Vachon Imagined

“Sugar and spice and everything nice.”

That’s what my grandfather used to say about me when I was a kid.

I was curious about everything, and I mean everything. I asked questions constantly. I talked all the time. There was rarely a quiet moment because, according to me, there was always something important that needed to be said.

According to my grandfather, I was turning his hair gray faster than he’d like.

It was our joke.

He would laugh about how much I talked, but he never made me feel like my curiosity or my voice was something I needed to shrink. He had a way of letting me be fully myself without making me feel like I was too much.

Looking back, I think that’s a rare gift.

He didn’t pretend I wasn’t intense. He didn’t ask me to become less curious, less passionate, or less myself. He simply taught me that what we carry does not have to carry us. The goal isn’t to deny the fire, but to learn how to hold it without letting it define us.

He taught me how to carry it.

You don’t learn what you can handle by surrounding yourself with people who always agree with you.

I suppose my grandmother helped him develop that philosophy.

She was a pistol with no holster.

When she was angry, you knew it.
The neighbors knew it.
I’m pretty sure people a few streets over knew it.

It was the kind of anger where you didn’t argue, you didn’t negotiate, and you definitely didn’t suddenly remember that one thing you needed to say. You simply looked around the room and thought, “You know what? I think I will depart now. This seems like an excellent time to rearrange my closet.”

My grandfather had mastered the art of becoming very quiet, very still, and somehow very interested in whatever was happening on the other side of the room.

Turns out, sugar and spice isn’t always everything nice.

Sometimes it means a person hasn’t learned how to stay with themselves when they’re angry.

And before you turn me into someone who never gets angry, let me stop you there.

Absolutely not.

I get angry.

I have the internal, “Am I having an aneurysm? Is she having an aneurysm? WTF is happening right now?” moments.

I’ve just committed myself to let the fire settle before I hand it the microphone.

Because anger and passion, when they are held with intention, have another name.

Bold.

You know that feeling when someone has established a boundary so clearly that, if you’re smart, you will not cross it?

That’s boldness.

But you can’t know your boundaries if you don’t know yourself.

And if you don’t know your own anger, you don’t know how to practice grace with someone else’s.

The grace you give other people is the grace you first learn to give yourself.

That softness you intentionally offer when the explosion happens inside you, to feel something powerful, and to learn how to hold it.

There is no escaping that relationship.

From within to without.

The way we meet ourselves becomes the way we meet the world.

Before we were taught what anger was supposed to mean, anger was and is simply life.

A child gets angry because something hurts.

A person gets angry because something matters.

A boundary gets crossed.

Something precious feels threatened.

Anger is information before it becomes behavior.

The problem isn’t that we have life.

Problems come rather from what we do with it.

We can abandon ourselves inside it.

We can weaponize it.

We can suppress it until it becomes resentment.

We can throw it at everyone around us.

Or we can learn to hold it like you would something incredibly precious, and wildly informative.

We can let the fire speak without handing it the steering wheel.

I think that’s part of what my grandfather gave me. He didn’t make me feel small for being loud, curious, passionate, or intense. He challenged me. He pushed me. He made me defend ideas I didn’t even know I had.

And my grandmother gave me another lesson.

She showed me what happens when the fire takes over.

Between the two of them, I learned that anger isn’t something to fear, and it isn’t something to worship.

It’s something to know.

Anger doesn’t have to disappear for us to become peaceful.

Passion doesn’t have to be extinguished for us to become gentle.

Boldness doesn’t require cruelty.

A boundary doesn’t require hatred.

And grace doesn’t require the absence of fire.

The work isn’t to eliminate the fire.

The work is to know it, respect it, and carry it without letting it carry you.