Vachon Imagined

I walked into a psychiatrist’s office at age fifteen after I found my brother dead by suicide.

I was alone with him, and my unsophisticated reasoning said, Bolt. Get away. Run down the street. But on the inside, I was screaming for my mother.

I was fifteen, not five, not three. I was old enough to know that my mother was not there, yet some part of me was still screaming for her. I was screaming for help.

Our logic does not always match our emotion. But thought and emotion are not separate things. Life and the body are not separate things. They work as one, ultimately producing what we call behavior, what we call the physical.

But it is not merely physical.

It is experience. It is perception. It is individuality creating a life that still belongs to something greater than individuality itself.

Something we call God. Something for which we have no name.

Yet we walk in it. We live by it. We surrender to it. And we can see its movement. We can hear its guidance.

But we cannot do this easily in a fixed mind filled with strife, hate, guilt, shame, or violence. Those things can exist in us, but when we walk in them, as them, life cannot move through us as freely.

Or as quickly.

I was depressed. I was confused. And then someone agreed with me.

Someone labeled me.

And I lived a life on medication, with suicidal thoughts, just like my brother.

But none of that was me.

I am life.

You are life.

And when we return to that life, our perception becomes clear. Our life matters not because I declare that it matters, but because life is already present in everything we touch and everything we see.

When you return to it, you begin to see that you are not depressed. You are living with your own life.

And that is very different.

Agreement is powerful. I can influence you. I can label you. I can give you an image of yourself, and if you agree with it long enough, you can begin to live as though that fixed image is who you are.

And we all have ways of doing this.

We criticize other people. We put them down. We belittle them. We hate them. We reduce them to an image that makes it easier for us to judge them.

And then, here’s where it gets interesting: we call ourselves right and justified for doing so.

We convince ourselves that our anger is justified, that our hatred is warranted, that our judgment and vengeance are necessary. We create an identity for another person and then defend our right to treat that identity as though it were the whole of them.

We do the same with worshipping them and that too comes with its own consequence.

No matter the label, what we are doing to another person is also happening in us.

We are creating the experience of separation in ourselves.

Love does something different.

Love does not require us to become an image.

Love restores relationship.

Love restores unity.

And unity can undo things that humans alone could never undo and has never proven itself capable of undoing.

We do not have to fight ourselves back into life.

We can return to it.

And that is what we do every day we are alive, and every moment we are human.