Vachon Imagined

When I served in the Army, there was a woman I served with who became a Pathfinder.

For those who don’t know what that is, a Pathfinder is a Soldier who goes ahead of other Soldiers entering an area to identify pitfalls, dangers, landing zones, and areas that could provide an advantage or disadvantage to the unit that follows. They are, in many ways, guardians of the path. They can rappel from helicopters, often undetected, and their work can help prevent the loss of life.

And there is a rigorous standard.

No one says, “Oh, you’re a woman? Okay, we’ll lower the standard.”

Why would they?

We’re not willing to gamble with American Soldiers’ lives to make a philosophical point about equality.

I had the privilege of serving during a time when a woman, perhaps one of the first, joined the ranks of these Pathfinders. I never met her, but I heard about her.

And the moment I heard about her, my eyes went into full deer-in-the-headlights mode.

I had never heard of a woman doing something like that.

So I gave her a big high five from my air-conditioned office, sitting behind my computer with my Bath & Body Works vanilla lotion, because, you know, all that data plotting can really chafe the hands.

But I digress.

We live in a world that often says, “Ah, you identify as something different? Okay, we’ll change the standard.”

Or we do the opposite. We look at someone who doesn’t fit our assumptions and decide they must change themselves to fit the standard we’ve already created.

I’m not arguing for one side or the other.

I’m arguing for the standard itself.

We are not living in a world that was built around every possible version of “other.” Difference challenges our logic. It challenges our assumptions. It forces us to reconsider what we thought was normal.

But just because something challenges our assumptions doesn’t mean the standard should be lowered.

Imagine having open-heart surgery and finding out your surgeon made a D in anatomy, but that was considered good enough because the standard didn’t fit their individual circumstances.

No.

There was a standard.

And the standard existed because your life depended on it.

Standards aren’t inherently oppressive.

Sometimes standards are what protect us.

The real question is whether the standard is actually connected to the responsibility being carried.

If it is, then meet it.

If you want to become a Pathfinder, meet the Pathfinder standard.

If you want to perform open-heart surgery, meet the standard for an open-heart surgeon.

If you want to carry the responsibility, accept the standard that comes with carrying it.

Don’t ask the responsibility to become smaller because you don’t yet fit it.

Become larger.

This is where personal courage is built.

Personal courage isn’t built by constantly arranging the world so that we never have to struggle against it. It is built through challenge, heartache, failure, discipline, and struggle.

It is built when something in front of us says, “You aren’t ready.”

And instead of responding, “Then change the requirement,” we say,

“Then I’ll change myself.”

That doesn’t mean every standard is good.

Some standards are arbitrary. Some are unjust. Some deserve to be challenged and changed.

But challenging a standard because it is wrong is very different from demanding that a standard disappear because it is difficult.

That distinction matters.

The world is not obligated to conform to our opinions, our politics, our identities, or our individual expectations.

And that can be a hard truth.

The world can be cruel.

It can be indifferent.

It can tell you no.

It can expose your weaknesses without asking whether you’re emotionally prepared to see them.

But we can use that reality.

We can let difficulty develop us instead of demanding that difficulty disappear.

We can do the hard things.

We can meet the standard head-on.

We can allow the challenge to reveal where we need to grow rather than interpreting every challenge as evidence that the world is wrong.

And when we encounter someone who doesn’t fit our assumptions—someone who is different from us, someone who enters a space we never imagined they could occupy, we don’t have to lower the standard to make room for them.

We can raise our understanding instead.

That woman didn’t need a lower standard to become a Pathfinder.

She needed the opportunity to meet the same standard.

And when she did, she didn’t just prove something about herself.

She challenged the assumptions of everyone who thought the standard belonged to someone else.

That’s the beauty of a real standard.

It doesn’t care who you are.

It asks what you’re willing to become.