Vachon Imagined

How many times have you heard someone use the word insecure in a disparaging way?

As if it were something burning inside of them that needed to be cast out, demonized, or thrown onto someone else.

I’ll wait.

Because if you’re anything like me, you cannot count the number of times you’ve heard it. But you can remember them. You can remember the experiences. You can remember the moments when insecurity was used as an accusation, a weapon, or an explanation for why someone was not enough.

And now, this becomes part of the life inside of you.

The fear.

The judgment.

The way you were taught to perceive insecurity.

This perception is the key—not just to your relationships with others, but to the relationship you have with yourself.

The only relationship you truly have.

The one person who is always there when you walk through a crowd of people or sit alone in an empty room.

Yourself.

And it is your perception of that self that shapes your relationship with the world.

From the time I was a child, I was deeply afraid.

Deeply afraid.

I experienced things that many people do not want to talk about, much less sit still long enough to listen to without offering advice, explanations, or interruptions.

And those experiences got into me.

Just like life gets into you.

They became part of the way I understood the world, part of the way I responded, part of the way I protected myself.

But the possibility of all of this—the capacity for fear, for insecurity, for struggle—was already present before I ever spoke my first word or took my first breath.

I did not create it.

I became aware of it.

Because I am a part of life itself.

As we walk with divine intelligence, we begin to remember who we are.

Not without fear.

Not without insecurity.

But with all of it.

In a world that often rejects what it cannot understand, we can become insecure about our insecurity. We can become afraid of our fear. We can begin fighting the very parts of ourselves that are asking to be understood.

And that is when things become complicated—both within ourselves and between one another.

Because we no longer see clearly.

We see distortion.

We see stories.

We see lies.

Insecurity, like fear, like desire, like every other part of the human experience that people often criticize, is still part of being human.

The goal is not to destroy it.

The goal is to awaken to it.

The more we awaken to these parts of ourselves, the more uncomfortable it can become. But eventually, we learn that we do not have to be ruled by what exists within us.

We can lay down our old understanding.

We can reach for something higher.

And in doing so, we learn how to use every part of ourselves—not as evidence of our brokenness, but as material for our growth, our wisdom, and our discipline.