Vachon Imagined

Some memories remain with us even when we cannot consciously recall them. They do not disappear; they live quietly inside us. We do not always need to search for them or try to uncover them like a lost archive. Sometimes, we can simply accept their presence and continue living.

But when those hidden memories begin to shape our behavior—especially the way we treat others and ourselves—there comes a time to look more closely. When we are left suffering the consequences of patterns we do not understand, exploration becomes necessary.

There comes a time to let your life come back to you.

I was sexually abused before I can even tell you an age. I have images that come back from time to time—a baby laughing, fragments I can see but don’t understand, memories I can’t always explain. For a long time, I thought I was making them up. In a sense, I was imagining them, but not from some fairy-tale place where imagination makes something false. Everything we experience passes through the imagination in some form. An image can carry something real even when we don’t yet know exactly what it means.

Then there are the memories that feel more solid. I can tell you what I was wearing, who was around me, how old I was, when it happened, and how it continued into my teenage years. They have the quality of ordinary memory, the kind that doesn’t need to be argued with.

They were all men. Men did this to me.

So naturally, my relationships with men have been complicated, to say the least.

I didn’t ask for what happened to me. But over time, I learned how to receive the shame of it. I learned to wonder what I had done to cause it, what I might have looked like, whether my body had somehow invited it, and what it meant when my body responded to something I never wanted.

That became its own kind of suffering.

I became ashamed of being a woman. Ashamed of being alive. Ashamed of having a body that could respond to something my mind and heart rejected.

Then I sought religion, hoping it would give me somewhere safe to put all of this. Instead, for a time, it added more rules to a body I already didn’t trust. There were things I was told not to wear, things I shouldn’t say, ways I was supposed to behave because I might somehow cause temptation in men. Purity became something I was responsible for preserving, and somehow the responsibility seemed to fall more heavily on women.

The shame only deepened.

Eventually, I lost contact with my body almost entirely.

When the body becomes a place of danger, you find ways to leave it. I developed a binge-eating habit that lasted for years. I couldn’t simply stop. I tried affirmations. I listened to people tell me to control myself. I tried again and again.

But you cannot always stop a coping mechanism by demanding that it stop.

Try stopping fire from being fire. Try stopping a runaway train with your hands. Some things are much easier to command than they are to change.

I don’t say this to excuse anything. I say it because I have learned that people often understand suffering until the person suffering begins behaving in ways they don’t understand. Then compassion can disappear very quickly.

Sexual abuse has been, and to some degree remains, one of my greatest demons, particularly when it comes to men. But I have also learned that healing isn’t about defeating a demon once and for all. It is about learning how to live differently in its presence.

I had to learn to trust myself.

I had to learn to trust my instincts.

I had to learn to listen to the parts of myself I had spent years silencing.

And slowly, those instincts began guiding me back toward something much more profound than shame. Something that accepted me without conditions, without judgment, without immediately offering advice.

Something that simply remained.

This is where I began to understand the field of awareness differently.

When you sit quietly for long enough, the mind begins to reveal itself. Thoughts appear. Images appear. Memories appear. Feelings rise and pass. There is sound, but beneath the sound is something quieter. There is sensation, color, movement, and awareness before we have named any of it.

Before we say, this is me, or this is my body, there is simply experience.

Then the mind returns and begins to describe it.

For years, I believed those descriptions. I believed the shame. I believed the accusations. I believed the stories I had built around what happened to me. I mistook the voice in my mind for the whole truth.

But the mind is not the whole of us.

There is something beneath it.

We don’t discover these depths as much as we rejoin them.

And just as we rejoin them, we can lose them again. We all do. We touch something vast, something alive, and then the noise of the mind pulls us back. We forget.

Then, somehow, we hear it again.

It is a constant flow of force that no one can stop.

But we can return to it.

For me, that return has taken many forms.

I thought joining the military might help. Later, I thought law enforcement might help. And in many ways, it did. I found purpose. I got to make a difference in people’s lives. I found answers. I used my ability to critically think through difficult problems. I had opportunities to protect people and perhaps even save lives.

But purpose doesn’t erase trauma.

Nothing prepared me for the kind of trauma that the work could bring into my life either. I discovered biases in myself. I encountered things I couldn’t listen to because I wasn’t yet comfortable in my own skin.

I remember male colleagues asking questions about women who had been assaulted: Was she drunk? What was she wearing? What happened before? What were the circumstances?

I felt a rage inside me that was difficult to contain. At first, I wanted to believe those questions meant they were being hostile, sexist, or ignorant. I wanted to believe they were judging the women they were supposed to be helping because those questions carried the same weight and shame I had experienced myself.

But I eventually learned that wasn’t what was happening.

They were gathering details. They were looking for patterns in the way these crimes were committed—a modus operandi that could help identify who was responsible, understand how the crimes were happening, and ultimately find and detain the people committing them.

That realization was difficult, but it was important.

I learned that I wasn’t always reacting to what was happening in front of me. Sometimes I was reacting to what had happened to me.

I learned how much of the world I was still filtering through experiences I hadn’t fully understood.

I was trying to help other people while still learning how to live inside myself.

I’m still not completely comfortable in my own skin.

But I am well on my way.

At some point, I had to turn the world back on myself—not as punishment, but as reflection. I had to turn the mirror toward myself and begin asking some very difficult questions.

What belongs to me?

What was given to me?

What did I learn to believe about myself that was never mine to carry?

I still don’t have all the answers.

Maybe I never will.

But I know this: healing does not have to look perfect to be real.

It has turns. It has setbacks. It has moments when we hurt other people because we are still hurting. It has moments when we get it wrong. It has moments when we realize we have become the very thing we once promised ourselves we would never become.

And even then, we are deserving of love.

We are deserving of acceptance.

We are deserving of the opportunity to understand ourselves more deeply.

That doesn’t mean harm doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean we don’t take responsibility for the ways we hurt others. It means responsibility and shame are not the same thing. One can lead us toward repair. The other can convince us that we are beyond repair.

I’ve come to believe that everyone has and will continue to hurt someone.

Some people know it. Some don’t. Some are hurting people today while completely convinced they are right.

Oddly, there is comfort in knowing this.

Not because all harm is equal. It isn’t.

But because it reminds me that I am not uniquely broken.

I am human.

And being human means carrying contradictions. We can be wounded and still wound others. We can protect people and still need protection ourselves. We can love deeply and still be afraid. We can be strong and still have places inside us that tremble.

None of that makes us less worthy of love, or less worthy of returning.