Vachon Imagined

We tell stories about one another.

She is selfish.
He is arrogant.
She’s weak.
He’s dangerous.
She’s difficult.
He’s a failure.

And once we have the story, we stop seeing the person.

We can’t even see we’re doing those things.

The story though gives us something intoxicating:

Certainty.

Power.

Pride.

Sometimes even happiness.

We can feel righteous in our judgment. We can feel powerful in our punishment. We can convince ourselves we are teaching, protecting, correcting, even loving.

But underneath the story is a human being.

Always.

There was a woman once who stood in front of someone who had already decided what she was.

He saw the failure. The mistake. The thing she had done wrong.

And he came at her with the full force of his authority.

He felt powerful.

She felt small.

Perhaps he thought he was making her stronger. Perhaps he never imagined that his words would enter her so deeply, finding every wound that had come before them.

He may have walked away believing he had accomplished something.

She carried it.

And eventually, she paid the ultimate price.

Her life.

Her potential.

Everything that might have been.

And this isn’t only about him.

It’s about us.

We do this to one another everywhere.

We take one moment and turn it into a person.

One mistake becomes an identity.

One terrible day becomes a lifetime sentence.

Sometimes we carry that sentence for twenty years.

Someone changes, grows, apologizes, becomes someone new, and we reach back into the past and pull out the old version whenever we need it.

Remember who you were.

Look what you did.

This is who you are.

And suddenly we’re no longer relating to a human being.

We’re relating to a story.

We’re putting a life into a religion.

We take something living and make it sacred in all the wrong ways.

We worship the story.

We defend it.

We organize ourselves around it.

We become devoted to being right about who someone is.

And the human being underneath it disappears.

That’s what stories can do.

They freeze something living.

They turn a moving human being into a fixed idea.

And then we punish the idea, when in truth, we’re punishing ourselves.

The frightening part is that we can do all of this without ever thinking of ourselves as cruel.

We call it accountability.

Justice.

Honesty.

Love.

Meanwhile, there is a person underneath it.

A person carrying wounds we cannot see.

A person who has been carrying more than we know.

And we don’t know where another person’s breaking point is.

We never do.

We may be the final voice in a lifetime of voices and never know it.

That’s why this matters.

Because underneath every story we tell about one another, there is still a life.

And the greatest tragedy is that we don’t realize what we’ve done until the person beneath the story is gone.