Vachon Imagined

When a person continually escapes from their reality, they slowly learn not to love and accept who they are.

Sometimes that reality looks like abuse. Other times it looks like heartbreak. Sometimes it even looks like joy. Escapism does not distinguish between them very well because it is tied to the experience itself, not the content of the experience. It seeks relief, not understanding.

This is what it means to be controlled by experience rather than disciplined within it.

Anything that comes to you arrives as a teacher. Pain teaches one lesson. Joy teaches another. Loss, love, fear, courage, compassion—each arrives carrying something that cannot be learned any other way.

But first, it must break through your perception of it.

It must break through the stories you tell about it.

Sometimes that breaking through requires distance. Sometimes the experience is simply too much. So you step away. You take a breath. You rest. Some pauses last minutes, others last years.

That is fine.

The important thing is that you return.

Life has a way of inviting us back to what we have left unfinished. Not as punishment, but as instruction. Not to harm us, but to reveal something we could not see while we were running from it.

And over time, something unexpected is discovered.

What we feared was not the experience itself.

It was our belief that we could not survive meeting it.

Yet when it is finally met with presence, something larger appears. A quiet strength. A deeper awareness. A compassion that was unavailable while we were escaping.

Escapism offers temporary relief.

Presence offers transformation.

One helps us leave.

The other teaches us how to return.

And in that return, we often discover that what we feared would destroy us was waiting to become part of us all along.