Vachon Imagined

There are people who go into evil places to combat evil, and in doing so, they have to become acquainted with it. People who kill meet people who kill them back. Life meets life in an exchange that can leave everyone changed.

I was one of them, even if I never directly killed anyone. I helped. I provided information to people who did. In that sense, my hands were bloody too.

It is something I have come to accept about myself.

And part of me is still proud of the uniform I wore, and, in a certain sense, still wear. Those memories are becoming less prevalent as love reshapes me. I am becoming more humbled by a life that allows all of us to move, to choose, and to react through power, fear, lust, control, courage, and love.

It is part of being human.

But it is not the totality of life.

One thing I have discovered after standing against injustice is that you get dirty.

You cannot stand against violence without entering its proximity. You cannot always confront what is wrong from a perfectly clean place. Sometimes you have to step into the mud.

And there are people who will encourage you to stand on the scaffold. They will ask you to give up your integrity, your reputation, your well-being, your life as you know it. They will ask you to sacrifice yourself for something they believe must be done.

And then, sometimes, they will call you crazy.

Inept.

Stupid.

Selfish.

Because death, in all its forms, is painful.

No matter how much we romanticize it, try to ignore it, or pretend in some small way that it doesn’t happen to all of us, death hurts. Loss hurts. The death of an identity hurts. The death of a relationship hurts. The death of an old version of ourselves hurts.

And yet we are surrounded by it.

There are people who will put you on the crucifix to fight battles they would never fight themselves. Then they will stand apart from you in self-righteousness, as though they are somehow untouched by the very violence they condemn.

But they are not.

None of us are.

They may not kill with a weapon, but they can kill with resentment. They can kill a relationship with contempt. They can kill their husband every day with a little piece of themselves because he didn’t put the laundry in the right bin.

I’ve done it.

You’ve done it.

We all have.

And at some point, we are all put on the crucifix. Sometimes someone else puts us there. Sometimes we put ourselves there because we cannot see the life that is drawing us near, tearing us apart, and sending us back into another moment, another experience, another version of ourselves.

It is always doing this.

Life is always moving us.

And when you begin to move beyond judgment, something strange happens.

None of it matters in quite the same way it used to.

You begin to see more clearly.

You begin to see that the mind is not separate from life, standing outside of it and judging what it sees. The mind is life perceiving life.

It is happening everywhere.

All the time.

In everything.

And in every person.

The person you condemn is part of this life.

The person you praise is part of this life.

The person who hurts you is part of this life.

And so are you.

This is where love becomes more than an idea.

Love does not require us to pretend that injustice isn’t real. It does not require us to abandon boundaries, responsibility, or action. It asks something much harder: that we see the humanity in ourselves and in the person standing across from us, even when we cannot understand what they have done.

We get dirty.

We make choices.

We hurt people.

We protect people.

We fight.

We love.

We fail.

And somehow, through all of it, life continues to move through us.

We can trust it.

Life has never required our perfection in order to continue.

It keeps moving.

Our task is not to become clean enough to deserve it, but to become humble enough to recognize that we were never separate from it in the first place.