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.
Updated: Mar 1
One of the hardest things about starting over is that people remember you for who you were.
They remember the capable version. The confident version. The strong version. They don’t always know what to do with the version of you that is lost. Quiet. Uncertain. Unrecognizable.
And sometimes, neither do you.
When I left everything familiar and went to Kansas City, I wasn’t becoming something new yet. I was deprogramming myself from the life I had built. Untangling my worth from my usefulness. Learning how to exist without constantly proving my value.
I became a shell.
In nature, the caterpillar doesn’t just grow wings. Inside the chrysalis, it dissolves. Its body breaks down into cellular soup before reorganizing into something else entirely. It is soft. Vulnerable. Unformed. A little grotesque.
That was me.
Some friends showed up. They stayed. They didn’t demand timelines or explanations. They loved me without requiring evidence that I was “better” yet.
But not everyone could tolerate the in-between.
People say they support your healing, but what they often mean is they support the version of your healing that still looks productive. I was studying for the LSAT. Working at a coffee shop. Applying to law school. Rebuilding a future from scratch. And even then, it didn’t always feel like enough for the people watching.
Because when you stop performing the version of yourself people depended on, it unsettles them.
Most people don’t believe people actually change.
But change happens slowly.
And then suddenly.
Like a trash panda crawling out of a dumpster fire. Burned. Disoriented. Alive anyway.
I am still emerging. Chrysalis or dumpster fire. Choose your own adventure. Jesus jerk the wheel!!
Lenten Reflection · The Wilderness
Scripture tells us Jesus was led into the wilderness for forty days.
Not to perform miracles.
Not to help anyone.
Not to prove anything.
Just to be alone.
To be tempted.
To be emptied.
To confront himself without the expectations of anyone else.
The wilderness was not a failure of faith.
It was part of the formation.
You don’t emerge from the wilderness recognizable.
You emerge honest.
Lent is not about pretending you’re whole.
It’s about admitting where you dissolved.
Because resurrection doesn’t happen to the version of you that existed before.
It happens to the one who survived becoming unrecognizable.
Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.
