Vachon Imagined

When people leave you alone, it does not necessarily mean they do not love you.

People need space.

People become overwhelmed.

People love differently than you do.

But when feelings of abandonment or neglect remain unexamined, we begin expecting others to heal wounds they did not create.

Seeing people for who they are is the first step toward deciding who belongs in your life, because every relationship requires something of you.

Your attention.

Your time.

Your energy.

The question is never simply who loves you.

The question is what you are choosing to give your life to.

There was someone in my life who offered explanations instead of apologies.

He would miss the things that mattered to me. There was always a reason. A schedule. A circumstance. An excuse that explained why he had done what he had done.

I understood.

I empathized.

I forgave.

I tried to move forward.

Yet something within me remained unsettled.

It wasn’t because I needed perfection.

It was because I needed acknowledgment.

I realized I had become so concerned with making sure he never felt unloved that I had stopped asking whether I felt seen myself.

I had learned to make room for his reasons.

I had forgotten to make room for my own experience.

I kept showing up because I know the feeling of abandonment. I know what it means to need help, to need support, to need someone willing to stay when life becomes heavy. My compassion for him grew from places within myself that had once longed for the very same thing.

But when the time came for my own experience to be acknowledged, it wasn’t there.

There were explanations.

There were reasons.

There was understanding for what had happened.

But there was no recognition of what it had felt like to be on the receiving end of it.

And that was the difference.

An explanation tells you why something happened.

An apology acknowledges what it cost another person.

They are not the same.

People struggle to acknowledge another person’s pain when they have not learned how to acknowledge their own. When we turn away from our own inner life, it becomes difficult to fully witness someone else’s.

How we relate to others reflects how we relate to ourselves.

This is why knowing yourself matters.

Not so you become more demanding.

Not so you become less forgiving.

But so you become honest.

Honest about what brings peace.

Honest about what repeatedly causes harm.

Honest about the relationships that nourish your soul and those that quietly deplete it.

There comes a time when explanations are no longer enough.

Not because forgiveness has ended.

But because wisdom has begun.

You can love someone and still recognize that the relationship no longer serves the life God is calling you to live.

Peace does not ask you to carry another person’s excuses.

Love does not ask you to abandon yourself.

The holiest thing you can do is bless someone for the part they played in your life, honor what the relationship revealed within you, and continue walking toward the peace that no longer requires an explanation.