Vachon Imagined

When I was a child, I experienced repeated abuse, violence, and neglect. It happened more times than I can count or fully remember. There are no clear edges to it in my memory—only fragments, sensations, and images that return without sequence.

I reached out to people to protect me, and they couldn’t. They were wrapped up in their own lives, their own emotional weight, their own limitations. They could not protect me, and I did not yet know how to protect myself.

Even asking the people who harmed me to care for me in small ways. Asking for nurture from the same hands that were unsafe. Needing care from what was also a source of harm.

It created a kind of confusion that did not resolve itself. Not because I did not understand something was wrong, but because the experience itself did not separate cleanly inside me.

I knew it was confusing. I lived inside that confusion for a long time.

It became an overlay on everything.

Not peace, but confusion.

Not freedom, but obligation.

A way of continuing to relate to what was also not safe, because there was no clear place for it to go.

Sometimes it feels like it never fully stopped. Not in the literal sense of time, but in the way memory holds the body. I can see moments as if they are still happening somewhere just out of reach.

I would wake the next day and continue as if nothing had happened. I would do my hair, go on with life, and something inside would still be there—active, watching, pulling attention back toward what I could not name.

When I tried to look at it, I was often turned away from it. Not always directly, but in ways that made it harder to hold. It was easier for others not to see it. Seeing it would have changed things they depended on.

Over time, something split. There was the part of life that continued outwardly, and the part that stayed inside what had happened.

When I felt threatened, I learned to disappear.

Not physically. Internally. I would go quiet inside myself, step back from being fully present, and let things pass without meeting them directly. It was a way to survive what I could not stop.

There were also other ways of leaving. Religion, self-improvement, ideas about transformation—anything that allowed me to move away from what was directly felt and into something more tolerable to think about. Even language that spoke about healing sometimes became another way of not staying with what was actually there.

At times, I would hear messages about success, elevation, and becoming something different, as if the way out required leaving my own experience behind. But underneath all of it, what kept returning was what had already happened and had not left.

I rarely met people who could stay with it without moving away in some way—without correcting it, reframing it, or shifting it into something more manageable. So it remained something I carried mostly alone.

In other parts of life, the same pattern appeared in different forms. I would see harm happen, control, or cruelty, and often there was no response to it. Sometimes it was overlooked. Sometimes it was minimized. Sometimes it was rewarded or ignored altogether. And I would be left with the experience of having seen it without it being held anywhere else.

Even when parts of my story felt like they could not be fully held in language, I learned to turn inward instead. Slowly, over time, I moved toward quieter places inside myself—toward something closer to stillness, something that felt like peace beneath reaction.

Not away from experience, but through it.

Not outside the nervous system, but within it, where things begin to settle when they are no longer resisted.

Before thought organizes it. Before memory turns it into story. Before “I” makes it into something fixed.

A place where experience is not yet shaped into meaning, but simply allowed to be there.

Over time, I learned to hold more of it without immediately reacting or disappearing.

Not because it was resolved, but because something in me became able to stay with what was present without leaving it as quickly as I once did.

This did not remove what happened. It did not change what it was.

It only changed what I could remain with.

There are still moments when it returns in images, sensations, or impressions that feel older than thought. And there are moments when I do not leave them as quickly as I once did.