Vachon Imagined

It started very simply.

Her mother correcting her language.

“No, no, that word, sweetheart. This word.”

Then:

“Don’t say what you want. Follow it with please and thank you.”

Then it was:

“It’s not Coke, sweetheart. Diet Coke. We have a figure to protect.”

It was subtle at first.

But over time, it was no longer allowed.

No, sweetheart became punishment.

Will this help you remember?

And the venom grew.

“Don’t wear that skirt, sweetheart. The boys will call you a whore.”

And somewhere inside herself, she would think:

Why am I supposed to care so deeply about the boys? Are they here? Who the fuck cares?

She would bite back with a nastiness that was natural, something she had kept holstered for precisely this moment.

No, sweetheart became absolutely not.

Not allowed.

A gate was built around her sense of herself.

And later, that gate became:

No, sweetheart. You cannot love women. Only men.

Only in certain ways.

Only in certain positions.

Her sexuality itself became something to be governed, her very inner tubing subjected to the machinery of other people’s rules, processes, religions, and interests.

She would bite back:

Fuck you.

She resisted them.

All of them.

The rules that seemed to exist only for women, never quite with the same force for men.

But eventually, she grew tired, and she was softened.

And as she softened, she discovered there was nothing left to protect.

Fuck women if she wanted.

Fuck boys.

She could do whatever she wanted.

And she did.

Not because anyone had finally given her permission.

But because she had stopped asking for it.

That was the day she stopped resisting who she was and entered an awareness of discernment.

An awareness of wisdom.

That was the day she stopped pretending to care about pleasing people who weren’t even in the room.

And wouldn’t stop living their lives even if they were.

She walked in her own certainty, a certainty that did not ask permission to be weird, homosexual, heterosexual, lover, hater, angry, tender, or anything else she might become.

Something inside her, already woven together perfectly for this moment, seemed to speak:

I made you this way.

I made it possible for you to exist.

So don’t ask for permission.

Don’t seek their permission.

Seek Me.

And I will give you back yourself.