Vachon Imagined

When I first lost my job, I lost a career I had spent nearly thirty years building.

I entered the Army as a young Soldier and a college graduate carrying more debt than I knew how to manage. The Army gave me a place to serve, a place to learn, a place to develop skills and build a life. It opened my eyes to people I might never have encountered otherwise.

Like many people, I carried assumptions about race. A Black person meant something to me before they ever entered the room. I judged them through memory, through experience, through what I had been told.

The judgment was mine.

Others may have influenced it through their words, attitudes, and actions, but it lived within me.

This is why individuality matters.

People often blame “the world” for what they think and feel. But the world is your world. The moment you become accountable for that, you begin to see clearly. If you can think on something, fear it, hate it, obsess over it, or love it, then it is part of you. No matter how righteous a person sounds, what they condemn reveals something about them. What they praise reveals something about them too.

The world they describe is often the world they carry within.

The Army taught me about differences, but it also taught me something deeper. Humanity organizes itself into smaller formations—units, teams, churches, governments, families, workplaces. Apply pressure to any group, and human nature begins to reveal itself.

I became fascinated by how behavior changes under structure, pressure, and authority. How people we praise for sacrifice and service can still be capable of the same violence found anywhere else in society.

The answer was unsettling.

It was humanity compressed.

The uniforms were different. The language was different. The structures were different. But beneath the clothing, it was the same human mind.

Policy and law can regulate behavior.

They cannot regulate thought.

At best, they suppress it.

And whatever is suppressed long enough eventually seeks expression. It rises into the physical world because it cannot remain hidden forever.

I later joined Army law enforcement because I was drawn to it. I liked the idea of power, the badge, the prestige. I wanted some of that too.

And I got it.

But I suffered from it as well.

I lost myself in it.

It is easy to become caught in a world that promises answers while quietly producing more questions. It is easy to become absorbed in the role of protector when you yourself have been deeply hurt—repeatedly dismissed, repeatedly violated, and carrying wounds that have never fully been seen.

At some point, the role and the person begin to blur.

What you are supposed to be becomes more important than what you actually feel.

And slowly, without noticing it, you can disappear inside the identity you thought would save you.

When I finally grew tired of people speaking to me violently, I refused it. I stood up to it.

And I lost everything.

The people entrusted with protecting others can also cause harm. This is hardly surprising to anyone who follows the news. Humanity expresses itself wherever human beings gather—whether beneath the roof of a church or behind the bars of a prison.

Both emerge from the same territory.

And that territory exists within us.

Isolation taught me this.

Being pushed aside, marked as a troublemaker, left without a mission, I was forced to sit with myself. I found the trouble my own mind creates. I found the stories it tells. I found how easily consciousness becomes trapped inside its own narratives.

After years without the distraction of a profession, I began to understand why isolation is so often used as punishment.

Take away a person’s purpose.

Take away their mission.

Take away the dream that organizes their attention.

And many people will begin to suffer beneath the weight of their own minds.

It was during this time that I began to understand something I had been trying to understand since I was fifteen years old.

I began to understand why my brother killed himself.

Living inside his own mind, he found what appeared to him to be a solution.

It was that simple.

For years, I resisted that simplicity because I made it about me.

I wondered what I could have done differently. I searched for answers. I searched for meaning. I searched for a way to undo what could not be undone.

I had been searching ever since the day I ran screaming from my home and found his body lying on our patio, a single moment that shattered the reality I thought I knew.

His death disrupted my family.

It disrupted my life.

It disrupted my understanding of the world.

And yet, after all these years, I can see that his decision was not about me.

It was about the world he was living in within himself.

That understanding did not erase the grief.

It did not erase the loss.

But it changed the question.

I stopped asking why it happened to me.

And I began asking what it means to be human enough to suffer that deeply.

The world is your world.

The moment you become accountable for that, something changes.

You stop fighting shadows.

You stop trying to fix everyone else.

You stop imagining that your suffering arrived from somewhere outside of you.

You begin to see.

You see how memory shapes perception.

You see how fear becomes judgment.

You see how identity becomes separation.

You see how the mind creates stories and then mistakes those stories for reality.

And eventually, if you stay with it long enough, you begin to see everything as yourself.

Not in the narcissistic sense.

Not as ownership.

But as recognition.

The same fear.

The same longing.

The same confusion.

The same love.

The same capacity for violence and compassion.

The same human condition appearing in different forms.

And from that self, another dimension begins to emerge.

Another land.

Another time.

Another God.

Not a God found through belief, but through direct experience.

A God hidden beneath the stories.

A God obscured by judgment, identity, memory, and fear.

A God that was always present, waiting beneath the world you thought was separate from you.

The moment separation dissolves, what remains is not emptiness.

What remains is creation itself.

I joined the Army to pay off student loans.

I joined the Army to get an education.

Instead, it gave me something far greater.

It taught me about humanity.

And eventually, through loss, isolation, grief, and time, it taught me about myself.