I hate breakups.
And coming from someone who has endured more uncouplings than any reasonable person should have to experience, I feel like my character has been sufficiently built. I saw a meme once where instead of giving someone their soulmate, God gives them another toxic relationship for “character development.”
Respectfully, my character is overly developed. Let’s move on.
Since this is a Lent post, let’s go back to the desert of Kansas.
I had taken my LSAT. Applied to law school. I was standing at the edge of a life I was ready to launch, and the person beside me wasn’t standing there with me anymore.
Not because either of us were bad people.
Because we weren’t a good fit.
I had been honest from the beginning about where I was emotionally. About what I could give. About who I was and that I was still healing. And when I finally reached the point where I was ready to say, "yes, let’s build something real..." that was the moment it ended.
Timing is a strange and brutal teacher.
The breakup itself wasn’t great. Her response to me was more about her past relationships than it was about me. That’s the thing about projection. People hand you ghosts that don’t belong to you and expect you to carry them anyway. She made it sound like we had this awful relationship when, in reality, I had been honest from the start about my emotional capacity and my investment.
And when I finally said I was ready to make it work. Ready to become partners. Ready to build something while starting law school.
That was when she decided to leave.
They tell you in law school not to let major personal upheavals happen if you want to succeed. Because you don’t go to law school alone. Everyone in your life goes with you. Your relationships go with you. Your support system goes with you. It isn’t just a personal investment. It’s a community endeavor.
And when someone significant steps out of that circle, you feel it everywhere.
One of my friends told me recently I’ve aged really well, and that I’m a much better version of myself today than I was two years ago.
She’s right.
Back then, I was barely holding myself together.
The thing is, I will always have other things happening in my life. Law school. Work. Golf. Existing in this world as myself. Dating isn’t really about capacity. It’s about logistics. It’s about whether someone can stand beside you while your life is actively unfolding, not just when it’s convenient.
But destruction has a purpose.
Things fall apart so you stop living inside structures that were never meant to hold you long-term. And somewhere in that unraveling, I realized something that changed how I understand love completely.
An ex told me once she couldn’t fall in love with my potential. That was over twenty years ago. At the time, I didn’t even know how much potential I had. When I finally tapped into it, it didn’t unfold quietly.
It detonated.
And now I understand this.
I don’t want someone to choose me eventually.
I want someone who chooses me clearly.
Not after hesitation.
Not after comparison.
Not after emotional negotiations with themselves.
Clearly.
And I want to be that person too.
Because secure love isn’t waiting to be picked like the last kid in gym class. It’s mutual recognition. It’s two people standing firmly in their own lives, saying:
I see you.
I like who you are.
I choose this.
Not because you need each other.
Because you want each other.
I’ve taken a long pause from dating. Law school. Healing. Rebuilding my entire life. But recently, I’ve been thinking about getting back out there, which feels both hopeful and mildly suspicious.
Because here’s what I know now.
Every relationship that ends raises my standards.
Not out of bitterness.
Out of clarity.
I don’t need a relationship to complete me. I already know I’m desirable. I already know I’m lovable. I’ve built a life I actually enjoy living.
But I do love loving someone.
I love having a person.
I love choosing someone.
I love waking up and deciding, again, that this is the person I want beside me.
And I am very good at it.
I show up. Even when I’m mad.
I stay in conversations that are uncomfortable.
If someone tells me something is hurting them and it makes sense, I try to adjust.
I once jokingly told a partner to put me on a Personal Improvement Plan. Which is objectively hilarious, but also not entirely a joke.
Because when I choose someone, I take it seriously. I mentally, emotionally, and spiritually invest.
You don’t stay just because someone chose you.
You stay because you choose each other.
For a long time, I confused being wanted with being loved. And I’ve watched so many incredible women do the same thing. Waiting. Hoping. Accepting emotional ambiguity because at least it meant they weren’t alone.
But you don’t have to wait to be chosen.
You get to choose, too.
You get to decide whose presence makes your nervous system feel calm instead of confused. You get to decide who earns access to your softness. You get to decide who gets to witness your life as it unfolds.
Because real love isn’t built on convincing someone to stay.
It’s built on mutual willingness.
It’s waking up and thinking,
I like this person.
I respect this person.
I feel safe with this person.
I want this person here.
And knowing they are choosing you back.
Not reluctantly.
Not eventually.
Not ambiguously.
Clearly.
Which brings me back to the bear.
Women don’t choose the bear because they hate men. They choose the bear because the bear is honest about what it is.
A bear is dangerous, yes. But it’s predictable. It doesn’t pretend to be safe while quietly becoming unsafe. It doesn’t charm you, gain your trust, and then disappear when you need it most. It doesn’t destabilize you emotionally and call it love.
A bear doesn’t text you good morning and then vanish for three days.
A bear doesn’t make you question your worth.
A bear doesn’t slowly erode your nervous system while telling you everything is fine.
A bear is regulated by instinct. It shows you exactly what it is.
Most women know how to read danger. We’ve had to.
What’s harder to read is inconsistency. Emotional unavailability disguised as interest. Someone who wants access to your softness but doesn’t want responsibility for your heart.
The bear doesn’t breadcrumb you.
The bear doesn’t keep you as an option.
The bear doesn’t ask you to shrink so it can feel bigger.
It either stays in its territory.
Or it leaves.
And what I’ve realized is I don’t want to spend my life trying to decode someone’s emotional weather patterns just to figure out if I’m safe there.
I want clarity.
I want consistency.
I want someone who is not afraid of themselves, and therefore not afraid of loving someone else.
Because real love should not feel like surviving a wilderness.
It should feel like coming home.
And at this point in my life, I’m not choosing the bear.
And neither is she.
She will choose me.
I will choose her.
Because safety, security, and predictability, that’s fucking sexy in your middle ages.
Lenten Reflection:
“Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” — 1 Peter 4:8
Lent is a season where illusions fall away.
Not just about who God is.
About who we are.
About who we’ve loved.
About who stayed.
And who didn’t.
Scripture doesn’t promise love will be easy. It promises love will be honest.
Jesus didn’t force anyone to follow him. People walked beside him freely. Some stayed. Some left. Some betrayed him. He didn’t chase them down to convince them of his worth.
He simply remained himself. Present. Clear. Available.
That’s the part people don’t talk about.
Love is not convincing someone to choose you.
Love is recognizing who already has.
And having the courage to choose them back.
Lent asks us to release what is not aligned. The relationships built on confusion. The versions of ourselves that stayed out of fear. The belief that we must earn what should be freely given.
Because the holiest thing you can do is not sacrifice yourself to be loved.
It is to become someone who can stand fully in their life, fully in their truth, and say:
I am here.
I am not hiding.
I am capable of loving.
And I will not abandon myself to keep it.
The right people will recognize that.
And they will stay.
Take care of yourself.
Take care of each other.
When I moved to Overland Park, Kansas, I joined a women’s golf league because golf is my happy place, and it gave me an outlet while my life was emotionally, spiritually, and existentially unraveling.
It was very different from my Rochester women's league. In Rochester, we absolutely drink Bloody Marys at 7 AM and take Fireball shots after birdies like that’s part of the official rules of golf. Overland Park was quieter. Tee times were at 7 in the morning, and it felt less Gucci to be getting your buzz on before the sun rose. Wine spritzers after noon seemed more appropriate. These were retired women. Women of means. Women who looked like their lives were put together as well as their golf fits were.
I got a summer job at the clubhouse restaurant so I could golf for free. Which honestly felt like thriving.
But sometimes you’re not thriving. You’re still you, just in a different location.
And sometimes you’re also the problem.
At least one of my organs was.
I was exhausted all the time. Not normal tired. Bone tired. I thought it was depression. Or grief. Or growing older. Or maybe I was just giving up on life altogether. I was in a city where no one knew who I was or what I’d spent the last fifteen years doing. I assumed the stomach aches and back pain were just part of becoming irrelevant.
Then one morning, finishing the 18th hole at ladies league, a shooting pain hit my back so hard it almost dropped me to my knees.
And instead of thinking, this could be serious, I thought,
“Oh cool. My back is going out again.”
So I finished the round.
Went home. Took Advil. And went to bed.
Because that’s what you do when pain becomes normal. You stop asking questions. You just survive it.
Also, Kansas did not offer poor people healthcare. So there was that.
Months later, after I moved back to Rochester, my body decided it wasn't having it any more. My body was on strike.
I remember apologizing to my roommate for asking her to take me to the Emergency Department. That’s how deep the conditioning goes. You can be actively dying and still worry about being inconvenient.
After hours in the waiting room, bloodwork, and a CT scan, they put me in a hallway bed. Another busy day in the ED. The nurses were kind. My doctor poked around my abdomen and came back and said, “Your appendix is severely infected. We need to remove it immediately. Here are some options.”
Apparently it had been infected for a long time. Quietly poisoning me while I was out there pretending I was fine.
My appendix lasted 50 years in this body and then decided it was done. Just clocked out. No two weeks notice. No exit interview.
Honestly? Fair.
They took me into surgery that night. When I woke up, the pain was gone. Not better. Gone but now replaced with different pain. My body was healing itself kind of pain and the anesthesia was still wearing off, too. The exhaustion I’d been carrying for over a year lifted almost immediately.
It wasn’t burnout.
It wasn’t weakness.
It was dying. Literally.
And here’s the part that’s hard to sit with.
If I had stayed in Kansas, working part-time, no insurance, barely holding myself together, I might have waited too long. I might have gone into medical debt just to stay alive. I might have convinced myself it wasn’t serious. I might not be here writing this.
Moving back to Minnesota didn’t just reset my life.
It saved it.
Because Minnesota believes poor people deserve healthcare. Because someone ran the test. Because someone listened. Because someone cut the dying thing out of me before it took everything else with it.
Spiritually, I’ve always believed the Universe tries to guide you quietly at first.
A feeling.
A fatigue you can’t explain.
A sense that something isn’t right.
But if you ignore it, it gets louder.
More pain.
More disruption.
More loss.
Until eventually it hits you over the head with a brick.
Or in my case, a tiny useless organ tries to take down the entire operation.
Call it God.
Call it energy.
Call it instinct.
Call it survival.
But when it’s not your time, it’s not your time.
Sometimes the desert isn’t trying to destroy you. It’s trying to strip away everything that cannot come with you.
My appendix couldn’t come with me.
Neither could the version of me who believed I had to endure everything silently.
My body knew before I did.
I just had to listen.
Lenten Reflection:
“When I kept silent, my bones wasted away
through my groaning all day long.
For day and night your hand was heavy on me;
my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.”
— Psalm 32:3–4 (NIV)
Scripture understands something we try to outrun. Silence has consequences. Ignoring what is wrong does not make it disappear. It just buries it deeper, where it can do more damage.
My appendix lasted fifty years. Half a century of quiet service. And then, at some point, it decided it was done. It didn’t fail loudly at first. It whispered. Fatigue. Aches. A low-grade sense that something wasn’t right.
I ignored it.
Because that’s what many of us do. We override the signals. We push through pain. We ignore the trauma we are experiencing in our body.
Until the message stops being quiet.
Until it becomes pain you can’t rationalize.
Until the body, or your life, or your spirit picks up a brick and hits you over the head with it.
Lent is an invitation to stop pretending everything is fine.
To listen.
To the body.
To the grief.
To the exhaustion.
To the truth we’ve been trying to outrun.
Sometimes the thing that feels like it’s destroying you is actually saving you.
Sometimes losing something is what allows you to live.
My appendix is gone now.
So is the version of me that believed I had to silently endure everything.
Both served their purpose.
Both knew when it was time to let go.
Take care of yourself.
Take care of each other.
I was going to write tonight about my time in the desert. Overland Park, Kansas, to be exact. But I’ll leave that for another day.
Because I had a conversation today that made me think about something else entirely. What friendship is supposed to look like. What beloved community actually is. And more importantly, how we intentionally build it. Or destroy it.
I heard someone on a podcast say you can tell how much a person loves themselves by the partner they choose.
I felt personally attacked. Because it was kind of accurate.
And I think this applies to friendships too.
Because let’s be honest. Would you voluntarily surround yourself with people who constantly make you feel like you’re the problem? Who subtly, or not-so-subtly, remind you of your flaws? Who project their unresolved chaos onto you like you’re an emotional support stuffy from IKEA?
And yet… many of us do.
I don’t. Or at least, I try not to. I’ve spent enough of my life fighting to exist as myself to know I cannot build intimacy with people who are hiding. Who are sneaking. Who are not honest about who they are.
But romantic relationships? I have chosen differently from my friendships.
Sometimes I tolerated relationships that slowly eroded me because they were familiar. Because they loved me. Because it was easy in the beginning, until it wasn’t. Because we confuse history with safety.
Because of the sunk cost fallacy of the heart.
Or because we don’t fully love ourselves yet, and we accept the version of ourselves reflected back to us as truth.
There’s a sociological theory called the Looking-Glass Self, coined by Charles Cooley. It says we form our identity based on how we believe others see us.
Which explains a lot.
I grew up a lesbian in the 90s. Before rainbow logos became corporate branding strategies. Before Pride had sponsors and merch tents. I’ve had strangers publicly call me disgusting. Immoral. Broken. I remember lying awake at night wondering if they were right. Wondering if there was something fundamentally wrong with me.
Which is disorienting when all you were trying to do is exist and help people see each other’s humanity. Through the work I chose. Through advocating for equal marriage. For speaking up for immigrant communities. For creating policies to stop bullying kids because they were different.
Apparently, that made me a radical snowflake sinner.
But when enough people tell you you’re the problem, it doesn’t just stay in your head. It settles into your nervous system.
Therapy helps. Time helps. Developing a strong sense of self helps, even if other people misinterpret it as ego or narcissism. Because sometimes confidence is just what survival looks like after years of being told you shouldn’t exist.
And that’s where relationships get complicated.
Because conflict between people is rarely about the surface issue. It’s about identity. About whether we feel seen as good, worthy, and valued. Or reduced to our worst moments.
When someone we love says something that hurts us, the instinct isn’t always curiosity.
It’s defense. Retaliation. Emotional scorched earth.
Not because we want to destroy them (some may be actually trying to destroy you).
Because most of the time we’re trying to protect ourselves.
It’s the difference between saying,
“What you said hurt me. Can we talk about it?”
And saying,
“Oh yeah? Here’s a comprehensive list of everything you’ve done wrong since 2020.”
Which, admittedly, is tempting.
But beloved community doesn’t survive on scorekeeping.
It survives on repair.
On witness. On understanding.
On choosing people who can hold your complexity without turning it into ammunition. On being brave enough to hold theirs too. On having hard conversations instead of quietly drifting into resentment while still liking each other’s Instagram posts like everything is fine.
Because here’s the truth I’ve learned the hard way:
Some people love you, but they don’t actually like you.
Some people like you, but they don’t know how to love you.
And some rare people do both.
Those are the ones who stay. Hold on to those people.
Lent asks us to examine not just our individual hearts, but the communities we are building around us.
Who reflects your worth back to you?
Who distorts it?
Who makes you feel more like yourself after you leave, instead of less?
Beloved community isn’t accidental.
It’s chosen.
Over and over again.
Sometimes awkwardly. Sometimes imperfectly. Sometimes after uncomfortable conversations and mutual humility and maybe over a meal, because everyone is emotionally fragile and hungry.
Like all relationships, romantic or platonic, you want to surround yourself with people who help you become a better version of yourself. People who see the good in you and don’t keep score of your worst moments, but witness your effort. People who choose to grow alongside you instead of standing still and resenting your movement.
That is how we build holy, beloved community.
As above, so below.
Lenten Reflection:
“Two are better than one… If either of them falls down, one can help the other up.” – Ecclesiastes 4:9–10
Scripture doesn’t pretend we are self-sufficient. It assumes we will fall. The only question is who will be there when we do.
Because falling is inevitable. Illness. Grief. Breakups. Losing yourself. Reinventing yourself. The long middle where you don’t recognize who you are yet and neither does anyone else.
Beloved community isn’t the people who only knew you when you were strong.
It’s the people who stayed when you were disoriented.
When you were quiet.
When you had nothing impressive to offer.
And it’s also the people who let you show up for them when it was their turn to fall.
Not fixing.
Not rescuing.
Just refusing to disappear on each other.
Jesus didn’t build community around perfection. He built it around proximity. Around people who misunderstood him. People who doubted him. People who failed him. And still, he kept choosing connection.
Because beloved community isn’t proven by how people treat you when you’re thriving.
It’s revealed by who remains when you’re not.
Take care of yourself.
Take care of each other.
