Vachon Imagined

My grandfather and I would often sit together on the couch and talk for hours.

He was the closest man to me. My confidant. My safe space.

And he would push my buttons, not cruelly, but like a lawyer. He would challenge me to think critically. Even when I knew he didn’t necessarily believe what he was arguing, and as you should with a good lawyer, you should never really know what he believes, he made me think.

Think for myself.

Weigh my options.

Question what I thought I knew.

It was one of the greatest lessons he ever gave me.

That, and what it felt like to sit in the space of a man who could make you feel safe.

Even if only for a little while.

I think that space he created for me propelled me into almost every place I’ve found myself since.

Anything that asked me to remain the same, I would eventually leave.

Not because I am disloyal to people.

Because I am loyal to the search.

The search for meaning.

The search for why.

Because a little girl who has been wounded wants to understand.

Why?

How?

How could the people I trusted hurt me?

How could they have allowed it?

And that question became the beginning of a search that never really ended, because there is always another why. Another how. Just around the corner. Just beyond whatever I am not yet ready to see.

And that makes me thirsty.

Thirsty for knowledge.

Thirsty even for power.

But not the kind of power a lawyer seeks. Not the kind of power a person seeks when they are trying to make something of themselves.

I mean a power that lasts.

A power in the heart.

The power to love people even when they have wronged you.

The power to look at what happened without needing to turn anyone into a villain or yourself into a victim.

The power to remove the memory of evil long enough to see that what happened was simply life moving through people who, like you, were still trying to find their way.

I’ve spent the last twenty years building a reputation.

An academic laundry of degrees and certificates.

And I’m proud of those things.

I’m proud of my service. My dedication. My service to the nation as a Soldier and now as a law enforcement professional who worked long and hard to become a senior member of the profession.

I don’t need to erase any of that.

But here’s the thing.

That little girl sitting across from her grandfather, the truest and purest love of her life at that age, and perhaps even now, taught me something I didn’t fully understand until much later.

He taught me to think.

And somewhere along the way, I began using that ability to judge other people.

I learned to work within the law, but I also began believing that the law could tell me what a person was.

And every time I helped send someone to prison, I participated in that belief.

I stepped outside of life itself and called another person’s life a prison.

I called one person criminal and another person victim.

I called one good and another evil.

And this is what happens when we judge another.

We create a separation that isn’t actually there.

We create villains.

We create saviors.

We create enough distance between ourselves and another human being that we can feel justified in deciding what they deserve.

And all the while, we are pointing our finger from inside the very life that gave us the finger to point.

From inside the very God who gave us the ability to judge.

How foolish am I?

How foolish are we?

To believe that this is our right.

That this is our role.

And worse, I made a career from it.

I make money from it.

And I use that money to support a life built, in part, upon taking happiness away from other people.

I’m not proud of that.

But I don’t need to change it either.

Because seeing something clearly is different from condemning it.

Once you see something purely, you can’t unsee it.

You don’t have to go back and destroy the old clothing.

You simply stop wearing it.

You don’t have to hate the person you were.

You simply stop being her.

You walk away because you’re done.

Done with the old clothing.

Done with the old belief.

Done with the need to make another person into something you are not.

And that is what my grandfather gave me all those years ago without either of us knowing it.

He taught me to question everything.

Even myself.

And the search that began with a wounded little girl asking,

Why did they hurt me?

has slowly become something else.

Not Why did they do this to me?

But:

What is this life trying to show me now?

And I think that question is the one that finally makes me free.