Vachon Imagined

I don’t always like admitting how much it hurts when I am not liked.

Not disliked in some dramatic, obvious way.

Just not received.

I put something of myself into the world. Something I thought about, something I felt deeply, something that came from a place in me that I don’t show everyone.

And then I wait.

Nothing.

No response.

No acknowledgment.

No sign that anyone felt what I felt when I wrote it.

And I can feel myself start to wonder.

Was it too much?

Was it too strange?

Did anyone understand it?

Did anyone even care?

Sometimes I check.

Sometimes I tell myself I don’t care.

Sometimes I get angry that I care at all.

And sometimes, if I’m being completely honest, it feels lonely.

Because there is a strange vulnerability in putting something intimate into the world and having it met with silence.

I am human.

I want to be liked.

I want to be seen.

I want someone to recognize something of themselves in what I have offered.

And when that doesn’t happen, it hurts.

In a world increasingly fueled by likes, hearts, shares, and immediate approval, it can become very easy to confuse being liked with being worthy.

I can feel that pull in myself.

The desire to be affirmed.

The desire to know that what I gave mattered to someone.

But something is changing in me.

I am learning to stay with the feeling.

Not fix it.

Not explain it away.

Not turn it into a judgment about myself.

And, most importantly, not act from it immediately.

I can be angry.

I can be lonely.

I can feel rejected.

I can want to be seen.

I can let all of that be here without becoming any of it.

The loneliness is an experience.

The anger is an experience.

The hurt is an experience.

They are moving through me.

They are not who I am.

And I don’t have to make them who I am just because they are here.

This is what I am beginning to understand about direct experience.

I don’t have to deny what hurts in order to be free of it.

I can feel it completely.

And still let it pass.

I can be human enough to want to be liked without making being liked the measure of my existence.

I can offer something of myself and allow it to be received—or not received.

I can let someone misunderstand me.

I can let someone not care.

I can let someone not like me.

And I can remain here.

Still alive.

Still present.

Still myself.

Not because I have convinced myself that I don’t care.

But because I no longer need the experience to tell me who I am.

I am learning that this may be what freedom actually feels like.

Not the absence of hurt.

The absence of becoming it.