I'm a control freak; you'd think I'd have mastered self-control by now.

I am not a very religious person. This is a statement that really shouldn’t surprise much of anyone, but I thought it was necessary to state because where I’m going with this post is going to verge on ideas I’ve grown up with, being raised catholic.

I’ve been feeling like shit for months- overworked, under motivated, and generally as if most of what I’m filling my time with is worthless- as if I’m wasting myself. So I began to try and recall the time in my life when I felt most successful, healthy, happy. I landed in my junior year of high school, sometime after my birthday up to about a month before the end of the school year. Anyone familiar with both school calendars and catholic calendars will be able to identify this time as lent.

While there are many parts of Catholicism that make no sense to me whatsoever, I’ve recently understood Lent in a way I never did growing up. For years I thought of it as ridiculous- what did God care if you stopped eating chocolate until Easter? Even my shaky theology now is sufficient to say that he doesn’t. But there’s something to it, this idea of “giving something up.”

There’s something about depriving yourself of something unnecessary that makes you feel really amazing, especially if it’s something you’ve begun to depend on too much. My mom usually gives up chocolate or soda, and while that may seem frivolous to you, I get it. The chemicals in these things are emotional satisfiers for her- a kind of self-medication that sometimes gets out of hand. Forcing yourself to abstain from something that has become a chemical or emotional dependence for you is empowering.

Like your body, your self-control has to be exercised every once in a while to keep working at all. I find it interesting that a religion that goes very far to allow for confession and absolution to make up for loss of self-control also includes a specific time of the year where we must exercise our self control, where the community holds you responsible for a promise you’ve made (in their hearts ‘to god’ but in my heart) to yourself to exercise your self control.

Even non-Catholics do this. We diet. We ‘cut back’ on drinking. We make New Years Resolutions to stop doing whatever bad behavior we’ve decided is worth taking a long look at, worth trying out the absence of. What lent gives us that New Year’s Resolutions and diets don’t is a time limit. If you’re on a diet to lose 20 pounds you might be on it for 10 weeks or 10 months. But lent is 40 days. At the end of 40 days without something you can be pretty sure to have some perspective. How hard was it to give up? How good do you feel without it? It might just make you appreciate it all the more.

The year I mentioned earlier, my junior year? I gave up red meat. A beef roast never in my life tasted as good as it did on Easter that year. Nothing to do with the holiday, just an affirmation of the old adage, “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” And if it doesn’t, it probably means that it’s something you didn’t really need after all. And knowing you don’t need it is half the empowerment gained from self-control.

Whether you’re catholic or jewish or a witch or an atheist, I encourage you to think about what in your life you could go without for 40 days. Something challenging but not life-threatening. Like giving up candy, or fast food, or any little indulgence you think might be getting out of hand. Don’t call it lent if you’re not catholic… call it a “self-control experiment.”

So what am I giving up?

I’ve been struggling for a while with spending too much time playing video games, namely WoW. I don’t want to throw around the term “addiction” because I don’t think it is, but it is a time sink that has become a little too much for me. I checked out when my current subscription would end, thinking I’d keep playing until that came up and then I’d take a serious break. I can renew my account at any time, and until then see what I’d be doing with all that glorious time I’m currently spending on the game. When I checked my subscription end date, it was February 17th.

February 17th, which is also Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. I don’t believe in signs, or providence, or fate… but that seems like some pretty perfect timing to me.