I would be remiss not to acknowledge what is happening in the world right now.
It is not good.
Historically, the United States has rarely been free from international conflict, and the reasons we give for being there--to defend freedom, to help people, to protect the vulnerable--often do not match the reality of what happens on the ground.
If we were truly there to protect people, we would not be bombing a school full of girls.
Beautiful babies with entire lives ahead of them. Girls who probably lit up rooms, who were funny, creative, whimsical, brilliant, and deeply loved by the people in their lives. Futures with wide open spaces.
Most people don’t like to think about war that way.
Because if we did, we would have to face a truth we prefer not to see. Our tax dollars, our political choices, and our national identity are tied to actions we would recognize as atrocities if they were happening in our own communities (which they are).
That realization is uncomfortable because it means we are not only observers of violence.
We are implicated in it.
I am American. That means my government acts in my name, whether I agree with those actions or not. My tax dollars help fund decisions I cannot control, but cannot fully separate myself from either.
So today, in a small way, I want to say something that rarely gets said out loud.
I am sorry. As an American citizen to the global community. I am so very sorry for the sins that we have inflicted on the rest of the world.
Not as a political statement, but as a human one.
Right now it is Ramadan, a sacred month for Muslims, a time of fasting, prayer, reflection, and community. Families gather before dawn and after sunset. People try to live more intentionally, more compassionately, more faithfully.
And in the middle of that holy time, people are also living under the threat of bombs.
That contrast should disturb us.
Because faith traditions, whether Christian during Lent or Muslim during Ramadan, ask us to examine our lives and our responsibilities to others.
They ask us to see clearly.
Even when the truth is uncomfortable.
There was a moment at work recently that has been stuck in my head.
A woman came into Circle K to cash in a winning scratch-off ticket and buy cigars. I rang up the purchase and realized I had made a small mistake with the change. It happens. I fixed it immediately and refunded the difference.
But she still wasn’t convinced.
After I explained it again, she shrugged and said, “Well, God will make it right if it’s meant to be.”
And before I could stop myself, I said out loud, “Nope. We’re not going to put that on God.”
I had already corrected the mistake. The change had been refunded. There was nothing left for divine intervention to solve.
But what struck me was how quickly people reach for God language to explain things that are actually very human. A math error. A misunderstanding. A moment that simply required honesty and correction.
God is not a cosmic cashier fixing our receipts.
If something is wrong, we fix it.
If we make a mistake, we correct it.
And as a gay person, I’m especially sensitive to people throwing God around casually in ways that shift responsibility away from themselves. Too often faith gets used as a shield, a way to avoid accountability instead of embracing it.
It reminds me of a scene from "Bruce Almighty," where Bruce, after granting everyone’s prayers and creating complete chaos, turns to God (Morgan Freeman) for help. Instead of fixing everything for him, God hands Bruce a mop.
Bruce protests, saying he only gave people what they asked for.
God calmly responds that the problem is people don’t actually know what they want. Everyone expects God to do everything for them. What they fail to realize is that the power to change things was within them all along.
“If you want to see a miracle,” he tells Bruce, “be the miracle.”
That scene seems simple but it is deeply profound.
Because the truth is we have always had the power within us to change our own lives, no matter how messy things get. Sometimes we just have to be willing to pick up the bucket and start mopping.
A little help from friends doesn’t hurt either.
When I look at the division in this country, I’m not surprised by how absurd it all feels. The mess we’re in didn’t appear overnight. It’s the result of leaders who care more about power and profit than people. Leaders who treat entire groups of human beings as expendable because the consequences never reach their own lives.
But I refuse to live in that kind of darkness.
Instead I ask a different question: How do we bring light back into the world?
Not in the way of an electrician, flipping a switch and pretending the problem is solved. But by choosing, every day, to act with courage, compassion, and clarity.
If miracles are going to happen, they won’t come from someone else fixing everything for us.
They will come from ordinary people deciding to be the miracle themselves.
And right now, the world needs that more than ever.
Faith, if it means anything, should push us toward honesty, not away from it.
And the same thing is true on a much larger scale.
When harm is done in our name, when innocent people suffer because of political decisions, we cannot shrug and say that somehow God will make it right.
Those are human choices.
Which means they require human accountability.
The scriptures are full of stories about how hard this kind of honesty actually is.
When Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, they didn’t immediately celebrate freedom. They complained. They longed for the life they had just escaped. The desert was hard. The future was uncertain. At least in Egypt they understood the rules, even if those rules were cruel.
It took a whole generation wandering in the wilderness before they were ready to enter the promised land.
Jesus ran into the same reality. People loved listening to him, right up until the moment they realized that following him meant changing their lives. It meant sacrifice. It meant letting go of the systems and comforts they were used to, even when those systems were unjust.
At that point, many walked away.
Some even helped put him on a cross.
Because the truth is that human beings often prefer a familiar injustice over an uncertain freedom.
We cling to the life we know, even when it is broken.
Lent asks us to confront that instinct.
To tell the truth about ourselves, our systems, and the harm we participate in without noticing.
Not so we can drown in guilt, but so we can begin the long, uncomfortable work of repentance.
Lenten Reflection
“Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” — Isaiah 1:17
Lent is a season of examination.
Not only of personal habits and private failings, but of the systems we participate in and the suffering we sometimes learn to ignore.
Repentance begins with honesty.
With the humility to admit that our lives are connected to people far beyond our borders, and that the comforts we enjoy are often entangled with harms we would rather not see.
There is a kind of anger that grows out of that realization.
Not the scattered anger that burns everything down, but the focused anger that refuses to look away from what is broken.
The prophets carried that kind of anger. It was not hatred. It was moral clarity.
Because once you see injustice clearly, indifference is no longer possible.
If we are honest about what is happening in our country and in the world, then the work ahead of us is not small. It will require confronting willful blindness, challenging systems that reward exploitation, and resisting the temptation to retreat into apathy simply because the problems feel too large.
Empires rarely collapse all at once. They decay slowly, from the inside, when injustice becomes normal and truth becomes inconvenient.
Lent asks us not to look away from that decay.
It asks us to tell the truth about it.
And then to decide whether we will participate in repairing what is broken, or simply watch while it falls apart.
Justice, compassion, and repentance are not abstract ideals.
They are work.
And the time for that work is now.
Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.
As above. So below.
Behind Every Great Woman Is Another Woman
Everyone knows Susan B. Anthony. Her name is on statues. On coins. In textbooks. She has become the symbol of the suffrage movement.
Fewer people know Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Which is strange, because if you read the history carefully, it becomes clear that Susan likely would not have become Susan without Elizabeth.
They met in 1851 and, for the next fifty years, built one of the most consequential political partnerships in American history. Stanton was the writer, the theorist, the one who could articulate injustice in language that made people uncomfortable enough to listen. Anthony was the organizer, the strategist, the one who carried those ideas into the world with relentless discipline.
Stanton once described their partnership in a way historians still quote: she said she forged the thunderbolts, and Susan fired them.
In other words, one woman wrote the revolution. The other made sure the revolution showed up in the streets.
Their partnership endured decades of travel, public criticism, political defeat, and dramatically different personal lives. Stanton was raising seven children. Anthony never married and dedicated her life to organizing.
But they kept returning to one another intellectually. In letters. In speeches. In strategy. In the shared belief that women deserved a political voice in a country that insisted they did not.
They fought for suffrage for nearly seventy years.
Neither of them lived to see women vote.
The 19th Amendment passed in 1920, fourteen years after Anthony died and eighteen years after Stanton was gone.
Two women spent the better part of their lives pushing against a system that had no intention of changing.
And still they persisted.
Sometimes movements are not built by individuals. They are built by partnerships. By the rare and stubborn friendships where two people sharpen each other’s thinking and refuse to give up at the same time.
Susan B. Anthony became the symbol history remembers.
But the truth is, she did not stand alone.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was there, writing the thunder.
I’ve been thinking about them a lot this month (It is only March 3rd).
I’ve been celebrating Women’s History Month a little differently this year. It’s Lent. I’m busy. Law school is law schooling. The world is… well... on fire.
So instead of big declarations, I’ve been trying to be intentional.
I sent one of my women friends money and told her to take herself out to lunch (cause we're both busy). I texted her, “Empowering Women’s History Month. Go eat lunch on me.”
Because sometimes resistance looks like feeding yourself well. Sometimes honoring women looks like making sure the women you love are taken care of.
I’ve also been writing about women not choosing the bear, because we deserve better than survival. We deserve safety. We deserve steadiness. We deserve love that does not require shrinking.
And when I get tired. When it feels like nothing ever changes, I remember Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
If you ever took even one gender studies class, you know the story.
The lifelong “friendship.”
The letters. The devotion. The intellectual intimacy that history politely labels practical.
They worked side by side for decades. Writing together. Traveling together. Organizing together. Arguing strategy. Building movements.
They were, by every meaningful definition, partners in purpose.
And here is the part that wrecks me every time:
They fought for women’s suffrage for nearly seventy years.
Neither of them lived to see the 19th Amendment ratified.
They gave their lives to a future they would never personally enter.
Tell me that isn’t love.
History will not say they were in love. It will call them collaborators. Reformers. Dear friends. It will footnote their letters and gloss over the language.
But read those letters.
Read the tenderness. The longing. The devotion. The way they wrote to each other about their work, their dreams, their frustrations, and the long road ahead.
Susan once wrote to Elizabeth that she longed for the day they could sit together and talk over their work and their dreams.
That line alone is enough for me.
Because that is what partnership is.
Talking over work.
Sharing dreams.
Staying in the fight together.
And here’s the part that makes me emotional in a very dramatic, very gay way.
They did not win in their lifetime.
They did not get to vote.
They did not get the parade.
They did the work anyway.
So when I get tired and when the political climate feels like a pendulum swinging backwards. When the rights of women and especially women of color feel fragile. I remember them.
Seventy years.
No guarantee of victory.
No immediate gratification.
Just persistence. Devotion. Work.
Good in theory.
Better in practice.
Women have always done the work.
Often without credit.
Often without safety.
Often without the right to exist fully in the love they were clearly living.
This month, I honor the women who fought before me. The women who filled my undergrad classrooms and taught me how to think. The women who organize, heal, resist, write, build, and love with stubborn steadiness.
And I honor the women in my life right now the ones who deserve lunch, rest, softness, and partners who do not make them choose the bear.
Happy Women’s Herstory Month.
May we love each other loudly.
May we fight for each other relentlessly.
May we build futures we might never personally see.
And may we never again call epic devotion
“just friendship.”
Happy Empowered Women's Herstory Month!
One night over drinks, a friend said something that has been circling in my head ever since. We were talking about golf, about mechanics and consistency, and how improvement only comes if you’re willing to practice, learn the fundamentals, and repeat the same motion over and over again, but what we were really talking about was doing the work.
She works in healthcare, which means she has a front row seat to what happens when people neglect themselves for years and then act surprised when they end up on an operating table. She said sometimes it feels like people must hate themselves, the way they treat their bodies. That the slow violence of bad nutrition, unmanaged stress, and avoidance looks less like ignorance and more like giving up.
Then she said, “Vangie, people don’t actually want to be better. They don’t want to put in the work. They just want an easy fix. And you know who suffers for it? We do.”
I didn’t like hearing that. Mostly because I recognized myself in it, not in the avoidance, but in the opposite. I have always been willing to do the work, perhaps to a fault.
At 51, you would think I would have everything sorted out. In some ways, I do. In other ways, I am only now beginning to understand what I was doing wrong all along.
I have been the problem in many of my relationships.
Not because the women I dated were cruel or incapable of love. Many of them were good. Thoughtful. Smart. Ready for something real. The common denominator in the ending of several genuinely decent relationships was me. And not because I didn’t care. I cared deeply. Sometimes too deeply.
The problem was that I was still trying to unlearn what love meant. If you ask me, I have loved every woman I have been with. That was never the issue.
However, I grew up in a house that was materially stable and emotionally unpredictable. My father told me never to let anyone see me cry because it showed weakness. And weakness, in his worldview, was dangerous. It opened you up to vulnerability. His moods could shift from protective to disappointed to rage without warning, and so I became very skilled at reading a room, adjusting my tone, anticipating shifts in temperature. I learned how to regulate other people before I ever learned how to regulate myself.
Emotional steadiness was not modeled. It was something I had to figure out later in therapy, in books, and in the patient correction of women who were far more emotionally literate than I was in my twenties.
A therapist once told me that I did not know how to express sadness; it presented as frustration and anger. That assessment was eye-opening. Mind blown. New skill unlocked. We were not raised with language for grief. We were raised to endure.
So when I began dating women, I brought intensity instead of steadiness. I understood longing. I understood desire. I understood the rush of being chosen and the equally intoxicating rush of choosing someone. What I did not understand was the quiet discipline of staying regulated when things became uncomfortable.
My friend Kimi likes to joke that my dating strategy in my twenties was, “Let me seduce you with my awkwardness.” To this day she is baffled by how much I dated. I am too, if I am honest. Intensity can look like passion. Earnestness can be mistaken for depth. Emotional avoidance can look like seduction.
Looking back, I can see how often what I called chemistry was really just two people’s unhealed wounds recognizing one another.
And because I am apparently quite coachable, I attracted partners who felt comfortable offering detailed feedback on how I might improve. I took it seriously. I adjusted. I softened here. I hardened there. I tried to be the version of myself that would make the relationship work. And somewhere in that slow process of refinement, I began to disappear.
They were happier.
I was becoming unhappier.
When I eventually ended things, there was shock. Anger. Accusations of betrayal. But the ending had not been sudden for me. It had been months in the making. A quiet realization that compromise had slid into self-abandonment and that I could not continue to contort myself without losing something essential.
It has taken me decades to understand the difference between growth and shrinking.
Growth expands you. It challenges you but leaves you more yourself. Self-abandonment, by contrast, feels like a narrowing. A dimming. A slow erasure in the name of harmony.
There were moments when I chose to leave not because the other person was dangerous or unworthy, but because if I stayed, I would eventually no longer like the person looking back in the mirror. In that sense, yes, sometimes I chose the bear. Not out of fear of intimacy, but out of a desire to remain intact.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” - Søren Kierkegaard
When I was 25 I hadn't lived enough life to really get what Kierkegaard meant. It means we must make decisions and act in the present without knowing the future, and only later, through reflection on past experiences, can we understand their true meaning and purpose.
At 51, I get it. I can see now what I could not see then the projections, the unrealistic expectations, the ways in which I was reenacting old dynamics while insisting I was chasing epic love.
Lent, for me, is not about punishing the younger version of myself. It is about refusing to repeat old patterns.
A coworker asked me recently whether I am single by choice. I said yes. Dating was never the difficult part. Remaining in something healthy was. I have, on more than one occasion, had to stop mid-story and calculate how many exes ago a particular woman was. That part is almost comical.
What is less amusing is remembering how blunt I used to be and mistaking that bluntness for “keeping it real.” “You don’t look hideous in that,” is not me being honest, it's me being a jerk.
I am still learning. More often than not, I am unlearning.
And now, when I consider what I want, it is no longer fiction. No longer cinematic longing or dramatic declarations. It is steadiness. It is a relationship in which I do not have to manage someone else’s volatility in order to feel safe. It is a space where I can remain fully myself and be loved not for how well I adapt, but for who I really am.
Which brings me back to my friend’s comment about doing the work.
When my doctor tells me my blood pressure is creeping up and that I need to adjust my diet, move more consistently, lower my cholesterol, I do not argue. I do not pretend it will fix itself. I try. Not always perfectly, but consistently. Because I would prefer to be alive and well in this body for as long as I am here.
It is not fun to eat the vegetable. It is not thrilling to lift heavy or go for a boring walk. It is not dramatic to sit in therapy and untangle your poor life choices. It is repetitive and, at times, dull. But it is good work. Necessary work.
And I am willing to do it. Over and over again.
I cannot control the state of the world. I cannot regulate global chaos. But I can refuse to abandon myself. I can refuse to repeat patterns simply because they are familiar. I can choose steadiness over chaos.
Life is understood backwards.
But it must be lived forwards.
And I intend to live the rest of mine doing the work.
Lenten Reflection
“Let us not grow weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest, if we do not give up.” — Galatians 6:9
Lent is not about grand gestures. It is about repetition. About choosing discipline over impulse. About doing the small, boring, necessary things that slowly reshape a life.
Faith, like love, is good in theory. Better in practice.
It is easy to talk about growth. Harder to stay when staying is uncomfortable. Easy to romanticize transformation. Harder to wake up and choose steadiness again.
The work of Lent is the work of becoming... not dramatic, not loud, but consistent.
And consistency, over time, changes everything.
Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.
