At the base of the drawer was a bamboo organizer, not overfilled with perfectly arranged office supplies. Pens, staples, post-its, stamps, pencils, tape, paper clips, etc. My jaw dropped. I’d been doing my Christ-like best not to judge this woman as a slob and now this. It felt like a bucket of ice water poured over my head.

She was me. I was her and she was me.

I’m about to reveal some of my inner-most crazy. So bear with me and see if you relate. Or just sit back with your popcorn and enjoy for entertainment value. Whichever.

I didn’t know I was a perfectionist until I was in my thirties. Don’t you have to have done at least SOMEthing perfect to claim that title? Because I never did. Turns out, no. You don’t. You can be an absolute fucking disaster and still be a perfectionist.

In fact, the disaster might actually be a direct result of the perfectionism.

I was a hot mess in school. But every semester I started over with the same plan.

This was going to be the semester. I was going to stay organized. Keep track of everything. I was going to write down all my assignments, and in an unprecedented second step, look at the place where I had written them down and get them done.

For a little while, I’d have an A.

Then I’d miss something. Or lose something. Or forget something existed until three days after it was due. A couple things would pile up. I wouldn’t know exactly what I was missing anymore.

And then I’d just stop. All the way. An A first quarter, then a B, then a C, then a D, then my teacher pulled me into the hallway. “If there’s anything you want to talk about… I’m here.”

Same with planners.

If you’ve seen my home on any random day, you might be confused why my husband spent so many years trying to talk me into lowering my housekeeping standards. From the outside, they definitely appear to be low enough.

They weren’t. And the household perfection I had in mind was only achievable through elaborate household systems. Each zone broken into granular jobs slotted into all throughout my calendar.

Daily. Weekly. Monthly. Quarterly.

Not just toilets and vacuuming. Moldings. Picture frames. Cabinet fronts. Inside, underneath, behind.

There was an assigned time for all of it.

Which worked great until the day I woke up and remembered I don’t like to be told what to do. Not even by myself. I don’t like consistency and I abhor monotony. So I skipped that day.

Now I was behind. But behind on what? Everything. So what should I do first?Everything.

Eventually the whole grand, unwieldy plan came crashing down. Not because anything was wrong with my plan, mind you. No.

My system was excellent. I, however, was apparently a piece of shit.

That one was just a schedule falling apart. But I had a version of this that started earlier. Back before the pens or the vacuuming. It was about becoming a person worth loving on the inside.

Mormonism.

I could just not Mormon right.

And this one really mattered. Deeply and eternally.

There was a right way to be. Things I was supposed to do. Things I was supposed to think and want and feel. Obedience wasn’t enough. Transformation was the goal. Fully becoming.

I knew very young that this was not going well. By fifteen, I had figured out that being perfect was completely impossible for me. And perfect was the point. Imperfect hurt people. Most especially the savior. Who loved me so much. So I gave up.

And I don’t mean I became a slightly less committed Mormon teenager who occasionally skipped Mutual and swore. I went off the deep end. Boys. Alcohol. Drugs. School didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. For a while I didn’t try very hard to keep living either.

There’s obviously a lot more to that story than perfectionism, and I’m not going to reduce some genuinely dark years of my life to a failed spiritual diet but I can see the pattern now.

I knew how to try to do it right. And I knew how to say fuck it. I was really, really bad at anything in between. Which is probably why it took me until my thirties to figure out I was a perfectionist. Because look at my life.

I wasn’t the person with the immaculate house and the 4.0 and the meal-prepped lunches lined up in matching glass containers. I was the person surrounded by abandoned attempts to become that person. And underneath nearly every one of them was a bamboo organizer. A perfectly reasonable-looking system for how this was all going to work.

What I know now is that all of those failures were bursting with information.

If I bought a planner every year, used eleven pages and then abandoned it, that was information.

Housekeeping systems repeatedly crashing. Diets requiring a lifestyle I couldn’t maintain. Information.

If I had spent years trying to become the kind of Mormon I was supposed to be and eventually concluded that the only alternative was to blow the whole thing up, that was definitely information.

But somehow none of the information was ever about the standard being wrong for me. A misfit

The standard was fine. Maybe. I don’t know. I never questioned the standard. Never. If you had letters after your name or a priesthood ordination, you had my trust. Wholesale.

I was the problem. The common denominator that kept failing the systems that seemed perfectly viable. That seemed perfect on paper. That were working so well for all THOSE people.

I just needed to be more disciplined. Consistent. Less lazy. Less impulsive. More organized. More committed. More righteous. Better at following through.

If I would just USE the planner. STICK to the diet. FOLLOW the schedule. My problems would all be solved. Maybe I’ll just try another new one and see if it will keep my attention.

And maybe it does for a minute. Until…

Until someone gets sick. You forget something. You don’t sleep. You get busy. You buy a candy bar at check out. You run out of the ribbon for that wreath. You miss the assignment. You don’t do the laundry. You have a bad day. You have a good day and decide you’d rather do something else with your time and energy.

For most of my life, if I missed a day (skipped the workout, ate Oreos, didn’t open the planner) I didn’t know how to just miss a day. I only knew how to spiral or quit. Missing Tuesday meant Wednesday started in debt.

It sounds obvious now, but it took me decades to learn: you can just do Wednesday. You don’t have to catch up on Tuesday first. You don’t have to restart, or figure out how to prevent yourself from ever slipping again. You can just do the next thing.

I still hate this. I’d rather build a system that never lets a Tuesday go wrong in the first place.

I LOVE systems.

I want the right system. The one that finally accounts for every variable and makes everything click into place and means I never again have to stand in my kitchen at 4:37 p.m. wondering what the hell everyone is going to eat.

But my brain now flies neon red flags at systems that require me to become a different person in order for them to work.

For example, I don’t do lids. This is stupid, but stay with me. If you want me to consistently put something away, I need to be able to do it one-handed. Preferably without moving anything else.

If its designated home has a lid, I will put it on top of the lid. If its designated home is behind something else, I will put it in front of the something else. If I have to pull out one container to get to another container, the item is becoming random clutter somewhere else.

None of these things are hard to do. Opening lids. Setting down whatever else is in my hands to move one thing, lift a lid, etc. And that used to matter. If it wasn’t hard, and it was organizationally sound, I should be able to do it. Just make it happen, Brittney.

I wasn’t asking if that system worked for me and the way I move around my space. I was telling myself the way I thought a human should behave in a space the way a space should run. See the difference there?

Not: Does this work?

Why can’t you do this?

That question has followed me everywhere.

Why can’t you just keep up with your assignments?

Why can’t you just use a planner?

Why can’t you just keep the house clean?

Why can’t you just stick to the diet?

Why can’t you just read your scriptures?

Why can’t you just do the very normal, reasonable thing that other people seem perfectly capable of doing?

I was always the defendant in the courtroom of my own brain.

Which is why I think that bamboo organizer hit me as hard as it did.

I had been pulling handfuls of crap out of this woman’s drawer and trying very hard to be a good person about it.

Don’t judge. You don’t know her circumstances. Everyone struggles. Very Christ-like. But obviously, underneath all that benevolence, I had an explanation for this mess.

She was a slob. She didn’t take care of things. She didn’t try. And then I hit bamboo. Oh. She had tried. At some point, she had bought the organizer.

She probably stood in the kitchen aisle at Target and looked at the different sizes. Maybe she’d even measured the drawer. Then she’d brought it home and put the pens in one compartment and the batteries in another and the tape where it still sat.

And for a while the drawer looked exactly like it was supposed to. And then life happened. One thing that didn’t have an obvious compartment, then another. Until eventually the system was buried so deep I didn’t know it existed.

And my first instinct, looking at the end result, had been to evaluate the woman. The way I’d always done it.

I had spent years standing over the accumulated evidence of my own life doing exactly the same thing.

Failed systems. Abandoned planners. Bad grades. Messy rooms. Abandoned projects. I could see perfectly well that whatever I was trying to do was not working.

I just never thought that gave me permission to question any of the standards I was holding myself to.

The standard remained untouched. I didn’t.

Every new failure went into the file:

Lazy.

Inconsistent.

Undisciplined.

Too much.

Not enough.

Can’t follow through.

There are things I do differently now. I use open bins. I put things where I’m actually going to use them. I have much less respect for where something is “supposed” to go. I am learning, very slowly and with considerable resistance, that missing Tuesday does not require a new life plan beginning Monday.

But I’m not about to pretend I’ve solved this. My brain still autopilots into unhelpful thoughts. Something isn’t working and before I’ve even figured out what happened, I’ve started building a case.

What did I forget?

What should I have done?

Why didn’t I keep up?

Why can’t I just do this?

The old questions.

The one where the answer is always the same.

Me.

I’m what’s wrong.

But now I try to catch it and ask different questions.

Not why can’t I make myself do this?

Or, what kind of person would let it get this bad?

Just:

Does this work for me? Why or why not?

I’m spending the next several weeks on this topic.

I’ve been writing about what happens when the rules go away but the grading doesn’t. The voice in your head that keeps checking, correcting, explaining, measuring, and asking what you did wrong.

I call it the Internal Auditor.

This is the second piece in that series. If you recognize yours, stick around.

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Not that he had anything more pressing to do. In fact, school pickup is his assigned job. And it’s not that I was finished working. I’m still catching up from the summer and am, in fact, climbing out from beneath a pile of waiting projects.

So, why, then was I ready to pack up my laptop and head for the school? For the same reason I’m buried under a mountain of overdue work, actually.

This summer, my boundaries got really slippery. The kids were home. My husband was even home on medical leave. Everyone was always around. They needed me. But more than that, I wanted them to feel like the priority. To know how much I wanted to be with them. And the best way to show them was to be with them, at the expense of everything else. To show them they mattered more than my work. Than myself.

Wait, did we just go back in time? YES. But how? It’s complicated.

But here we are, back to school. Back to work. And I’m officially relieved of school pickup responsibility. One of my adult sons lives wth us and carpool is part of his arranged contribution to the household.

I had another project to start but once that thought arrived, that I could pick them up, the old tape started playing. I was already out, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. Besides, they’re my kids. It’s really my responsibility.

Was my older son taking on too much? Was this parentification? Was I making him go out just for my convenience when i was perfectly capable of doing it myself?

And the younger kids really don’t like riding in the car with him. They don’t like his rules. They like me. They want me.

I could surprise them! Frankly, it’s the least they deserve.

And really, how much difference were a couple hours of work really going to make ayway?

And then the kicker: Are a couple more hours of work really more important than my children?

Well, fuck.

Except a little alarm was quietly going off in the back of my brain. The one I’d ignored all summer long. Hello! We’ve done this work. Remember? Your brain is lying to you!

My son isn’t being forced to raise his younger siblings. This was an arrangement we’d made for our benefit but our son’s too. There is purpose there.

The kids were safe. They had a ride. They might prefer me.

But I used to know that the children preferring something doesn’t automatically make that thing my responsibility.

That: Just because I could do something, doesn’t mean I should.

So, I didn’t go. I started my next project. And part of me felt like shit about it.

Mothers feeling guilty about working is definitely not breaking news. And being raised Mormon adds quite a few tiers to that shit cake.

But interestingly, this slice tasted less like the doctrine I was raised with and more like one I made myself.

There was no bishop’s voice in my head. No one quoting The Family: A Proclamation to the World. No apostle speaking over the tabernacle pulpit about my divine role as another. No messages from Heavenly Father that day regarding my children’s afternoon transportation.

Instead the argument sounding in my head was in my voice.

I care about not parentifying my children.

I care about being available.

I care about whether my kids feel loved.

I care about not becoming so consumed by my work that the people I love get the leftovers.

Those are my values.

And somehow the voice in my head knew exactly how to use them. It didn’t use the church’s outdated rhetoric. It used mine. What matters to me.

When I wrote for the magazine, most of my work happened during naptime and bedtime. Or in whatever scraps of time I could grab.

When a deadline bore down too hard, my husband would corral the kids while I hammered through the last of an article.

I often typed with one baby strapped to my front and another strapped to my back. No one explicitly told me this was how it had to work. I just knew I was already bending the rules by working. A venture outside my diving role and purpose. But there was no direct criticism or correction. I just knew.

I grew up swimming in stories about good mothers.

They were told over the pulpit in General Conference. In primary, young women’s and relief society lessons. Over time I assembled in my head a composite of the perfect Mormon woman.

She was gentle. Self-sacrificing. Consistent. Hard-working. Patient. She served.

She never uttered the sarcastic thing that would have slipped out of my mouth automatically.

She baked bread to lift the weary. And had fresh cookies waiting when the kids came home from school.

Everyone had clean underwear in their drawers and never had to tear madly through laundry baskets full of clothes on the way out the door to school.

She noticed the needs of others and filled them. Without a request or a complaint.

Then she did more.

She disappeared behind the image of the savior which filled her countenance.

The messaging that women shouldn’t have work outside the home faded out as I got older. But what stayed was the idea that work should bend around what really mattered. And that “no success could compensate for failure in the home”.

The kids and the home came first. Work was a cute way to fill the time left behind when kids went back to school. It might be helpful someday if something should happen to your husband.

My work fit well inside those bounds. But if my child had a need, my work took a backseat. My needs did too. Forget about wants.

I don’t believe that anymore. Or at least I don’t think that.

I’ve invested years of work reevaluating what I was taught about women and motherhood and work and sacrifice. I no longer believe a good mother should erase herself in service to her family.

I certainly no longer believe my kids’ preferences should dictate my schedule.

My work matters. I protect time for it. (Usually)

So where, exactly, did the I-could-pick-up-the-kids thought come from?

Here’s where things get weird. Our beliefs don’t necessarily stay in the same language or voice as they were when we learned them. When we rehearsed, recited and sang them into our bones. They grow with us. They age with us. They acquire knowledge and information. They learn new concepts.

They get access to therapy language and parenting books and feminism and Instagram. And whatever else we’ve been feeding our brains for the last twenty years.

They become harder to recognize.

Good mothers have to be 100% available for their children no longer gets me. An easy-to-spot lie.

I don’t want to parentify my son is harder. That’s something I actually care about. In my brain and my heart.

My kids would be happier if I went is even harder. It’s true.

And then there’s: I’m already out. I could.

That just sounds like common sense. Efficiency.

They are rules I lived by long enough that they had become part of my operating system. All sewn in tight.

I’m not saying that every uncomfortable thought I have was originally Mormon conditioning. There’s not some perfected version of me underneath it all, and if I could just shake off all the chains of my upbringing life would be sunshine and roses. I do not believe that.

That’s not how people work. I’ve got my own problems. Baked right into my brain.

And some things I was taught as a child are still very important to me. They’ve survived examination and re-examination and been found valuable and true. Some values I learned inside Mormonism are values I consciously choose now.

A belief isn’t false just because I learned it at a church I no longer believe in.

And sometimes I probably should pick up my kids. Sometimes my son might need a break. Sometimes two more hours of work genuinely aren’t as important as what my family needs from me.

Picking them up or not isn’t really the problem. The problem was what the voice said it meant if I didn’t. If I could make their lives easier and chose not to, I was selfish.

The problem was not stopping to ask whether or not I actually believe that.

There are certain sentences that used to run my life that now register as red flags.

I should.

I’m supposed to.

I can’t just…

I need to explain.

I should be able to handle this.

I don’t want to be difficult.

A good mom would…

That would be selfish.

It’s not that these phrases are automatically wrong. But for too many years I treated them as a given. True unless proven otherwise. Without ever making that decision.

So I’ve been trying this question:

Says who?

Not SAYS WHO? while throwing two middle fingers up at anyone looking my way.

Actually:

Says who?

Where did I learn that?

What do I think would happen if I didn’t do it?

What would it mean about me?

Do I still agree?

Or is this outdated information?

Does it belong to someone else? Is there voice hiding behind mine?

Sometimes it’s family. Sometimes culture. Sometimes fear. Sometimes experience. Sometimes something I actually believe.

And sometimes I have no fucking idea. That can be useful information too.

My son picked the kids up that afternoon.

They rode home with the brother they who drives them a little crazy.

I worked. A little more. Not an earth-shaking amount.

Part of me still believed the voice and wanted to go. That it would have been the nice mom thing to do.

Part of me was pretty sure that a mother with her priorities in order wouldn’t have needed to think this hard about whether she should choose her children or two stupid hours of work.

The voice did not disappear just because I caught it this time. But I’m getting better and better at spotting it.

I wasn’t really choosing between my children and my work.

I was deciding who was doing school pickup. Just that day.

When I first left the church, I thought leaving meant nobody got to tell me what to do anymore.

I didn’t understand how long it would take to notice all the ways that voice was living inside my body. It took years to install. I'm not getting rid of it today. But one says who? at a time I can continue to distill my own from the scripts that have been running my life.

But my kids just started school and I find myself in the predictable place of trashing last year’s systems and starting over. Why? Because there’s a nasty secret lurking behind all those shiny, happy ADHD family systems. All the visual schedules, and screen time limits, and DOOM baskets, and dry erase boards.

Behind the color coding. Behind the laminator. There is a mom.

A disheveled, exhausted, hoarse, ragey mom.

Here’s the part that never makes it onto the ADHD Tools Pinterest board. Externalizing executive function doesn’t mean removing it. It means moving it somewhere. And in most houses, that somewhere is Mom.

I built the visual schedule. I laminated it. Brush your teeth. Eat breakfast. Take pills. Pack snack. Pack water bottle. Shoes on. Backpack in hand.

I don’t ask the kids to look. No, ADHD brains have selective vision. So they touch each one when they are done. So I ask, Did you touch each one? How about now? How about now? How about now? How about now? How about now? How about now? How about now? How about now? How about now? How about now? Yes?! Then where are your shoes?!!!

I did not remove myself from the system. Nope. I became the narrator. I became Siri.

The board still needed a person to notice it wasn’t being used. A person to remember it existed at 7:42am while also finding a shoe and listening to a story about a Minecraft villager. A person to ensure it was completed. An announcer and an enforcer.

That person was me. Ask any mom running an ADHD household what “externalized” actually means and she’ll laugh at you in a way that has a little bit of scream in it.

In researching for this year’s updates, I received suggestions like putting checklists on top of remotes, on backpacks, on shoes. Right. So, who makes the checklists? Who finds the remote? Who places the checklist? Another three things for me to remember.

Now let me correct myself because trashing last year’s systems was a mild exaggeration. That’s my frustration talking. The why-can’t- enough-ever-be-enough? frustration. The will-we-ever-get-this-figured-out? Frustration. But the truth is that things are much better here than they used to be. And it gets better and better every year the more we learn.

What I’m actually doing is much more boring than trashing. It’s revising. Or what we learned in ADHD Coaching school to call “sparkle-izing”.

I’m going back through last years system to check for dependence. Where does this system still need me? Where is it breaking down? Where am I still the active ingredient? And how can I build myself out of it? One degree at a time. The same way you don’t teach a kid to ride a bike by letting go of the seat all at once.

Last year, the visual schedule had the kids touch each item once they’d done it. Touch it, move on. Sounds independent. It wasn’t Touching leaves no trace. There was no way for the system to remember what happened five minutes ago which meant I still had to. This year the same chart has an actual magnet. They move it. No screens until it’s moved.

Each kid has their own color. A magnet on each item on the board. A screen when the board is full. That’s it. The only change is that the consequence is no longer me. It’s a magnet. And a screen. It’s the environment enforcing so I don’t have to.

I have a confession though. Because the redesign story sounds like a breakthrough. But it wasn’t quite like that.

Magnets weren’t new. I’ve tried them before. And it was a disaster. A slow-motion disaster that still makes me grumble when I see the evidence.

The board was posted in the boys’ hallway by their rooms. Where they got dressed and ready for school and bed. Made sense, right? Except nobody walks down a hallway on purpose. You walk down a hallway to get somewhere else. So the board just sat there. Doing nothing. With nobody looking at it.

I didn’t realize that’s what was wrong. I just knew it wasn’t working. And I did what we always did when something wasn’t working. I decided the kids weren’t good at following systems. Or the system was too complicated. Or I hate magnets. Or whatever.

But the magnets weren’t the problem. The magnets were fine. The problem was that I put a visibility-dependent system somewhere nobody was ever going to see it.

It took me years to understand that. Which is a little embarrassing to admit for someone whose entire job is teaching other people to see this exact thing in their own homes. But isn’t that how it goes? The cobbler’s kids’ shoes and whatnot?

This year we have boards in the entry and boards in the kitchen. The highest traffic paces in the house. They are unavoidable. You cannot get breakfast, leave for school or come back home without physically passing them.

So here’s the test I’m using now on my own house before anyone else’s. If I left town for three days, does this system still happen? Or does it just sit there, laminated, judging me. Waiting for me to come back and be the executive function it was supposed to replace.

For most systems starting out, the honest answer is no. It doesn’t run without me. I am the system. I always was. I just built a nice looking frame for myself.

The goal is eventually for the system to become a habit. One that runs in the background instead of the kind I have to narrate out loud. As so many have over the years. Last year, ten months of touching a laminated square and it never once went automatic.

A tiny tweak. Same system. Different engine.

I will return and report.

Every system depends on something.

If the “system” depends on one exhausted human remembering every reminder, it isn’t a system.

It’s hidden labor.

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The next step had a name. A date. Possibly a manual. Maybe even a setting apart. Even the hard parts like fasting, repentance, worthiness interviews – awkwardly squirming across the desk from your bishop – even those were defined. Laid out clearly. With bullet points. There was a clear start. A clear finish. It might be hard. Sure. But it was clear.

We spent our whole lives steeped in clarity. In certainty. Definition. Always knowing what to expect. Exactly what came next. We didn’t really need to make decisions. We just had to be obedient. Nd we were pretty good at it. Sometimes. And we built our whole nervous systems around that. That’s what safety feels like. Security. That’s what our brains know. It’s what our bodies know.

Then we left.

Now there is no next step. There is no manual. There is no envelope to open with an assignment. No one to tell you the grand plan for your life. What god or anyone else needs you to do. Your purpose. Your mission. It’s all on you.

So now when you sit down to do the thing (the email, the phone call, the form, the laundry)... You just can’t. You’ve known about it for a while now. It might even only take you five minutes. But you just can’t.

Instead, you reorganize your junk drawer. Tackle a pile of dishes. Doom scroll. Tell yourself you’ll do it after lunch. Then, after lunch you decide you’ll do it after this show. Then, after the next episode.

And the shame shows up, right on cue:

I’m procrastinating. Why can’t I just get one thing done. Why can’t I stop being so lazy? What is wrong with me?

I want to offer my opinion here and you may or may not like it:

Procrastination isn’t a thing.

Not the way we think of it. Not as a failure of character. Or a diagnosis. What you are calling procrastination isn’t a failure of your brain to do something. It is actually brain choosing to do something. Your brain is making a decision. With a reason behind it. You just don’t know the reason yet.

Your brain does not do things for no reason. Ever. Everything you’ve ever done in your whole life came out of some kind of calculation your brain ran. Your brain decided on that course of action for a reason. For better or for worse. Even the ones you hate.

It doesn’t always feel like a decision. Sometimes it feels like nothing. Like default. Like falling. It feels like your finger just won’t press send. Like something that is happening to you. Rather than something you are doing.

But itt is you. Deciding. For a reason that made sense. To your brain. And your body. Enough that it overrode your intentions.

That’s actually not a failure. That’s your system working exactly the way it’s meant to. Protecting you from perceived harm. Waiting on something that feels important. Asking for something you haven’t given it yet.

The question was never: Why can’t I make myself do this?

The question is: What is my brain waiting for?

It turns out our brains wait for all kinds of things. They are trying to solve problems we haven’t even noticed yet.

Sometimes your brain is just waiting for the actual next step. “Deal with the insurance thing” isn’t a task. It’s eleven tasks in a trench coat. And your brain knows better. And will not attempt to start a task that hasn’t been identified yet.

Sometimes it’s waiting for capacity you don’t actually have right now. You know exactly what to do. You’ve done it many times. But you’re exhausted and there’s nothing left in the tank. That’s not laziness. That’s human.

Sometimes it’s waiting for safety. This one’s sneaky. Especially for those of us who grew up being publicly corrected. If you learned that being wrong was dangerous your brain will treat a difficult email the same way it treats any threat. It will stall.

Sometimes it’s waiting for certainty. Because certainty used to be required for any action at all. You didn’t move until you knew. Until you prayed and had a burning in your bosom. That training is in your bones. Your nervous system still craves certainty in a world that no longer offers much, if any.

And sometimes, your brain is waiting because the goal isn’t actually yours. It belongs to a version of you that is still performing for someone. Parents. A god who kept score. And some part of you (the YOU part) isn’t interested in performing for anyone anymore.

This is a very incomplete list. And none of these are diagnoses. Just some places to begin your search. I’ve started collecting these over the last few years. Watching my own brain. Watching coaching clients. I’m noticing the same patterns over and over again.

There are far more than five.

Once you start asking, “What is my brain waiting for?” you start seeing those patterns everywhere. (I’ve posted a more complete list below for paid subscribers.)

Once you do find that reason. The thing your brain is waiting for. The craziest thing happens. It’s like spraying WD-40 on a stuck joint. All of a sudden things are moving again. Smoothly. The way they were meant to. And you find something out about yourself.

You are not lazy. You are not a procrastinator. When you have what you need. When your brain has what it needs. You make things happen. You get shit done.

You don’t need more discipline. You need to ask your brain a better question.

If this essay resonated, I’ve put together a companion resource that goes much deeper for paid subscribers. What Might Your Brain Be Waiting For? is a practical field guide exploring more than a dozen investigative lenses. From clarity and capacity to safety, certainty, permission, meaning, and more. With reflective questions to help you discover what your own brain might actually be waiting for.

It was a bizarre feeling. Because I was also bursting with love for them. Enormous, aching, would-do-anything love. I was doing anything. I gave them everything I had. I put them first. My kids more than my husband, sorry Allen. And still, some nights, I couldn’t be in the same room without wanting to walk out the front door and keep right on walking.

It made me feel like a terrible mother.

When I hugged my kids, I prayed to the gods of worn-out mothers that they couldn’t feel the fire of rage roiling in my chest. Pressed right up against them while I held them close and told them I loved them. Which I did. That was also true.

I tried not to snap when they asked me a question. I often snapped anyway. I was on a hair trigger, all day, every day, for what felt like no reason. So I left. I took trips. I went out for girls’ nights. I called it me-time. I told myself I was refilling the tank.

The tank did not refill.

I came home from every trip just as burned out as before. Resentful of everyone in my own house before I’d even set my bag down. How dare they. How dare they ask me for one more thing when I was already giving everything. How dare they interrupt me again. Could they not see what I was already carrying?

That’s the part I didn’t say out loud to anyone for a long time. The rage. The exhaustion people understood. The rage underneath the exhaustion? I wasn’t sure

I went to therapy to fix it. I assumed it was anxiety. Showing up as anger, the way it sometimes does. I did not know it was resentment. Resentment wasn’t allowed. Resentment sounded ungrateful. Resentment was something a bad wife and mother felt. But I was doing all I could not to be either of those. I was bending over backward to do everything right.

When the word finally did reveal itself (ugh… resentment) I saw it as a me problem.

And it was a me problem. Just not the one I thought.

I thought of it as an attitude problem. Something I needed get over. Manage. Because I was doing my job. Dinner happened. Homework got checked. Everyone got where they needed to be. Fights mediated. Emotions managed. Problems solved. If the job was going fine and I still felt like this, the problem had to be me. My attitude. My lack of gratitude. My inability to just be present and enjoy it.

What I didn’t understand yet was that I had no boundaries. None. I did not honor myself as a full human being inside my own family, with wants and needs that counted for something. I thought everyone in my house deserved unrestricted access to my time and my body and my attention, all day, on demand. I thought it was my job to manage everyone’s emotions along with my own. To carry the schedule, the moods, the meals, the mediating, and to do it smiling, because a good woman doesn’t make her sacrifice visible.

I was not honoring myself as a person. I was functioning as a resource.

Here’s the part that actually changed things for me, eventually.

The resentment I was trying so hard to get rid of was not the problem.

The resentment was information. A signal from a brain that was still working correctly, still tracking reality, still trying to protect me even after I’d stopped listening to it. It was telling me something needed to change. My energy. My time. My nervous system. It had been telling me for months, maybe years, and I had spent all of that time trying to silence the messenger. Never thinking to read the message.

You know this loop, probably. You’re running it in a different room with a different set of small hands reaching for you. A different set of demands. The irritability. The snapping you promise yourself you’ll stop doing tomorrow. The trip you take that doesn’t touch the actual problem. Because the problem was never a lack of time away. Or a shortage of spa days. The problem was that you had no space for you at home. For you to matter. Where you can say no. No place where your needs got to register as real.

This is not a character flaw. It’s not an attitude problem, no matter how many times you’ve called it that in your own head. It’s a nervous system doing exactly what it’s built to do, sending up a flare, over and over, until someone in charge finally looks up.

The someone in charge was me. It’s you too.

Resentment doesn’t need to be managed away. It needs to be heard.

If you’re in it right now and don’t know where to start, that’s normal. Boundaries aren’t obvious when no one ever taught you where yours were allowed to be.

→ Book a free 15-minute Clarity Call if you just want to talk it through.

→ Book a 90-Minute Clarity Reset if you already know what the one thing is and you’re ready to build a plan around it.

One session. One problem. A place to start.

What?!

Somehow in the next minute or two I was singing in “I want the world… I want the whole world!” from Willy Wonka to her. It was a day.

There she sat in her comfy little chair telling me I can, in fact, NOT do everything I want to do in this life. That I am human. That I will die before I am finished. That I can do only one thing at a time. That I have limits.

Rude.

I do want the whole world. I want to start each day with fresh bread breaking. Be present with my kids and grandson. Build a successful business. Travel. Catch up with my friends. Serve on the PTSO. Write another book. Or get the first one published. Enjoy my husband. Match all Tupperware to lids. Develop my physical fitness. Finally launch my knitting group, Tough Knitties. Create. Heal. Rest. And protect my nervous system.

And that’s the pared down list.

I used to think the problem was time. And self-disclipline. If I could just get up earlier. Stay up later. Cut something out. Optimize my schedule.

But the problem wasn’t time. It was capacity.

I never really understand what that word meant before I was a coach myself. Not in this context anyway. Capacity is what you actually have available to spend.

Physical energy.

Mental energy.

Emotional energy.

Attention.

Patience.

Decision-making

The ability to absorb one more thing.

The ability to handle a challenge.

The ability to recover when something goes sideways.

We wake up each day with some amount of capacity. Then we spend it.

The tricky part is, that you can have more of some kinds and less of others. Your body can be full of energy but your brain feels like mush. Or maybe you can think clearly but you have zero patience. You can be emotionally stable and out of decision making power. You can be fine answering emails and unable to make one phone call. Different accounts. Same bank.

If you had asked me of course I always knew people had limits. Especially other people. Less so me. (Still not sure how that works.) But I also knew what God’s expectations were of me and that if I took on the challenges he offered, he would make up the rest. So, I had more and more babies, accepted jobs at church, and attempted the grand list of achievements that would make me a righteous woman in Zion. And I waited for the promised blessings. Knowing that even if they didn’t show up in this life my heavenly mansion was just becoming more glorious and beautiful. It must be basically a heavenly Mar-A-Lago because as of the day of my faith crisis, I was still waiting for that help to show up.

So when I hit a limit, I experienced it as a spiritual failure. More evidence of my inadequacy. I needed to be more organized, more disciplined, more grateful, more faithful. More something. It rarely occurred to me that I had simply run out of what I had for the day.

Capacity doesn’t negotiate. Trust me, I’ve tried. I have ignored it. Argued with it. Wished very hard that it worked differently for me specifically.

We all get the same twenty-four hours in a day. We can be in one place at a time. Can pay attention to one thing at a time. Can spend today’s capacity exactly once, and then it’s gone. And then tomorrow is a different account with its own balance. I know… so unfair.

Writing this article uses some of my capacity. Answering texts uses some. A hard conversation uses a lot. Grief spends a lot. Masking uses more than people realize.

Important note: Ability and capacity are not the same thing. And confusing them can lead to a whole heap of shame.

I know how to write. But I may not have the capacity to write today.

I love my kids. But I may not have the capacity to be patient after a day of constant interruption.

I can bake three dozen cookies. That doesn’t mean I have the capacity to do it this weekend.

I still have the ability but that doesn’t mean I have the resources available at this very moment.

Every yes to one thing is a no to something else. That’s just math:

If I spend Saturday helping a friend move, I’m not deep-cleaning my house.

If I pour all my energy into finishing a slide presentation, I don’t have much brain space for dinner conversation that night.

If I stay up until two with my husband who works nights, I’m not making a hot breakfast for the kids in the morning.

I used to consider all of these unrelated events that just happened to land on the same week. They’re not.

I grew up believing that if something mattered enough, you found a way. You stretched. You gave one more hour. Went the extra mile. Never turned down a calling. Said yes.

There’s some truth there. People do amazing things for short stretches. We stay up with newborns. We sit with dying parents. We pull all-nighters and answer emergencies and somehow keep functioning on fumes.

We can borrow from tomorrow.

But when tomorrow comes, the cost comes with it. The debt we borrowed must be paid.

Hard truth: Pushing past my limits has yet to increase what I have available. It just steals from the next day. And even the day after that. Until I’m running on a deficit. One I usually don’t even notice accumulating.

That’s what burnout actually is. It’s a slow shrinking of the capacity you’re working with. Week after week. Until there’s almost nothing left to give.

ADHD makes all of this harder to track. It doesn’t just drain the account faster. It messes with the data, so I can’t even tell what my balance is until it’s already at zero.

I’ll wake up feeling like I have enough capacity for six different things today. By the second one I’m spent. Then I assume I planned badly or didn’t try hard enough. Or I am adulting wrong again. Yet another thing everyone but me can seem to figure out.

Most days I just misjudged the balance. Again.

What I didn’t expect is that respecting my capacity hasn’t actually shrunk my life. It’s made it hold together better. Run smoother. Made me more consistent.

When I stop overdrawing the account every day, I stop crashing. I recover faster. I show up more myself. Because I’m not always rebuilding from empty.

I used to think accepting my limits meant giving up on what I wanted. It’s turned out to be almost the opposite.

This last weekend, an old friend and I reconnected. In the past, we’d have said we should get together sometime and never actually done it. This time I asked, “What about Saturday?” I drove an hour and a half with three of my kids to meet her at the Verde River, and we spent the day in the water. I had an open Saturday. Something I could never have dreamed of five years ago. It would have been filled with important things that don’t actually matter. None as important as this was.

That’s the whole world I actually wanted.

If you already know what you need to do, and you’re still not doing it, it isn’t about trying harder.

Paid subscribers, the replay video of my workshop, You Know What to Do. So Why Can’t You Do It?: Understanding the gap between insight and action after leaving high-control systems, is now posted. You can find it here. Please DM me with any questions or thoughts!

All my readers can also book a 15-minute clarity call to talk through one stuck point here.

I read it. I have some idea of how to respond. I’ve opened it and closed it four different times.

If you asked me why, I’d probably say I’m procrastinating. Avoiding it. I’m just overwhelmed.

But as a coach, I know that if you looked at five different people in my situation you will find five different reasons. One is grieving something unrelated and doesn’t have the energy. Hasn’t switched gears back. One doesn’t know where to start. One is afraid of the reply that will come back. One has simply run out of capacity for the day. One doesn’t actually care about the outcome anymore and doesn’t know that is allowed.

It’s the same email. The same six days. But completely different problems underneath. All of us.

Behavior tells you what happened. It does not tell you why.

Most of us aren’t thinking to look at that at all. We see the unanswered email, and we know the verdict. We are lazy, undisciplined procrastinators. We are not trying hard enough. Not organized. Not motivated. Oh, that elusive motivation!

Whatever the first explanation that comes to mind, we treat it as an official diagnosis.

I’m spending an hour tomorrow night pulling this apart. The religious training that made ambiguity feel unsafe, the ADHD wiring that needs a concrete first step, and what actually closes the gap between knowing and doing. Tomorrow night, Tuesday, July 7th, 7 MT (Arizona). Free for CNRS members here, free for paid subscribers here.

To fail to plan is to plan to fail. An ounce of prevention. Put on the armor of God to withstand the fiery darts of the adversary. You didn’t just plan a talk. You rehearsed it until it was memorized. Plan A, plan B, plan C. Back-up plans.

A few years ago, I was the president of the young women’s organization at our…

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Today’s essay was inspired by this discussion question from Celeste Davis’s Women’s Circle discussion group: What would it look like to raise boys without a sense of…

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I think almost every adult has a thing:

a form

an email

a phone call

a text

a donation box

a thank- you card

a library book

a return

something they’ve already decided to do. It would probably take ten minutes. And you’ve been walking past it for six months.

In my work I call this the Knowing/Doing Gap. It shows up in small ways like this. But also in major life decisions. Like knowing for years your relationship is over. You’ve made the decision in your therapist’s office, you’ve written the letter, you’re mentally gone, but you just keep showing up rather than have the conversation. Same thing.

You know what you need to do. You did the research. Read the reviews. Read all the conflicting articles. Sought out expert advice. Made a pros & cons list. You’re sure. And you’ve been meaning to start. But it’s like there’s this alien forcefield between you and the thing.

Procrastination? You just need to try harder? Need more motivation? Whatever it is, you don’t have it.

Why does knowing what to do so often fail to change what we do?

We act like knowledge should solve our behavior. But has that ever been a reliable pattern? You know sugar is bad for you. You know you need eight hours of sleep. Five minutes of meditation a day is a small price to pay for improved mental health. If you’re doing those, backing up your photos, and saving for retirement, you can just skip the rest of this article.

This is pretty standard human behavior. But now your A1C is up, your doctor has given you some dietary guidelines which you are going to start any day now for the last year, and you’re baffled at your inability to launch the program.

The more stuck you feel, the harder it is to start, and you might even feel the pull back into the research phase. Maybe one more podcast will fix it. One more article. One more review.

What if obedience trained us to solve the wrong problem?

For me it felt like falling through space with nothing to hold onto. Nowhere to land. Nowhere to turn for help.

When I ran to my husband with the horrifying discovery that the foundation of our lives – our religion — was a lie, I never expected to be disbelieved. Isn’t that funny? I think we all feel that way. It’s the biggest discovery of our lifetimes. And we are treated as messengers of the devil. Digression.

The point: You are never so alone. Your world is the same. Your family. Your church. Maybe your calling. You show up. You are asked to keep showing up in the same way. Everyone knows you don’t believe. They ask you to keep trying. You want out. You know it’s wrong. You know you are done. You know you want to leave. You know you can’t do this anymore. But you do. I did. For years. How many years did you go? How many years did you keep pretending? To keep the peace. Until you couldn’t anymore. Until it hurt too much. Or until something outside of you shifted.

This is also the Knowing/Doing Gap.

We were trained in a specific pattern.

First came certainty. Through God in some fashion. Usually priesthood authority. And then prayer to confirm that authority through personal revelation. Then came action. There was a right choice and a wrong one. Always. And so many signs to point the way. You didn’t have to generate the feeling that it was okay to act. The feeling was provided. Externally. You knew where to look for it.

Then the source disappeared. But you kept waiting.

Same effect. Different mechanism than the library book. But the same muddy feeling of knowing and not moving.

Most of my clients are both people with ADHD and former believers, which is its own kind of double exposure. The gap looks the same from the outside. The same months of a thing sitting there. A different reason why.

For the ADHD brain it’s a starting point problem. No clear entry. No concrete first step. No on-ramp. So the brain keeps circling. And ambiguity can be paralyzing.

In both cases, the person sitting in the gap has come to the same conclusion about themselves. Something is wrong with them.

That’s the part I want to interrupt.

I’m going deeper on all of this — the certainty piece, the ADHD piece, and what actually bridges the gap — in a one-hour workshop on July 7th @ 7 MT (Arizona). If this landed somewhere specific, that’s probably the room for you. Free for CNRS members here. And my paid subscribers below the jump.

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It doesn’t make sense. I’ve done so much work trimming my life down. I used to say yes to everything. Now I’ve defaulted to no long enough that I’m rarely asked.

But I guess there are new partners now. New endeavors where I’m still an easy yes. So the to-do list is growing again. And my kids are out of school and the routine…

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We’ve just discussed the overwhelm on a brain deconstructing from high-control religion. Demands that are new. Managing your life, your time, decisions, and charting a new course both inside and outside of your brain. It’s too much and you were not prepared.

The church has always told you where to be and when. What to do and how to do it. What success looks like. And failure. What to wear, how to behave, what to eat and drink. The answers to your questions and a framework for decisions. When belief dissolved, your external executive function disappeared with it.

So collapse is to be expected. And the answer isn’t more external structure. It’s not discipline or trying harder.

Enter scaffolding.

You may have noticed I always struggle to answer this question with the clarity you want. This is because scaffolding, done in a supportive, shame-free way is so very individualized. It looks wildly different from brain to brain. Person to person. In my coaching sessions we dive deep to understand where the exact disconnects are in your brain and your life and create solutions uniquely tailored to you. So they really work. They really stand the tests of stress and time.

But I will do my best here to break it down in a way that you can get started building some scaffolding on your own. With your brain and life in mind. There are generally five types of scaffolding we use to externalize the demands that are crowding your brain. Time scaffolding, environmental scaffolding, sensory scaffolding, relational scaffolding and decision scaffolding.

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The beauty part? None of these require willpower to work.

Time scaffolding starts with what already exists. Not a new calendar system. Not an alarm you’ll eventually start ignoring. Your day already has a rhythm. You already make coffee. You already sit down after the kids leave. You already have a moment before your first meeting that you usually lose to Instagram. Those moments already run on autopilot. You didn’t have to build them and you don’t have to maintain them. Attaching something to one of them borrows that structure instead of trying to manufacture new structure from scratch.

That’s the difference between a calendar reminder and a natural sequence. The reminder asks your brain to respond to an external prompt. The sequence just carries you forward. One thing happens, and then the next thing happens, because that’s what comes next.

Built-in anchors work the same way. Your commute. Your lunch break. The moment you put the kids to bed and come back downstairs. These are already load-bearing moments in your day. They don’t need to be created. But they can be used.

Environmental scaffolding is letting your space remember things for you. Shoes by the door. Journal open on the table. Objects placed where the action needs to happen, so your brain doesn’t have to generate the reminder from inside the fog.

Sensory scaffolding is the playlist you only play when you’re doing one specific thing. A hoodie. Cold water. A candle. The body settling before the brain is asked to work. We used to play It’s a Hard Knocks Life during clean up times. The kids’ bodies knew what that meant as well as their brains did. I can’t shift into work mode without my playlist and my coffee.

Relational scaffolding is the presence of another person that makes your nervous system feel safe enough to start. Body doubling. Not accountability, not supervision. Just not being alone in the effort. I do these sessions sometimes for clients and subscribers. If you’re interested in these (free) send me a message.

Decision scaffolding is reducing options before you’re supposed to choose. Defaults. Small menus. Systems that make the decision for you until you have bandwidth to decide. I teach a framework for this in coaching sessions to simplify the process.

None of these are complicated or impressive. That’s the point.

When scaffolding fails, it’s almost never because the person didn’t try hard enough. It’s because the scaffolding assumed things about their nervous system that weren’t true. Wrong time. Wrong sensory environment. Too much ambiguity. Too many steps.

You will hit walls. Something won’t work and your brain will want to make that mean something. It doesn’t. It just means the scaffolding needs adjusting.

Revise the scaffolding. Not yourself.

For paid subscribers, below is a one-page scaffolding reference. Each of the five types with specific examples you can pull from, and a short set of questions for figuring out which mismatch is actually happening when something stops working.

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The stakes were clear. If I sinned. If I made a mistake. If I let go for even a moment, the Holy Ghost would leave me. And if the Holy Ghost left me, my children could be dying in the next room, and I would feel nothing. No prompting. No warning. Just me, oblivious, while something terrible happened that I could have…

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I wanted to be a good wife. A good mother. A faithful member of the Mormon church. I knew what each of those things required. Exactly. I knew what a good Sunday looked like, what a good woman wore to church, what a good family ate for dinner, how a good person spent her discretionary income. I knew what…

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That essay was about the moment that a simple want gets smothered in cross-examination. That tiny pause where you know what you want, the immediately begin evaluating whether or not you’re allowed to want it. The shoulds.

So I made a little resource to go with it: Tiny Wants

It’s just a list of simple preferences you’re allowed to have without building a case for them first.

Things like:
wanting to go home
wanting softer clothes
wanting to stop optimizing the decision
wanting the thing you wanted first

It’s less advice and more about noticing how often ordinary preference gets interrupted before it fully forms.

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Right away, you know. Sushi. You’ve been craving sushi.

Then: Sushi is so epensive. Is it rude to suggest? Does she even like sushi? You remember one of your friends hates it… was that her? How many times has she told you?

By the time you’ve finished that thoguht loop, you’ve suggested salads. Salads are safe. …

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