Vachon Imagined

Working in law enforcement became the unexpected gateway to understanding that criminals and their actions were not simply something I was witnessing.

They were something I was participating in.

Not in the sense that I was committing the acts, but in the sense that I was entering into relationship with them. I was stepping into the lives, choices, pain, trauma, and consequences of other human beings. I was carrying pieces of those encounters with me.

Cases stick with you.

They get “in” you.

You can close the file, put the evidence away, leave the scene, and go home, but sometimes a part of it comes home with you. I did not always understand what that meant. I thought I was just doing a job, gathering facts, seeking truth, holding people accountable.

But those cases changed me.

And strangely, that change became liberating.

The humans I encountered, the ones who made choices society condemns, the ones we label as criminals, taught me something profound about humanity. Studying people like Jesus Christ, who looked beyond behavior and saw the person beneath it, helped me understand how complicated we are as human beings.

How can we be capable of such darkness and still be loved?

How can we make terrible choices and still contain something worthy of compassion?

The answer eventually led me back to myself.

Because the uncomfortable truth is this:

I am the criminal.

Not because I have committed every act I have investigated, but because I carry within me the same human nature, the same capacity for choice, error, fear, desire, anger, love, compassion, and contradiction.

That is difficult to see when we are standing firmly inside our judgment.

But just because something does not appeal to our senses, our morality, or our preferred image of ourselves does not make it less true.

I talked with many law enforcement professionals about this idea. A few understood what I was trying to say.

Many did not.

Many still saw themselves as the “good guys” or “good gals” standing on one side of a line separating them from the people they investigated.

I never quite saw it that way.

I felt those cases.

I carried them.

Some of them, decades later, are still with me. They do not disappear. They remain, not as a burden, but as reminders of the complexity of being human.

What I have chosen to see is that good and bad are always in relationship with one another. They reveal each other. They teach each other. Sometimes we are teaching life, and sometimes life is teaching us.

But no matter which way it moves, we are always in relationship with what we see, what we experience, and what we believe ourselves to be, even when it appears as “other.”

One of the moments that stayed with me during my own search for understanding came from the movie Donnie Brasco. There is a scene where the undercover investigator, played by Johnny Depp, has become deeply immersed in the criminal world. When his wife is shocked by how much he has changed, he says something that struck me deeply:

“I didn’t become someone else.”

“I became who I am.”

That was an awakening moment for me.

Because I understood what he meant.

It was not about becoming the criminal. It was about discovering the parts of himself that had always existed, the capacity for deception, loyalty, fear, courage, connection, and survival.

The parts we like to claim belong only to “them” are often the very parts we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves.

And yes, people will clutch their pearls, their beliefs, their convictions, and their carefully protected sense of self when you say something like that.

But somewhere beneath all of that, they know.

Maybe they do not want to look yet.

Maybe they are not ready.

But eventually, we all meet ourselves.

We all discover that the line we drew between ourselves and others was never as solid as we imagined.

And in that discovery, something changes.

We become less interested in proving who is good and who is bad.

We become more interested in understanding what makes us human.