Vachon Imagined

I recently bought myself a Mercedes.

It made me think of my time on the Autobahn, going as fast as I wanted in a rental car. And in Germany, there are no Ford rentals. We’re talking Alfa Romeo, Mercedes, BMW, Audi.

My boyfriend and I would rent one of their finest cars on an SGT’s salary and drive for hours, wherever the road took us. Switzerland? A few hours away. The Amalfi Coast? Coming right up. Top down, windows open, cruise control on.

It was one of the happiest times of my life.

And recently, I have felt without purpose.

For the last four years, I have been paid a salary for essentially no work.

Now, before you get jealous, let me explain.

It sounds fantastic.

No one bothers you. No one gives you anything to do. The paycheck arrives. You could call it a government-sponsored sabbatical.

Except that being sidelined after reporting harassment inside a corporation the size of three cities has its drawbacks.

You might be right.

But you also get to be sidelined.

Put out to pasture.

Lucky me.

There is something strangely disorienting about being paid to do nothing when you have spent most of your life working, achieving, solving problems, climbing the ladder, and being useful. Eventually, you start wondering what exactly you are supposed to do with all that unused life.

So I stopped waiting for someone else to give me a purpose.

I started doing things that make me happy.

Volunteering at my son’s school? Coming right up.

Being with him at every doctor’s appointment? Happiness.

Laughing with him. Running up the stairs competing over who is faster. Listening to stories I have probably heard three times already because I know there will come a day when he won’t tell them to me anymore.

These are moments I will not get back.

And I am grateful that I am here for them.

For most of my life, I thought purpose meant being needed somewhere outside of myself. A position. A title. A mission. Something important enough to justify my existence.

Then that was taken away.

And for a while, I kept looking back at what I had lost, wondering when my real life was going to start again.

My son had a different idea.

He kept pulling me into the present without even knowing he was doing it.

He doesn’t care about my title.

He doesn’t care about my position.

He doesn’t care whether anyone at work recognizes what I have done.

He just wants me there.

And being there has become one of the most meaningful things I have ever done.

That was the turning point.

I realized I had spent years looking for happiness in achievement, recognition, accomplishment, and the next thing I could become, while something extraordinary was happening right in front of me.

My son was growing up.

And I was there to see it.

There is no promotion for that.

No award.

No performance rating.

No one sends you an email telling you that you did a great job.

There is just your child laughing, your feet running up the stairs behind him, and the sudden realization that you are exactly where you are supposed to be.

That is happiness for me now.

Not getting everything back.

Not being vindicated.

Not proving the people who sidelined me were wrong.

It is being present for the person who is still here.

My son did not give me back my career.

He gave me something I didn’t know I had lost.

My attention.

And once I gave him that, I started getting my life back.

Which brings me back to my Mercedes.

People joke about how you can’t become something simply because you think about it. But I think they underestimate the power of spirit. The power of mind. The strange relationship between imagination and experience.

Because every time I roll the top back, roll down the windows, and turn on Metallica like I’m the drummer and it’s my band, I am twenty-three again.

I become her.

I am back on the Autobahn, learning what it meant to be alive without even knowing I was learning it.

I am turning every corner on a dime and a dream.

And for a moment, I am not remembering that girl.

I am her.

The car, the road, the music, the freedom, the memory, the love I still carry for the man who was there with me—all of it enters the present.

And this is what I have come to understand about imagination.

It isn’t always an escape from reality.

Sometimes it is a way of entering it more completely.

I can imagine anything I want, and in that moment, I can enter the experience itself.

Not because the past has returned.

It hasn’t.

Not because I am twenty-three.

I’m not.

But because something in me was never twenty-three and never fifty.

Something in me was simply alive.

She was happy.

She just didn’t know yet that happiness was never going to be found in the next place, the next car, the next person, or the next life.

It was in the experience itself.

I know that now.

I know it sitting beside my son, listening to him talk. I know it running up the stairs with him. I know it in the quiet moments when I realize I don’t need to be anywhere else.

And I know it when I put the top down, turn up Metallica, and drive nowhere in particular and everywhere at once.

The Autobahn is gone.

I am not twenty-three.

That life is over.

But the aliveness isn’t.

It is still here.

So I can become anything I want—not because I can recreate the past, but because I am alive in the present.

Sometimes that looks like being a mother.

Sometimes it looks like being twenty-three on the Autobahn.

And sometimes, apparently, it looks like a Mercedes.

So yes, I bought the car.

And when I put the top down, roll the windows back, and turn up Metallica, I don’t have to go back to become her.

I only have to be alive enough to enter what is already here.