Vachon Imagined

Before life became kind, compassionate, cruel, or violent, it was simply life happening in you and through you. Then someone pointed and gave it a name. This is good. This is bad. This is acceptable. This is not.

And so we learned.

I believe most people mean well. Even our darkest impulses often begin as distorted expressions of something we love. A murderer may love power. A tyrant may love control. A jealous person may love certainty. The problem is not that we love; it is what we do in service of that love.

The love of power runs through all of us. To deny it is to divide ourselves against ourselves. To pretend we are only light is to reject half of what it means to be human.

I was taught that loving someone meant lowering myself. It meant remaining kind when others were unkind. Remaining available when others were dismissive. Remaining loving when others were cruel.

There is wisdom in that.

There is also danger in it.

What I have learned instead is that life often asks for a moment-by-moment response. Sometimes that response is compassion. Sometimes it is patience. Sometimes it is forgiveness.

And sometimes it is simply:

No.

No, you will not speak to me that way.

No, you will not treat me that way.

No, I will not remain here.

Then you leave.

I have done this in a profound way only once in my life, and the consequences were enormous. I lost my job. I lost much of what I had spent years building. The unraveling did not stop with my career. It reached into my education, the plans I had made, the reasons I joined the Army, my marriage, my identity, and the story I told myself about who I was.

The list is long.

What matters is that I came undone.

Completely undone.

And when I came undone, I became a patient unto myself.

Others grew tired. Some left altogether. Others left while remaining physically present. Depression has a way of exhausting everyone it touches.

That season of my life revealed something I had never considered: much of what I thought was me was simply something I had built.

And when it collapsed, I suffered.

It was torturous. I would not wish it upon anyone.

Yet life has a way of delivering its lessons without asking our permission. It measures us against ourselves and brings us face to face with what we would rather avoid.

What I learned was surprisingly simple.

There is a time to stack the cards carefully, building something meaningful with patience and intention.

And there is a time to scatter them across the table and walk away.

Most people think wisdom is knowing how to build.

I think wisdom is knowing when to stop.

You must know one to do the other.

It is the dual nature of life itself: creation and destruction, attachment and release, effort and surrender.

Again and again, life offers us the same gift.

Choice.

Will.

Self-determination.

And the courage to begin again after everything has fallen apart.