Vachon Imagined

At the core of every misunderstanding are the questions:

Why don’t they like me?

Why don’t they accept me?

Why don’t they do what they’re told?

Which, more often than not, means: Why don’t they do what we want them to do? Why don’t they act the way we want them to act?

This is where control begins.

And it is also where control becomes visible, if we are willing to see it.

We can look at our actions objectively. We can become observers of ourselves. We can turn the outward inward and finally see what we have been asking everyone else to see.

And then something changes.

We can learn to love the person who controls but refuses to see themselves as controlling.

We can learn to love the bully. The toxic one. The person who is difficult to be with.

Not by excusing them, but by recognizing the places where they live in us, too.

Because that’s all we ever really have.

Ourselves.

We can love other people. We can prioritize them. We can care about their feelings, their desires, their needs. We can build relationships, earn status, make money, accomplish goals.

But if we lose ourselves in the process, we may gain everything we were searching for and still lose the person who was doing the searching.

And sometimes we don’t lose ourselves because we cared too much.

We lose ourselves because we hurried past ourselves to get somewhere else.