Our theme for the month of March is “I was wrong about.”

You’re probably not supposed to write a Lent-themed piece saying that you’ve been indulging yourself recently, and suggest others do the same. But I am. If any clergy take issue with it, I know that until Easter, they’ll have bigger fish to fry. 

Over the past couple weeks, while some of you have been eating fish on Friday and abstaining from various carnal pleasures, like good ashen-foreheaded penitents, I have been enjoying myself on purpose. About a week ago, I caved to long-time curiosity and bought myself a palette of brightly colored eyeshadows and some red lipstick. Since then, I’ve spent a number of evenings experimenting with gaudy makeup looks. A couple times, I’ve treated myself and a friend to coffee. Last Sunday, I took myself to see the Grand Rapids Ballet perform Swan Lake. 

In a specifically unlenten move, I’ve started cooking meat again. Although I’ve never been a strict, principled vegetarian, I go through phases where I rarely eat meat at home—in large part because the cost stresses me out. 

I’ve always been a little parsimonious. As a kid, I quite literally nickel-and-dimed my younger siblings: after earning candy at church for memorizing verses, I would sell it to them for whatever change I could coax out of them. In college, I spent literal weeks agonizing over whether to buy a 30-euro pair of sneakers to replace a pair I’d worn out. 

After graduation, this tendency got worse. I didn’t get the exciting writing job I thought I wanted, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go into professional writing anymore, and my life felt like a big waiting period. Did I still want to be a journalist? Did I want to go into publishing? Did I want to go to grad school? If so, what for? History? Special education? Languages and literature? Some other field?

There’s a Tumblr-famous scene in The Bell Jar where the protagonist/narrator, Esther, faced with a similar range of options, imagines herself sitting in a fig tree, starving to death, because she couldn’t make up her mind which fig to choose. I thought of it often. 

The idea of enjoying myself amidst this uncertainty — especially if it involved spending money — felt overwhelming. I kept telling myself that I’d do those things later, in some mysterious future where I’d gotten the Big Job, published the Great American Novel, figured out what I was doing with my life, etc. 

I was effectively doing penance (to myself? to society?) for not having my life figured out. 

And there was no telling how long it would last. In the Middle Ages, various clerics, including Theodore of Tarsus, wrote books on what acts required what periods of penance. Unfortunately, these penitentials do not say how long one should do penance for not knowing what you were doing with your life. 

(They are otherwise extremely thorough. For the individual who “when asleep in a church pollutes himself,” Theodore recommends three days’ penance.) 

After a few months, I hated my life. And I still didn’t know what I was doing with it.

It also felt like I might be in my lost phase forever. After all, there was no telling how long it would take for me to decide what I wanted, or how long it would take to achieve that once I made up my mind. 

  In the back of my mind, there was another creeping question: if I ever got it, would it make me happy? 

In my heart echoed, “All is vanity, and a striving after wind.”

Ecclesiastes never featured heavily in my childhood Bible memorization plans. However, it is one of the few books of the Bible I’ve read through multiple times as an adult. (Job and Song of Songs are the other two.) Its general thesis (if ancient near-eastern wisdom literature has a thesis) is that you aren’t going to find fulfillment in success, and that you are going to die. “All are from dust, and to dust all return.”

We are but ashes and shall return to dust.

However, the narrator does not suggest that acetism is the solution to the state of affairs. In fact, they repeatedly recommend something quite different: “I perceived that there was nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil — this is God’s gift to man.”

Anyway, I was wrong about waiting to enjoy my life until I knew what I wanted to do with it. Maybe you’re in the same boat. That is my Lent message.

Grace Buller

After graduating from Calvin in May 2025 with a degree in writing and Spanish, G. E. Buller decided to stay in Grand Rapids. Currently, she is working as a special education aide. Her non-writing hobbies include fussing over her aquarium and reading about medieval/early modern nuns.