As I’ve said before, I mostly do things for the plot and character development. But the other part is understanding and participating in the human experience.
Every risk I’ve ever taken in life has somehow been calculated and weighed. And after some questionable life choices, I usually ask myself one simple question, “But… did you die?”
So far, the answer has been no. Which means the story continues.
I was recently retelling a story about an ex from my early twenties who took me to Hawaii… as friends. At the time she was my boss. It wasn’t some crazy age-gap situation. She was just a couple years older than me and she happened to have the money to fly herself and a “friend” to a romantic island getaway.
Now I know what you’re thinking.
“Oh come on, Vangie. Were you really that dense?”
Back then? Yes. Absolutely.
I believed what people told me because… why wouldn’t I? I wasn't always naturally suspicious. Some people walk into conversations with good intent, others with vigilance. I tend to approach things with neutrality. I observe. I assess the data. Then I respond to what the person is actually asking of me in that moment.
Which is probably why growing up I identified with characters like Spock or Data from Star Trek.
Spock was always balancing logic and humanity.
Data was an android trying to learn how to be human.
That’s pretty much what growing up felt like for me.
Which is probably part of my problem when it comes to women.
Because I can genuinely like someone and still not assume they like me back. That part of my brain that never believed I was the prize, the desirable one, still lingers.
Even though history has shown me repeatedly.
Yes, Vangie. You are the prize.
But that realization came late.
And it came slowly.
The bigger issue is that I struggle with subtext. If a woman is flirting with me, there’s a very real chance I will miss it unless she makes it painfully obvious. Otherwise my brain just assumes it was a pleasant interaction. I'm not hitting on every woman I speak to, either. I am a naturally curious person and engage with people easily. It could just be my decades of experience in customer service, community organizing, and years of facilitation training.
Because somewhere deep in my operating system I’m still the weird awkward kid.
The funny friend.
The smart friend.
The athletic tomboy.
But not the one people had crushes on.
I wasn’t the homecoming queen. I wasn’t the cheerleader. I was the big tomboy just living life as it came at me.
The closest comparison I can think of is the Asian kid from The Goonies. Like… when exactly did that guy become the romantic lead? Answer: when he was in his fifties in Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Which honestly feels about right.
When I was younger I used to wonder if I was normal.
After fifty-one years of living I can confidently say, "absolutely not."
And I don’t mean that in a bad way. I just mean my brain works differently than most people’s.
There’s a psychological concept called the Dunning–Kruger effect. It basically says that people who are highly incompetent often believe they are far more capable than they actually are.
Meanwhile, people who are highly competent tend to assume everyone else knows what they know, which makes them doubt themselves.
You see this all the time in law school.
The students who have actually read the cases and worked through the rules will say something like, “I think the answer is this… but I could be totally wrong.” Then everyone starts comparing reasoning. How did you get there? What rule did you apply? What facts mattered?
It’s collaborative problem solving.
Which reminds me a lot of math.
When I was younger I loved math because you could approach a problem from different directions, use different formulas, plug in the same information, and still arrive at the same answer.
Humans are not like that.
People are messy.
They ignore variables. They change the rules. They throw emotions into the equation and suddenly the algorithm stops working.
I once told my friend Jeffrey that I hate when people bring feelings into decision-making. You make terrible decisions that way. I want data. Information. Facts. Not feelings. Feelings have never gotten me into anything good.
And he literally poked me in the face.
I asked him why he did that.
He said, “I just wanted to make sure you were real and not a robot.”
To be fair… he wasn’t entirely wrong.
Sometimes it takes me a while to process my emotions. To understand subtext. To realize that people don’t always mean exactly what they say.
So part of my brain has spent years trying to build a formula for interacting with humans.
If they say this… they probably mean that.
If they act like this… it probably means that.
Which is funny because the moment you think you’ve cracked the code, a human will immediately do something that breaks the entire system.
And yet somehow I’m still pretty good at navigating people.
I adjust to different environments. Different groups. Different personalities.
Most of the time I get included automatically because people sense that I’m curious, safe, and also interesting. However, I’m quietly observing the room while participating in it. I think more than anything I keep people honest.
Am I what I say I am?
Yes.
Because I genuinely don’t know how to be anything other than myself.
When I first started dating I treated it like anything else I take on in life. I did my homework. I studied.
When I was nineteen my gay friend Raymond said something that sounded simple but ended up being identity-shifting.
“Vangie, you can be with anyone you want. You just have to be the thing they want.”
Which sounds logical.
Be the thing women want.
Simple, right?
But here’s the problem with that theory.
Have you ever tried dating women?
A friend from law school once complimented me on how good I was at handling sensitive situations and difficult conversations.
I told her two things.
First, thank you.
Second, it used to literally be my job.
And it’s practice.
Most people avoid hard conversations. They avoid situations where emotions are messy and complicated. I got good at navigating those things because I had to.
It was the only way I knew how to survive in a world that often didn’t make sense to me.
How people could say they love children and then turn around and exploit them.
How people could preach morality and then act with cruelty.
I never understood the hypocrisy.
To me, it always seemed easier to just be honest.
People are nothing like me.
But the truth is, I’ve never thought I was anything special.
I just think.
I’m Vangie.
Doing my best. Living life. Trying to leave the world a little better than I found it.
That’s all I do.
In all the things I have control over.
Which isn't much.
When you ask me what I do? I say, "My best!"
Lenten Reflection
There’s a moment in Jesus Christ Superstar during the song "Gethsemane" where Jesus reaches the end of arguing with God.
"God, thy will be done
Destroy your only son
I will drink your cup of poison
Nail me to your cross and break me
Bleed me, beat me, kill me, take me
Now, before I change my mind
Now, before I change my mind." — Andrew Lloyd Weber, Jesus Christ Superstar
He’s exhausted. He’s afraid. He knows exactly what the path ahead of him will cost. For most of the song he’s questioning everything, asking why it has to happen this way.
And then something shifts.
He stops trying to understand the entire plan and simply accepts the part he’s meant to play in it.
Not because it suddenly makes sense.
Not because the pain disappears.
But because he decides to move forward anyway.
Because humans are messy and some of us are sacrificed for the betterment of humanity. And, that moment always reminds me that faith isn’t about having a perfect algorithm for life.
Sometimes it’s about showing up, doing your best with the information you have, and trusting that the story will keep unfolding.
Even when you don’t fully understand your place in the algorithm.
Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.
I was speaking to a very lovely human tonight who told me something funny her son said: The idea of living for eternity seems like the worst idea ever (I'm paraphrasing).
Honestly, he might be onto something.
I mean, imagine having to listen to church music for eternity. That sounds awful. It's like having to listen to Christmas music all year long at the Circle K. Which is why I sometimes joke with my co-workers that hell is probably just people working at a gas station forever.
Let’s marinate on this for a bit.
What if when you die and go to heaven, you still have to pick a job to do for eternity?
Honestly, what a drag that would be.
You spend your whole material life working in one form of drudgery or another, and then you finally make it to the afterlife only to discover there’s Archangel Gabriel waiting for you with a clipboard ready to give you your work assignment.
Welcome to eternity. Please select your department.
Gas station attendant in the sky.
Heavenly attorney arguing whether someone should or shouldn’t get reincarnated. A full Defend Your Life situation.
Processing quality control paperwork for miracles.
In the show "Dead Like Me," the main character dies when a piece of space station toilet falls from orbit and hits her. Space poo.
That’s how she goes out.
And then she wakes up and discovers her new job in the afterlife is being a Grim Reaper. Honestly… that’s kind of hilarious. But it also got me thinking about how often stories about the afterlife still involve work.
One of my toxic or productive traits, depending on who you ask, is that when something is bothering me, I fixate on things. I pick a thing and obsess over it until my brain works through whatever problem it’s trying to solve in the background.
Sometimes it’s books or audiobooks.
Sometimes it’s going to the driving range and hitting hundreds of golf balls.
Sometimes it's aquariums.
Sometimes it’s reorganizing everything I own.
During the pandemic the thing I fixated on was K-dramas.
So many K-dramas.
An unreasonable amount of K-dramas.
And when I look back now, I’m pretty sure my brain was trying to work something out while I was watching them. It does that sometimes. Picks something harmless to stare at while the real issue sorts itself out, constantly rattling around in my brain.
At the time, what I was probably working through was my grief.
One of the shows I watched during that time I really loved was "Hotel Del Luna." The cinematography is stunning and the fashion is beautiful. The premise is simple but kind of brilliant.
There’s a hotel that only spirits can see. The guests are people who have died but can’t move on yet because they still have unfinished business from their lives. Grudges. Regrets. Apologies that were never made.
The woman who runs the hotel has been stuck doing that job for almost a thousand years as punishment for a massive sin she committed long ago.
So she spends centuries helping dead people resolve the things they couldn’t let go of.
But here’s the important part. She can’t run the hotel alone. She needs a human manager. Someone who is still alive to help deal with the parts of unfinished business that still involve the living.
Because sometimes the only way someone can move on is if something gets resolved back in the world they left behind.
Each episode is another story about someone trying to settle something that was left unfinished.
A grudge.
A betrayal.
A love that was never expressed.
An apology that never happened.
And the more I watched it, the more that idea gnawed at me.
The idea that people can’t move on until they deal with the things they left unresolved.
If you've been following this series I had mentioned my ex-fiancé who's a pastor.
When we broke up it wasn’t some dramatic betrayal. It was just unfortunate. One of those breakups where things are awkward but manageable at first, and then something happens that makes it difficult to ever speak again. Eventually, one of us decided the cleanest solution was no contact. It was her.
So we didn’t talk.
For eight years.
A lot can happen in eight years.
In that time she went through a divorce and lost her mother. I had also lost my mother by then.
When I heard what had happened in her life, something in me said it might be time to reach out.
Not because I expected anything to restart.
Just because there was unfinished business that I needed to address.
So I reached out. But she had to decide whether she wanted to reach the rest of the way.
And she did.
At first it was a little clunky. Two people trying to figure out how to talk again after almost a decade of silence. But eventually we found a rhythm. Not just re-friending each other on social media, but actually becoming friends again in real life.
Somewhere in those conversations I told her something that took me almost a decade to finally figure out.
I didn’t know how to grieve.
Instead of going to therapy like a normal human being and dealing with that grief, I convinced myself the reason I was so unhappy must be the relationship.
So I ended it.
Years later I finally said the thing I should have said back then.
I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to mourn. It wasn't you. It was me.
She told me something that was reminiscent of what she said to me when we were together.
“I didn’t think you were taking it very hard. You seemed fine.”
That’s the thing about grief.
Sometimes it doesn’t look like grief at all.
Sometimes it looks like someone is quietly blowing up one of the most meaningful relationships in their life because they don’t understand what’s happening inside them.
For years, I carried that with me.
What I like to call the compound interest of grief.
My father died. Then my best friend died not long after. And I didn’t know how to process any of it.
But eventually, life gives you another chance to finish the conversation.
And when it does, the work is simple.
Tell the truth.
Make the apology.
Let the other person decide what they want to do with it.
Did I think about restarting the relationship? Sure. I thought about it. But she wasn’t having any of that. And honestly, that’s fair. She had already moved on and started dating someone else. Someone, she’s still perfectly happy with.
And that’s the thing about moving on.
Sometimes crossing over into the next part of life doesn’t mean going back. Sometimes it just means finishing the unfinished business so both people can move forward.
In Hotel Del Luna, the spirits can’t move on until they settle the things tethering them to the past.
Jang Man-wol, who runs the hotel, is finally able to move on after a thousand years. Not because the betrayal that destroyed her life suddenly became okay, but because through the patience of the living dude, Gu Chan-seong, who helps run the hotel with her, she learns how to feel love again. Eventually she lets the grudge go, not because the past changed, but because it was finally time to stop carrying the pain.
Maybe that idea isn’t just about ghosts.
Maybe it’s about the work we’re supposed to do while we’re still alive.
Making amends.
Settling grudges.
Finishing the conversations we were too stubborn or too scared to have when we had the chance.
Because if you do that work now, maybe when you finally show up in heaven you won’t get assigned toilet-cleaning duty for eternity.
And honestly?
If I had to pick a job in the afterlife, helping people deal with their unfinished business doesn’t sound so bad.
At least it would keep eternity interesting.
Lenten Reflection
“Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift.” — Matthew 5:23–24
Lent is often described as a season of repentance, but repentance is not just about feeling sorry for things we’ve done.
It’s about repair.
Jesus makes something very clear in this passage: spiritual life is not separate from our relationships with other people. If something between us and another person is unresolved, the work of faith is not to ignore it or bury it under prayer or ritual.
The work is to go back.
To tell the truth.
To make the apology.
To finish the conversation that never happened.
Not every relationship can be restored. Sometimes people have already moved on, and that is their right. But the act of reaching out, of taking responsibility for our part, of attempting reconciliation, those things free something inside us.
Maybe that’s what moving on really is.
Not escaping the past, but finally settling the unfinished business that keeps us tied to it.
As above.
So below.
Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.
I ran for office three times. And I lost three times. Let’s talk about it.
And I want to be clear about something.
I’m not ashamed that I lost.
Not even a little.
Because what I did takes a kind of courage most people never have to summon in their lives. I put my name on a ballot. I stood in front of the community and said, “Here I am. Judge me. Decide if I’m worthy of your trust. If I'm good enough.”
And they did.
Three times.
They looked at me and decided I wasn’t what they wanted.
That’s not easy to sit with. Anyone who tells you it is either hasn’t done it or isn’t being honest.
But I’m still proud of myself.
Because I ran.
I put myself in the Arena.
I believed people when they said they wanted something different. I believed that if we talked honestly about inequity, about systems, about policy, that voters would choose the future they said they wanted.
I believed in the community.
Over and over again.
And yes, it hurt to be disappointed by that belief.
Not once.
Three times.
There comes a point where you start to understand something about the place you’re fighting for.
Sometimes the community you’re trying to help simply isn’t ready for the change you’re offering.
And that realization can break your heart a little.
Eventually it broke mine enough that I had to step away.
I joke sometimes that I “broke up with Rochester and ran away.”
But there’s truth in that joke.
Because it’s hard to keep pouring your energy, your time, your hope into a place that keeps telling you, in one way or another, that what you’re offering isn’t what it wants.
That doesn’t mean the work was wasted.
It just means the timing wasn’t right.
And sometimes loving a place means recognizing when you need distance from it.
In 2020 the world cracked open.
COVID-19 exposed just how fragile our systems really are. Then the murder of George Floyd forced this country to confront what Black and brown communities have been saying forever: the system was never broken. It was built this way.
And like a lot of people, I felt like I couldn’t just sit there and do nothing while all of this was happening around me.
By that point I had already spent nearly ten years working in nonprofits, including seven years at the Diversity Council. My work brought me into rooms with city officials, county leaders, school boards, and businesses trying to address disparities in employment, health outcomes, education, and civic engagement.
We had the conversations. We presented the data. We talked about race and racism and inequity in ways that made people uncomfortable.
Because the truth is those conversations should make people uncomfortable.
Sometimes we made progress.
But I also saw something else that people who haven’t done this work don’t always understand.
Pushback.
The kind that smiles politely in meetings and then quietly pulls the funding later. The kind that praises equity publicly but slows it down privately. The kind that listens, nods, forms another committee, writes another report, and somehow nothing actually changes.
After a while it became painfully obvious that nonprofits can start conversations, but real systemic change happens where power actually lives.
Policy.
Budgets.
Leadership.
So I decided if I wanted to see real change, I needed to step into that space myself. If we were going to have hard conversations someone had to talk about it. Cause the people who were running were not going to. So, I forced them to. Cause I showed up and I said the words. Defund the police.
I ran for office.
Three times.
And I lost.
Three times.
Let’s be honest about something, because people like to rewrite these stories afterward and pretend the outcome was about qualifications.
I was qualified.
I had the education, the experience, and nearly a decade of work in this community trying to make it more equitable. I understood the issues and the systems involved probably better than most people who step into local politics.
That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that I was not a candidate people trusted to maintain the status quo.
Because I wasn’t going to.
I ran because I wanted to create real systemic change through policy that benefited everyday people, not the institutions and business leaders who were already doing just fine.
Instead, voters chose the safer option. The familiar option. The candidate who would manage the system exactly the way it had always been managed. The old white retired pastor who baked bread.
And to be fair, those men did a perfectly fine job when they were in office. And still are in office. Being toast. Bland not even buttered toast. Because everyone loves toast. It will always just be toast.
But fundamentally nothing changed.
The same disparities remained.
The same conversations kept happening.
The same communities were still waiting for the promises of equity and inclusion to mean something beyond words.
And the longer I sat with that reality, the more honest I had to become about something.
Most communities say they want change.
But what they actually want is stability that feels like progress.
Real change is disruptive. It shifts power. It forces people to confront uncomfortable truths about who benefits and who doesn’t.
And a lot of people would rather protect a system they know is unfair than risk losing the comfort it provides them. Even if it's sucking the life out of them.
There’s another thing I learned along the way that still surprises me.
People often assume that because I smile easily, because I try to treat people with kindness and humor, that I somehow don’t understand what is happening around me.
As if kindness means naïveté.
As if being pleasant means you’re not paying attention.
But I have always been watching. Listening. Observing how systems work, how decisions get made, who benefits, who doesn’t.
That’s the part people consistently underestimate.
And honestly, that underestimation has always been a little insulting.
I don’t go around announcing how intelligent I am. That kind of performance is boring.
My personality has always been something else entirely.
I’m queer. I’m funny.
I’m weird. I'm steady.
I like people. Except when I don't.
I like learning. And I like sharing knowledge.
I’ve never believed in gatekeeping what I know.
But here’s the part people miss when they underestimate me.
I’m actually pretty damn impressive.
Even when my life is falling apart, I still find a way to get things done. When resources disappear, when doors close, when the path forward isn’t obvious, I figure it out.
I always do.
Because the world has always expected me to be three times better than everyone else just to be considered equal.
Three times sharper.
Three times more prepared.
Three times more resilient.
And even then, sometimes that still isn’t enough.
That’s a reality a lot of people in this country understand very well. If you want to survive in systems that weren’t designed with you in mind, “good enough” is rarely good enough. You have to be exceptional just to stay in the room.
So when people underestimate me, when they assume kindness means weakness or that a smile means I’m not paying attention, I mostly just let them believe it. Because eventually the truth shows itself anyway.
And when it does, it tends to surprise people.
And here’s the part that really sits heavy with me.
People spend a lot of time complaining about how broken everything is. They rant about how nothing works anymore, how the system is failing, how everything feels like a dumpster fire.
And then they turn around and vote for the same people who built the system in the first place.
Over and over again.
The same leadership class.
The same policies.
The same priorities that keep funneling benefits upward while everyone else is told to wait their turn.
People say they want something different.
But when the moment comes to choose something different, they reach for the familiar option every time. It's mostly old white dudes, but other times it's safe boring suburban moms.
They keep hoping that maybe this one will be different.
They won’t.
They never are.
They’re just different version of the same thing.
And sometimes I hear that quote rattling around in my head:
If not you, who? If not now, when?
And I’ll be honest.
Sometimes I want to scream back:
Why does it always have to be me?
Why do the people who see the problem feel responsible for fixing it while everyone else keeps choosing the same leaders who created the mess in the first place?
At some point we all have to confront something uncomfortable.
You can’t complain about the system while continuing to protect the people who built it (Hello, p-do-file politicians). 😳
Lent is supposed to be a season of honesty.
So here is mine.
2022 was the last time I ran for office.
After that, I was done.
I ran off to the desert of KCMO and licked my wounds.
Someone once told me you shouldn’t go back to the place that harmed you.
But the truth is more complicated than that.
Because Rochester is also the place that believed in me when I was first starting my life.
It’s the place that showed up for me.
And later, when I needed to rebuild myself, it was also the place that helped heal me.
So maybe the lesson isn’t that places are good or bad.
Maybe the lesson is that communities are made of people.
And people are messy.
We are capable of building systems that harm each other.
And we are also capable of building something better.
Which means the uncomfortable truth is this:
We are the problem.
And we are the solution.
We are the miracle.
That’s the work.
And Lent is as good a time as any to begin again.
Lenten Reflection
“But everything exposed by the light becomes visible... and everything that is illuminated becomes a light.” — Ephesians 5:13
Lent is not a season for polite lies.
It’s the season where you stop pretending you don’t see what you see.
Where you name the thing. The pattern. The cowardice. The comfort people confuse for peace. The “we want change” that turns into “not like that” the minute change gets real and might cost someone something.
A lot of people want resurrection without crucifixion. They want a better world without giving up their place in the current one. They want the miracle, but they don’t want to be the ones holding the bucket.
But this is the part Lent keeps dragging us back to: repentance is not a vibe. It’s not guilt. It’s not posting the right thing. It’s turning around. It’s doing something different. It’s choosing the hard truth over the familiar lie, again and again, until you become someone who can actually live inside the future you keep claiming you want.
I don’t know what Rochester will become. I don’t know what this country will become.
But I do know this: communities don’t change because people “mean well.” They change when people decide to stop protecting what’s killing them.
Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.
Everyone should run for office. I highly recommend it: https://www.rochestermn.gov/departments/city-clerk/elections/running-for-office?
The Minnesota Vikings haven't won a Super Bowl, but you still hope, pray, and believe one day they will. 🙏