until someone, somewhere, pauses and recognizes:

This was never fully mine.

This was shaped around me.

This was interpreted for me.

And in that recognition, something begins to return.

A sense of ownership—not over others, but over the self.

Desire is not the enemy.

Nor is restraint.

The loss comes when neither is consciously chosen.

In that moment of clarity, a person can begin to say:

This is my experience.

This is my body.

This is my awareness.

I can move toward desire.

I can step away from desire.

Not because I am correcting myself, but because I am finally seeing myself clearly.

And in that seeing, agency returns.

Not as rebellion.

Not as permission granted by others.

But as the quiet recognition that nothing within this life was ever meant to belong to someone else’s idea of who I should be.