Vachon Imagined

When I was studying for my PhD, I completed a dissertation on Black women who had committed felony crimes.

It was a long, exhausting venture because I chose to conduct a qualitative study.

To avoid statistics, I paid another price.

The price was sitting with words.

Coding.

Analyzing.

Taking stories and searching for themes while defending a methodology that had already been designed before I ever entered the room.

Pedantic?

Yes.

Boring?

No.

Nothing about those stories was boring.

Only perhaps tedious.

It was tedious to carefully collect these women’s experiences because my mind constantly wanted to interpret meaning.

It wanted to explain.

To categorize.

To understand.

But understanding is not always the same as seeing.

And because I am white, and my research focused on Black women, I had to confront prejudice—not only in society, but within the human tendency to separate.

To create differences.

To make distinctions.

To build walls.

That is what prejudice is.

It is a thought.

A reaction.

A perception repeated over and over until it becomes hardened.

Until something that began as an idea feels like truth.

Sitting with these women, I was drawn to their stories because I, too, had experienced oppression.

Oppression through violence.

Through sexual assault.

Through men who caused harm.

Through women who enabled or followed them.

The experiences were not the same.

The histories were not the same.

But I knew something about what it meant to carry pain that someone else had placed upon you.

It is inevitable.

It is part of being human.

Life unfolds in ways that none of us can fully control.

But when these women spoke about their experiences, something happened inside me.

An explosion.

Rage.

A deep anger at what had been done.

And then, eventually, the rage dissolved.

What remained was something quieter.

Something more honest.

Sympathy.

Sincere sympathy.

Sometimes I would lie awake crying because I could not overpower their experiences.

I could not fix them.

I could not erase what had happened.

I could not reach backward through time and remove their histories.

Their stories belonged to them.

Their pain belonged to their lived experience.

But after the explosion ended, after the desire to fix disappeared, I discovered something I could do.

I could listen.

I could witness.

I could document.

I could honor their stories as a real and solidified part of who they were in that moment of their lives.

A record of the time they walked through oppression.

Violence.

Survival.

And perhaps that is what documentation truly offers us.

Not just data.

Not just research.

A moment of recognition.

A moment when one human being says to another:

I see you.

I hear you.

I am here.

Without prejudice.

Without forethought.

Without needing to change you.

Just presence.

Just me.

Just you.

Be yourself.

Be vividly and purely yourself.