Vachon Imagined

It wasn’t consensual.

None of it was.

The lust placed onto me as a child, the hidden images men carried and refused to confront within themselves, the parts of themselves they kept separate instead of bringing into the light of awareness and integration—those were never mine to hold.

Fantasy does not have to become action.

Desire does not become permission.

An obsession does not become something that must be manifested.

But when people refuse to face what exists within themselves, when they hide parts of who they are in the darkness rather than understand them, what is hidden does not disappear. It seeks expression. It searches for a place to emerge.

And I was a child.

I did not understand consent. I did not understand the legal definitions that would come later—the categories, the statutes, the questions of whether something fits within a framework of law. Those definitions arrived afterward, after the body had already experienced something it did not have words to explain.

The world asks:

What category does this belong to?

What does the law determine?

What burden of proof exists?

But before there was a legal definition, there was a human truth.

I was a child.

The events themselves were just events. My mind learned to interpret them.

And in that endless obsession of interpretation, I lost contact with my own body. I learned to separate myself from feeling because feeling became too complicated, too painful, too difficult to hold. I divided myself into pieces: what was allowed, what was forbidden, what could be acknowledged, and what had to remain hidden.

But the body does not forget.

The sensations remain.

The body carries what the mind tries to bury.

And when you force the body into silence, when you deny what it knows, and you place performance above God, outward appearance above wholeness, it does not disappear. It speaks louder. It finds another language. It emerges in ways that feel unimaginable.

This is what suppression does.

Do not think about it—it becomes louder.

Do not feel it—it becomes an explosion.

The attempt to escape the experience and to become an image can become its own form of suffering.

The events existed before the meaning I gave them. My body registered what happened before my mind had language for it. But in trying to understand, in trying to organize something that should never have been mine to carry, I turned the interpretation inward.

I made myself wrong.

Lust became wrong.

Feeling my own body became wrong.

My own sexuality became something to fear, something to own or be owned.

I confused the violation of boundaries by others with a violation within myself.

But the shame was never mine.

The responsibility was never mine.

A child cannot carry the weight of an adult’s choices, an adult’s desires, or an adult’s refusal to confront the hidden parts of themselves.

What people refuse to integrate within themselves does not simply vanish. What remains hidden through conflict eventually seeks expression.

But what is brought into the light can be understood.

What is brought into the light can be integrated.

What is brought into the light no longer has to be feared, worshiped, or obsessed over.

The darkness gains power through separation.

Through secrecy.

Through shame.

The key was there all along.

Not suppression.

Not denial.

Not fragmentation.

But awareness.

The willingness to see what exists and hold it without turning against oneself.

Because what is hidden in darkness grows through conflict.

What is met with consciousness can finally become whole.