Lent 2026 · Day 11: Great in Theory. Better in Practice

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.

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