Vachon Imagined

The other side of the coin showed her how honest life can be when you’d rather it not.

When you’d rather every return on investment were immediate instead of agonizingly slow. She had followed every rule she knew. She collected the degrees. She practiced kindness. She was polite. She gave more than she took. She invested in all the places she had been told would eventually pay dividends.

Yet the other side of the coin kept turning over.

No matter how brightly she tried to polish the side she preferred, it always found its way back into view.

There were the panic attacks. The unexplained anxiety that carried her on and off medications promising happiness but delivering something closer to numbness. At times she preferred numbness to the relentless engine of anxiety that made ordinary moments feel like emergencies.

Nothing extraordinary was happening.

She wasn’t running into battle.

She was cleaning the toilet.

Driving to work.

Having a conversation.

Yet her body moved as though war had already begun.

For years she mistook this for energy.

Others did too.

It was praised as ambition, productivity, drive—the person who could always get things done. But what had been celebrated as energy was often an overspent, overproductive nervous system. A life organized around getting one thousand things done before ever stopping long enough to listen.

To be.

To become quiet enough to discover that stillness was never the enemy.

She had confused motion with aliveness, productivity with worth, and urgency with purpose. The deepest parts of herself had never asked her to move faster.

They had simply asked her to become still enough to hear them.

Eventually she realized she had never really left the other side of the coin.

It had been walking beside her all along.

So she began telling the truth.

Not because people wanted to hear it, but because she could no longer pretend otherwise. Most people wanted to explain it away, cheer it up, or fix it. Her honesty awakened something in them that was easier to deny than to recognize.

So she retreated to the one place she could no longer avoid.

Herself.

And if she’s honest, she isn’t always easy to live with.

This wasn’t a one-time revelation. Just when she thought the other side of the coin had disappeared, it quietly returned.

Not to punish her.

To deepen her.

Again.

And again.

Slowly she began to understand that return on investment rarely arrives on the schedule we imagine.

Sometimes it looks like years of applying for jobs before one opens.

Years of saying the same thing to your child before one day they simply live it.

Years of investing in a marriage.

There are beautiful days filled with laughter and quiet companionship. Then life changes. A parent dies. A child leaves home. The rhythm shifts.

You begin to feel like old news—not unloved, but familiar. The dependable one. The caregiver. The one who keeps showing up while wondering if you’re still being seen.

And then there are the quieter betrayals.

She wanted intimacy.

She wanted to want it with the same abandon she remembered. But by the time the day had asked everything of her, there was so little left.

The thought would come.

I could do this.

Almost immediately it met the fatigue of trying.

Not the fatigue of marriage.

The fatigue of effort.

The lingerie wasn’t the obstacle. It had become a symbol of something larger—the feeling that she had to become someone else before she could simply be herself.

Perhaps this, too, was part of the false economy.

A life that celebrated how much she could produce while quietly spending the very presence required to receive the love she had worked so hard to build.

Marriage is only one investment.

There is the career that asks for decades before opportunity arrives, if it arrives at all. The friendship that disappears without explanation. The dream that remains unanswered despite every qualification and every ounce of preparation.

We spend much of our lives believing that goodness guarantees ease, effort guarantees reward, love guarantees permanence, and healing guarantees peace.

Life has never made those promises.

The investment is immediate.

The return rarely is.

Between the two lies sacrifice.

Doubt.

Waiting.

The recurring appearance of the other side of the coin—the side we spend so much of our lives trying not to see.

But perhaps that side was never the enemy.

Perhaps it was the teacher.

Because no amount of positivity can erase what life is asking us to learn.

So when the other side of the coin turns over once again, I no longer ask it to leave.

I walk with it.

I listen.

Sometimes the greatest return is not what life gives back to us at all.

It is who we become while waiting.