Vachon Imagined

I worked for a woman who, whenever I would speak, would hold up her hand to pause me.

Not aggressively.

Just her hand.

She would raise it like a little flag that said: Do not cross.

I hated it.

Why?

Because she made me feel embarrassed.

Ah.

Now we’re really getting somewhere.

She was putting me in my place.

Only I didn’t know that yet.

I hated her. I hated the way she seemed to shut me out, shut me down, stop me in the middle of my thoughts.

And then I began to see that wasn’t what she was doing at all.

She was shaping me.

She had learned something I had not yet learned: when to speak, when to take something in, and when to remain quiet.

And, inconveniently, I was interrupting her.

While I was busy constructing my case against her, She’s disrespectful. She’s difficult. She doesn’t listen to me, I couldn’t see the much simpler truth.

I felt disrespected.

That is not the same thing as being disrespected.

This is where fact and opinion become very relevant, and where I think we lose our footing.

The fact was that she put her hand up while I was speaking.

The interpretation was that she was being disrespectful.

Those are two completely different things.

But we are remarkably good at taking what we feel and quietly promoting it to the status of fact.

I feel ignored, therefore you ignored me.

I feel dismissed, therefore you dismissed me.

I feel disrespected, therefore you disrespected me.

And once we make that leap, we don’t investigate anymore.

We prosecute.

I was sitting at a table where I was being groomed.

Not humiliated.

Not diminished.

Groomed.

She was teaching me discipline.

She was teaching me to trust my feelings enough to respond to them rather than allowing them to rule me.

There is a profound difference between those two things.

Working in stern, strict environments, the military, law enforcement, places where the room does not particularly care how you feel, taught me this lesson in ways that were not always gentle.

The work has to get done.

Decisions have to be made.

People have to listen.

Sometimes there is no time for a dissertation explaining why you feel the way you feel about the decision that just needs to be made.

That doesn’t mean feelings don’t matter.

It means they aren’t always in charge.

I had to be molded.

And it wasn’t without its bumps.

I resisted.

I bristled.

I took things personally.

I mistook correction for rejection and discipline for disrespect.

I was, in other words, learning.

Now I find myself becoming the woman with the raised hand.

I will be sitting across from someone equally passionate, equally certain, equally lost inside their own perception, and I will raise my hand.

Not to silence them.

To say:

I’m not finished.

You will have your turn.

Because what you have to say is not always relevant to what is happening right now.

And learning that is not cruelty.

It is discipline.

It is knowing that another person’s boundary is not automatically an insult to you.

It is knowing that being interrupted is not necessarily rejection.

It is knowing that someone disagreeing with you does not mean they have failed to understand you.

And it is knowing that the story happening inside your head is not necessarily the story happening in the room.

We spend an enormous amount of energy defending ourselves against things that may never have happened.

Not because we are stupid.

Because perception is fast.

Feeling is fast.

Memory is fast.

Fact is slower.

It asks us to stop.

To look again.

To separate what happened from what we decided it meant.

That woman raised her hand.

I decided she was disrespecting me.

She was teaching me.

And I had no idea how much I would one day thank her for it.

Because if you don’t learn what discipline looks like, you will keep calling it disrespect.

And if you don’t learn the difference between what happened and what you think happened, you will spend your life fighting people who were never fighting you at all.