Vachon Imagined

When I first began writing, I wrote almost exclusively about my own experience. I wrote honestly, in depth, about the valleys I found myself walking through.

Many people, including those who loved me, didn’t want to read it. It evoked too much pain, too much resistance. They wanted me to write about the lilies while I was still standing in the valley.

But the valley was where I was.

And it would become a place I returned to many times throughout my life.

Why?

Because the valley is where deliverance begins.

Not deliverance from pain.

Deliverance from resisting it.

To walk with yourself exactly as you are. To remain with what you see without turning away. Without judging it. Without trying to become someone else before allowing yourself to be who you are.

That is deliverance.

It is the gradual chipping away of everything you are not until what has always been true is finally revealed.

Anything worth beginning asks something of you.

You will evolve.

You will be misunderstood.

You will be supported by some, criticized by others, and met with silence by many more.

That is not a sign that you are on the wrong path.

It is simply the cost of becoming yourself.

No one has ever arrived anywhere meaningful by delaying the inevitable or by refusing to begin.

“What if I fail?”

You will.

Again and again.

Failure is not the opposite of the path.

It is part of the path.

“What if people don’t understand me? What if they criticize me? What if they shame me?”

Many already do.

Whether you hide or whether you speak, someone will misunderstand you.

So walk with yourself.

It is the same path as walking with everyone else.

And trust that you cannot truly fail.

Life is already carrying you where you need to go.

The path you are on is the one that is shaping you.

And you have never been more worthy of love than you are right now.

Not when you arrive.

Not when you become someone else.

Now.

Exactly where you are.

Exactly as you are.