Vachon Imagined

It’s hard to be in a body that feels divided within itself.

I know this well, having experienced sexual violation in childhood and again in early adulthood.

The little jabs about my sexuality didn’t help. Eventually, I learned to laugh some of them off, because constantly defending yourself against yourself is exhausting.

It isn’t necessarily denial.

Sometimes you’re fully aware of what is happening.

You’re just tired of fighting yourself.

For someone who has been sexually violated, being asked to simply “be with yourself” can feel like being asked to sleep beside a monster.

The images.

The memories.

The sensations.

The body remembering things the mind desperately wants to forget.

And sometimes a person moves toward sexuality rather than away from it. The very thing that once felt violating can become something they use for connection, control, validation, power, or survival.

That doesn’t make them broken.

It means they found a way to live with something they didn’t know how to carry.

Sexuality is powerful.

So is the body.

So is life.

And when that power no longer has to belong to the story of what happened, something begins to soften.

Yes, this happened.

Yes, it is part of my experience.

And it is moving now.

I can be here for it.

That can take a lifetime.

I don’t want to oversimplify sexual violation because there is nothing simple about what it does to a human being.

Working in law enforcement and the law, I’ve spent years around words like “consent.” The word matters, but it doesn’t explain everything the body can experience.

A body can respond to stimulation without choosing what is happening.

That response is not permission.

It is biology.

The body is an intelligence responding to what it encounters.

And the people who carry these experiences are everywhere.

Women.

Men.

Children who grew into adults.

Your friends.

Your colleagues.

Your parents.

You may never know.

But you may notice.

And if you do, perhaps the answer isn’t to immediately fix them, explain them, or tell them who they should become.

Perhaps it is simply to stay.

To listen.

To practice compassion.

To stand beside what they cannot yet stand with, within themselves.

Because sometimes the greatest gift we can give another person is not a solution.

It is a place where they don’t have to fight themselves alone.