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 church. We had planning meetings with each of the girls’ class presidencies. Before that, we had planning meetings with the adult organization presidency to plan the planning meetings. Before that, I sat in a ward council meeting where we planned the meeting where we’d plan the meetings.

And it wasn’t just that we were trying to think of everything. Be prepared for every eventuality. It was also that if we were worthy, if we were in tune, the spirit would warn us ahead of time. Would put the things we needed to know into our minds before we needed them. “It is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do,” says the Book of Mormon.

The grace comes after your part.

It’s been years since that calling. Since I sat in these lessons. Since I felt responsible for a “stewardship”. But what I didn’t notice is how hard I’m still preventing.

We are still doing this. Not the meetings or the temple recommends. But the architecture. Years out of the church, wearing ourselves down trying to prevent problems. Prevent pain. Ending up wasting precious energy and preventing growth instead. Calling it responsibility. Calling it being a good mother, a good employee, a good person who doesn’t let things fall through the cracks.

Oversights are natural. We aren’t psychic. We were never supposed to predict and prevent every problem that might come near the people we love. We have no practice trusting ourselves to come through in a problem. We’ve been too good at making sure the problem never gets the chance to happen.

So we carry around this constant buzz of anxiety. A hypervigilance without a single cause you can point to. Because it isn’t caused by any one thing. It’s caused by a belief that was systematically installed in you one lesson and one meeting and a time. That your energy is supposed to be everywhere, at all times, preventing everything. And we haven’t stopped to question this until now. But today, I’m presenting an idea that was completely new to me:

Problems are how you find out where your energy actually needs to go.

A kid melts down and you learn something about what he needed that you couldn’t have known in advance. A project falls apart in a way you didn’t foresee, and that’s how you discover where the weak point was. Something no amount of pre-meetings would have surfaced.

Attention was never supposed to be a floodlight running at all hours over every square inch of your life. It was supposed to work like a hand near a stove. You don’t hover your hand over every burner in the house all day, just in case one turns on. You go about your life, and when something gets hot, you feel it, and you move your hand.

We didn’t learn it that way. We were taught the opposite. The hand hovering over every burner, all day, every day. That was what love looked like. What worthiness looked like. What being a good steward of your one wild and precious calling looked like.

I still catch myself working out problems that haven’t happened yet. Running all possible eventualities in my head. Rehearsing talks nobody asked me to give. When I catch it now, I try to ask a different question than the one I was trained to ask.

Not what could go wrong.

When it does, do I trust myself to handle it?

I don’t know yet. I’m finding out one problem at a time.

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

I’m running a live workshop this week on the space between insight and action after leaving obedience-based systems on July 7th @ 7 MT (Arizona).

Free for CNRS members here. And my paid subscribers here.

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

At sleepovers I was always the last one awake.

I was the first one there and the last one to leave. I had terrible FOMO. The ultimate social butterfly. I always had friends over growing up or was over at their houses. I was happiest surrounded by people.

But at some point during the party, I slipped away. Someone would notice, find my mom, who would track me down. I was crying in a corner. About whatever it was that day. They didn’t actually like me. They think I’m weird. The friend I really wanted couldn’t come over. I didn’t want to share. She didn’t want to share.

Mom would talk me back out there. No, they are looking for you. They want to play. I’d calm down, go back out and be fine. Until the next time.

There was always an explanation for the tears. Later, it was usually that I missed my little brother who had died. I missed my friend I had moved away from. I was sad school was ending. Sad school was starting.

The big feelings came first. The pressure like a balloon about to pop. The escape. The disappearance. Then, the tears. I’d do a scan through my head and find the reason. And the reason always made enough sense that I stopped looking further.

As an adult the reasons were more abundant. I missed my kids. My husband. I was overwhelmed. To much to do. Over-stressed. Financial strain. Life seemed off course.

The reasons changed. The pressure in my chest, the panic, and the tears were the same.

Last week we were packing for a family reunion. I scanned the itinerary, noting planned activities from morning into the night, and panic shot through me. I told my husband there was no way I was going to be able to manage that schedule. Wondering out loud what would be the best way to modify it.

I need people breaks. Quiet. Sun and heat breaks. Noise breaks. And time to myself where I can hear my own brain.

He said, you didn’t use to be like this. You used to just go and go and go. I couldn’t keep up with you.

He was right. And also wrong. I was always like this. I just didn’t know that I was.

The first day of the reunion was beautiful. I made meaningful connections and had conversations with people I haven’t seen in years. There was good food and fun activities. It was a wonderful day, from start to finish.

But back at the Airbnb that night I was overwhelmed by that familiar sadness. My chest tight to bursting. Tears. The heavy weight of big, sourceless grief.

Except this time I didn’t scan for the reason. I knew what it was.

It wasn’t sadness. It was my nervous system completely depleted. This is what overstimulation feels like in my body. It has always felt exactly like this.

Learning this about yourself late requires alot of retroactive translation.

Every corner I hid in at a sleepover. Every tearful meltdown I attributed to grief or stress or worry. Every time I disappeared from a party or a family gathering or a good day and couldn’t explain why. I was explaining the wrong thing.

The sadness was real. The feelings were real. The experience actually made perfect sense. But I was collecting data all that time while having nowhere to file it. No category. No label.

Overstimulation doesn’t show up packaged and labled. It shows up looking like whatever your brain already recognizes. Interpreted as something you know. For me it was self consciousness. And grief, because I had real grief. So those were the easiest folders to drop it into. For someone else it might be anxiety, or loneliness, or the sense that something is wrong with them.

It just needs somewhere to land. And it will find somewhere, whether or not that somewhere is accurate.

The second day of the reunion I didn’t go to everything. That was hard. I disappointed some people. People I love and appreciate. But I got to make a few really deep connections. Got to visit with almost everyone. Had an actually meaningful time instead of a beautiful day that ended in a dramatic collapse.

That’s the trade-off now. I do not show up to everything. I show up to enough. In a way that leaves something in the tank.

I spent most of my life believing I was an extrovert with an emotional problem. Turns out I am someone who loves people deeply, connects hard, gives a lot, and then needs significant recovery time. Not because something is wrong with me. Just because that’s how my nervous system works.

I still love people. I’m still social. But the FOMO has been replaced by something quieter. Trusting myself.

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If you’ve spent years explaining your feelings with the wrong label, I made something for paid subscribers.

It’s a short guide called Is This Sadness or Overstimulation? What each one actually feels like in the body, how to tell them apart, and what actually helps for each one.

→ Get the guide here

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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 entitlement to women’s time, bodies, labor or emotional energy?

It was literally killing me.

The accumulating decades of being the floor everyone stood on. I was the one who found the answers. I absorbed the emergencies. I soothed the pain. The good wife. The good mother. The facilitator who had to numb, stuff, dissociate just to get through the day.

I thought I was showing them love.

I was teaching them something I didn’t mean to teach.

I had six children assigned male at birth. Now five sons, one daughter.

Some of them will love women. Whoever they love is not mine to decide. But all will have women in their lives and all of them are growing up learning about how a woman moves about the world primarily from me.

That education is happening whatever I intend.

I am living. I am loving. I am absorbing. I am deferring. They are watching.

Whoever they spend their life with is for them to discover. How they treat the people they love is mine to interrupt.

I was two decades into parenting when I learned the shocking idea that my kids are not entitled to unrestricted access to me.

And I really mean shocking, which tells you everything about what I was taught about what it meant to be a good mother. I invited these children here. To my home. They didn’t ask to come. They arrived already owed my attention. My body. My emotional energy. All communally owned. A good mother makes herself available until there is nothing left. Then she finds more.

One of my boys used to grab my face with both hands. Physically turning my head toward him to get my attention. He was small. Autistic. He wasn’t cruel.

Someone mentioned this specific behavior in a discussion group on this topic last week as an extreme example. I flushed warm with shame. I had allowed this. When my son did this my first instinct was guilt. I wasn’t being present and attentive. My son was right. He needed me.

It took me way too long to see this for what it was.

My son wasn’t suffering from too little access to me.

He was learning that access is something you take.

I had to completely redefine what a good mother was.

The version I learned was that of a human giver. To solve everyone’s problems, feel their pain, find the answers, manage the schedules, keep the wisdom, manage the emotions. Be the floor.

I believed it. I did it. I numbed myself so I could survive it.

But I was not their mother in those moments. I was a facilitator. A vending machine. A tool. A surface.

My greatest responsibility as their mom is to model a life well lived. To model emotional responsibility.

Saying no. Resting when I am tired. Enforcing boundaries.

As hard as it is for my heart to believe, when I hold the line and say, not now, and mean it, I am not actually failing them. I am showing them something they cannot learn any other way.

That the people they love have limits inside, just like them.

The difference between a request and a demand is consent.

A request can be declined. A demand has one correct answer. (It is not no.)

My son turning my face toward him was not a request. He wasn’t asking if my attention was available the way we had discussed it, a patient hand on mine, until a break in my conversation. He was taking what he believed to already be his.

Now every time I hold the line, I’m introducing a new idea. That my attention belongs to me. You can ask for it. Asking is different from taking. That no is a complete sentence when spoken by any person at any time. It is not an obstacle to be overcome.

My people are learning.

The interrupted mother becomes the interrupted partner.

A boy who learns to grab his mother’s face, growing up, will assume physical presence is a given. He expects it. Gets confused when it’s not available. Doesn’t understand when someone needs space.

A girl who is told that boys pick on her because they like her will learn to accept mistreatment as a fact of life in romantic partnerships. She will make excuses for abusers.

A boy whose meltdowns are absorbed by his mother grows up and says to partners, you make me feel this way. You always make me act like this. You make me shut down.

A girl who is told that it takes so much courage for those boys to ask her to dance and she must always say yes will end up repeatedly assaulted, because she has gagged the voice inside her that says what she wants in favor of others’ comfort.

(One of these stories is mine.)

These are the pieces of emotional logic we are given and we build our relationships on them. Just as our kids will do.

This is not just a hetero problem either. A boy can grow up to love men and still carry every one of these patterns into relationships with him and all the women in his life. Toward his friends. Coworkers. Mother. Entitlement to women’s emotional labor and bodies shows up everywhere.

Whoever walks beside my children through the years of their lives will inherit something from me. I am trying to change it from a burden to a gift.

My actual job as their mother is to walk beside them. Offer tools. Support. Believe in them as whole, capable humans who have the inner wisdom to succeed on their own.

They can solve it. ONLY they can solve it.

No one can actually make them do anything. To pretend is an illusion.

And no one should have to carry what I was. Not the women in their lives. Not their partners. No one should have to numb themselves past their capacity to keep going. Lose themselves in service to my children. Not only is it unnecessary. It’s harmful.

Every time I say, not now. Every time I don’t absorb the emergency. Every time I remain a person instead of becoming a floor. My kids will not remember it.

But someday, someone will.

I’m going deeper on all of this — the buffering, the absorbing, the knowing-better-but-still-frozen — in a one-hour workshop on July 7th @ 7 MT (Arizona).

The workshop is called You Know What to Do. So Why Can’t You Do It? and it’s about what’s actually happening when action stalls. Not laziness. Not motivation. The real questions your brain is trying to answer before it will let you move. And why those questions got so much heavier after obedience.

If you recognized yourself in this piece, that’s probably the room for you. Free for CNRS members here. And my paid subscribers here. Or book a 15-minute clarity call to work through one stuck point here.

Subscribe now

I’ve been putting together a workshop about Bridging the Knowing-Doing Gap. And around every slide, every bullet point, there’s my dad.

I could see him, standing at the front of a conference room with a jar full of rocks and sand. My dad was a great teacher. And I loved to sit in on his trainings. Seven Habits. Franklin Covey Planners. He was trained. Certified. But also… a master. My dad was a productivity ninja.

Not only was he a rockstar at work and church (no one there ever let us forget it) but he also ran marathons, ultramarathons, climbed rocks, was (is) a loving, devoted husband, and a good friend. He didn’t just coast on talent. He built systems. Then, because he cared, he tried to teach them to us. To everyone.

I, the hot mess that I was, was hungry for them. I took cast-off planners, read the books, listened to talks on tape… I was there for it. My life was out of control. I wanted what Dad had. I heard the stories. I believed the jar. Dad helped me set up my planner. And three pages in, I failed.

And because I was also a perfectionist with scrupulosity, the failure didn’t just sit there. It meant something. It meant that I was the problem. I mean, clearly. I was the problem.

I never did figure out that those systems weren’t built for me. Nope. That’s not what happened. What I figured out eventually was that my brain needed entirely different scaffolding. Not better willpower. Not more commitment or inspiration. A completely different approach. One built around how ADHD brains actually work. Which is nothing like how productivity systems assume they do.

That discovery let me off the hook for the first time.

It wasn’t until I trained as an ADHD coach and I learned about my brain that I understood. How brains work. Why brains resist. What brains need. And how to hack them. Now, writing this workshop. Knowing exactly how to Bridge the Knowing-Doing Gap. Not just for myself, but how to coach others through it. And right in the middle of all of this, there was my dad.

My dad spent years teaching people to use the space between stimulus and response. That’s where your responsibility lives, according to Covey. Between what happens to you and what you do about it. In that space lives your freedom. He was working on the outside. The behavior. The system. The jar with the rocks.

What I’ve learned is that for alot of people that space doesn’t exist yet. It has to be built. Especially people with brains like mine. Especially people who built their lives inside systems that handed them their choices.

Covey assumed the space was already there

I’m thinking, what if it doesn’t?

Not because we’re all broken, like I thought I was. But because building the space is a different task than using it. Instead of teaching people to choose better, I’m asking them to look at what’s happening in the brain between the knowing and the doing. What’s making the gap feel uncrossable. What scaffolding your specific nervous system actually needs before a choice is even possible.

It feels like carrying on the torch. And digging the next level deeper.

I spent my whole life knowing I’d never measure up to my dad. But that’s because I thought we were playing the same game and I was losing.

We weren’t. We were never playing the same game.

But my dad wasn’t done learning either. Probably a decade ago or more, he trained as a coach. From teaching people what worked for him to letting the client lead. I didn’t even know what coaching was until I experienced the process with him and something clicked in my brain. That’s a big part of what led me to coaching.

So Dad passed me his gift twice in different packaging. Once in a conference room. When I was young and desperate for an answer. A quick fix. And couldn’t catch it. And again, years later, in a completely different form. One where he wasn’t really passing me anything at all. Just walking with me while I found it myself.

We have the same heart. The same desire to help people live fuller lives. More intentional lives. More uniquely them. He found his way there and kept going. Mine was a little messier, but I found my way too.

He’s going to be one of the first people to read this.

Hi Dad.

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 here.

My readers can also book a 15-minute clarity call to clarify one stuck point here.

Subscribe now

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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Most of my writing life I’ve been shielded from direct criticism of my work. For better or for worse. The decade I spent at one parenting magazine I both wished I saw more feedback and was grateful for the buffer. The buffer was two layers thick. The first, editors who made me sound smoother and more professional than I was in my early twenties. Second, we were print. So there was no comments section. When we did go online, I was our first web editor. I posted all our articles on the website, blogged, and started all our first social media accounts. Still, web traffic wasn’t adequate for trolling. Or even criticism. Okay, besides one other staff writer who hated everything I stood for and loved to write about it.

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So, trolls were new to me about a year ago when my videos started getting traffic. My first comment was on a video about raising ADHD kids where a nice gentleman commented, “I can’t believe anyone would have kids with that fat pig.” A quick kick in the gut, but within minutes, cackle-fodder for me and my friends. Seriously? As Brene says, the anonymous trolls in the comments section who aren’t in the arena getting their asses kicked don’t get a say. I haven’t lost a wink of sleep over those.

I wrote some weeks ago about my deeply personal experience with the book, Yesteryear by caro claire burke. The book wasn’t the cultural satire I expected when I picked it up. Instead, I found myself walking through an alternate reality with my same brain. The details were different but as I wound through the story it was clear the author had been lurking around my brain, mapping my movements and scrawling her take as she went.

Some loved the book. Some hated it. Either way, responses were passionate. I think we all expected to see the tradewife-championing conservative takedown of this book. But I personally did not anticipate watching caro shredded to tiny little bits and pieces by those who aligned with her more ideologically. Am I calling writers out for that? No. That is absolutely their right. Art and criticism have a deeply symbiotic relationship. Would I even have noticed the bloodbath if I hadn’t gotten wrapped up in it? I’m not so sure.

A week and a half after my article, I received a DM from from Matriarchy Report. A review of Yesteryear dropped, citing my essay as “evidence”. An AI detector showed my essay to be 82% AI. The use of these tools has been widely debated and I’m not going to relitigate that here. What I do want to address is how the accusation was used. Nothing to do with AI. Everything to do with dismissal. My experience with the book, and yours, was declared hollow. We were effectively removed from the conversation. And then the review moved on to other, actually relevant things. Proving that this part of the conversation wasn’t even necessary. Just included, just because.

Lane kindly went right to my defense. She’d heard my thoughts and feelings about the book before publication and knew they were not “hollow”. She knew my personal story was real, partly because of the ways it matched hers. We did a live that day about our experiences in high-control religion, as mothers, and the parts of our stories we saw in Natalie’s, the main character in Yesteryear. It wasn’t just me. And it wasn’t just Lane. So many of you reached out about having similar experiences. Reading the book and seeing pieces of yourself. Pieces of your lives.

Your comments rolled in on my article. On caro’s posts. All over the place. On a normal day I would have been all over them! Responding. Connecting. Validating. But the pressure and the shame of what I was afraid I was costing all of us with the credibility of my story being questioned had me frozen. I let the criticism cut me off at the knees. I let it gag me. Shut me up.

I watched this unfold again just this last week. I finished reading Belle Burden’s book Strangers, just in time for a financial hit piece in the New Yorker to drop alongside it. A bombshell I heard referred to as a “nothing burger”. The information was accurate. Even if the point they were making wasn’t. But accuracy wasn’t the point at all. The point was to show up before her words could. To plant that seed of doubt. To sustain the pattern that women writing from personal experience need their credibility verified before their stories can be heard.

The mechanism doesn’t need to be coordinated to be a pattern. It just needs the same assumptions running repeatedly.

A few months ago, I read the book Calling In by Loretta Ross. She has worked in advocacy, primarily around rape and women’s rights, for decades. My primary takeaway from the book was the dangers of friendly fire within a movement. She explains the differences between a cult and a movement: “When people think the same idea and move in the same direction, that’s a cult. When people think many different ideas and move in one direction, that’s a movement.” In her experience what most activists want is a cult. Diversity is not allowed. For things to be done differently (wrong!) is untenable. There is one way. The correct way. So they call each other out, tear each other down. Instead of creating a strong united front, they weaken the message, the movement, and the impact. What does it mean when the people most loudly defending women writers are also the ones policing which women’s writing counts as real?

I’ve just finished writing a memoir. And all of this has left me wondering if I have what it takes. Can I survive this world that caro and Belle are living in? Will my life be more of waking up every day to find out who hates me today (there have been many copycat articles and comments)? Working constantly through what’s real? What matters?

The man in Brene Brown’s story put down his pencil and never picked it up again. Someone with more authority over his life than they deserved put an end to his creative journey. Does my book go on the shelf next to that picture he drew of his family home? No. But I couldn’t answer that question last week. The pit in my stomach. The silence. The gag.

This week I remember a little more who I am. Why I speak. Why I write. What my writing sounds like and why. Last week I wasn’t sure I could say that out loud. This week I can.

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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 routines have changed.

I was finally comfortable not picking them up every day. Not making after-school snacks. Not meeting friends at the park three afternoons a week. I have to work. It’s not selfish. It’s a different way to be a good mom.

But now everyone’s home again.

Someone wanders through the kitchen opening cabinets even though they aren’t hungry.

Someone else asks what we’re doing today in that particular hopeless tone children use when they already suspect the answer is nothing.

I can hear them fighting from my desk.

Am I really supposed to ignore them the whole day?

That question arrives with the force of a moral referendum.

I want their day to feel special. Or at least memorable. Or at least not like they spent the whole summer watching me answer emails from the other room. So I play a quick game or make cookies. Arrange a playdate. Say yes to one or two things.

They are such small things.

A game of cards is not a big deal.

Cookies are not a big deal.

A quick trip somewhere because everyone’s getting restless is not a big deal.

But I get two hours of work in instead of eight. The difference is not small.

The pile grows.

Overwhelm builds.

The next day is worse before it even starts.

My chest tightens.

A message appears from a new collaborator. She has some thoughts on a series we’re doing. Is this technically urgent? No. She specifically says no rush. But I’m excited about the project. I want to keep momentum going. I can feel the open loop humming there while I try to work on something else.

The uncertainty makes it an emergency.

Then a literary agent reaches out about my book after reading one of my articles. He wants to see pages.

I just tore the whole manuscript down the center. Started a major revision. Major surgery.

The agent says take my time. He won’t forget me.

My body does not believe him.

I painstakingly cut, sew, tear, shred, stitch for all hours of the next two weeks.

Meanwhile the kids are home and the house keeps generating small needs all day long. Popsicles. Rides. Someone bored. Someone hungry. Someone lonely. Someone wanting me to look at something for just a second.

None of it loud.

None of it dramatic.

Just a series of very reasonable interpretations, one after another.

The auditor is very convincing about minutes.

A quick response.

A quick game.

A quick batch of cookies.

A quick trip to Target because the day feels flat and I can feel boredom moving in.

My eight-hour workdays become two-hour workdays.

The pile grows.

My chest tightens.

And eventually it’s time for another come-to-Brittney meeting where I have to lay everything out carefully and trace the collapse backward. Name where the boundary was. Name when it slipped. Name what the voice said to make the slip feel reasonable.

Because that’s the thing I keep missing.

The auditor almost never sounds cruel.

It sounds helpful.

Responsible.

Loving.

It says things like:
this matters to people.
don’t let them down.
it’ll only take a minute.

And by the end of the day nothing catastrophic has happened.

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The collaborator was fine waiting.

The agent did not disappear overnight.

The kids would probably have survived an afternoon of boredom.

But somehow the day is gone anyway.

And I’m sitting here trying to figure out where it went.

Sometimes the problem is not the visible workload.

It is the accumulation of tiny reasonable things that slowly erode the structure holding the day together.

If you have a place in your life that keeps collapsing this way, we can slow it down together and figure out what is actually happening underneath it.

Book a Clarity Session here.

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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I am standing in my kitchen one afternoon and I notice I am hungry. Just the quiet, animal fact of a body that wants something. I stand near the counter and the thought forms itself without effort:

I want something warm.

A preference, arriving the way preferences arrive. Unbidden. Complete. Five words. A small truth. The kind …

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A tradwife influencer. A woman performing a life for eight million followers. Hiding the industrial ovens behind the farmhouse aesthetic. Outsourcing the children while selling the fantasy of motherly devotion. I knew who the inspiration was. I’d seen the content. I had opinions about it. This was going to be cultural commentary I could consume from a comfortable distance. Smart. A little biting. Not about me.

I was maybe two chapters in when something shifted.

As I red, a slow pressure built behind my sternum. Natalie’s internal voice was doing something I recognized. The standards she held herself to that no human could actually meet. The performance that never stopped, even in private, even when no one was watching. The feeling of being watched anyway. The fraud sensation, that at any moment someone would see the gap between who she appeared to be and what was actually happening inside her, and it would be over.

Those were my thoughts.

Not similar to my thoughts. Not reminiscent of my thoughts. Mine.

I kept listening because I couldn’t stop. And because something in me needed to watch what happened to her.

Natalie Heller Mills opens the novel with a line that should probably be studied: My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive. Past tense. Audience-facing. Not I was happy or I was good but perfect at being alive, which means the living itself was a performance being evaluated in real time

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She’s a tradwife influencer in Idaho. Raw milk, farm fresh eggs, six photogenic children, a handsome husband who is the heir to a political dynasty. Behind the scenes: nannies, producers, industrial appliances hidden behind shiplap. The life she sells to millions is staged. She knows it’s staged. She stages it anyway, and she’s very good at it, and something about being very good at it has become the whole point.

Then she wakes up in 1855 and none of the machinery works anymore.

That’s the premise. What the premise does, what Burke is actually doing underneath the satire, is strip away every external structure Natalie has been using to manage an internal voice that never shuts off. No Instagram. No producers. No performance metrics to check against. Just the voice, and the wilderness, and the question she keeps asking in various forms: Am I being tested? Have I failed? What do I need to do to make this stop?

I want to stay with that question for a minute. Because it’s not really a theological question. It doesn’t actually want an answer about God or Satan or reality shows. It wants relief from an internal state that has been running so long Natalie can’t remember what it was like before it was there.

What I kept noticing, as I listened, was the way Natalie’s checking behaviors followed her into a world that had no use for them.

She posts to quiet something. Even when there’s no phone, there’s the impulse: this would be a good image, this would perform well, this would prove I’m doing it right. The performance doesn’t need an audience to continue. It has internalized the audience completely.

She asks whether she’s being tested not because she expects an answer but because asking feels like doing something. Like action. Like control. If she can just correctly identify what went wrong, she can fix it, and if she can fix it, she can get back to the only state she knows how to aim for: acceptable.

When things go wrong, and things go catastrophically wrong, her first move is inward. Not what is happening to me but what did I do to cause this. The system is not questioned. The system is assumed to be correct. If the system is producing pain, the error is in her.

Every failure becomes evidence of a flaw. Every flaw requires management. The management is exhausting. The exhaustion is also, somehow, evidence of weakness.

I know this loop. I ran it for most of my adult life.

I left the Mormon church years ago. I did the hard part (or what I thought was the hard part). The questioning. The unraveling. The grief. The identity reconstruction that nobody prepares you for. I built a different life. I developed different beliefs, or the beginnings of them. I thought I’d left the system behind.

What I hadn’t understood yet was that the system had moved inside me a long time before I walked out.

The voice that tells you you’re not doing enough, not being enough, not performing the life with sufficient precision: that voice doesn’t have a church address. It learned to run without the institution. It had been practicing for years.

I found myself at a crisis point, not long ago, that had nothing to do with religion. Except it had everything to do with religion, because the internal auditor I’d been carrying since childhood was still running the same evaluation it had always run. The standards were different. The theology was gone. The mechanism was identical.

Listening to Natalie was listening to that mechanism with the volume turned up.

What she’s experiencing has a name. It’s called scrupulosity, which is a word that sounds obscure and clinical until you understand what it actually describes, and then it sounds like a word someone made up specifically to describe the inside of your head.

Scrupulosity is what happens when the moral evaluation system gets stuck in the on position. Not occasional guilt. Not healthy conscience. The kind of internal monitoring that never goes off duty, that finds something to audit in every moment, that turns neutral events into evidence, that generates the need to confess or correct or perform or explain even when there is nothing actually wrong.

It gets trained into people. It doesn’t arrive from nowhere.

High-control religious systems are very good at training it, because they are built on a specific premise: that your natural self is the problem. Your desires are suspect. Your instincts require supervision. The gap between who you are and who God requires you to be is the whole point. That gap is what creates the need for the system in the first place. You can never fully close it. That’s not a bug. That’s the architecture.

What this does, over years, is move the surveillance inside. You stop needing a bishop or a parent or a community watching you because you’ve learned to watch yourself with more precision than any of them could manage. You anticipate. You correct preemptively. You manage the gap so automatically that eventually you can’t locate where the management ends and you begin.

And here is the part that took me years to understand: leaving doesn’t turn it off.

Belief is cognitive. Surveillance is physiological. You can stop believing in God and your nervous system will still tighten when you make a mistake. You can reject the theology entirely and the internal auditor will still be at the desk at 2am, reviewing the day’s evidence. The institution doesn’t have to be standing for the damage to still be running.

Natalie’s question, am I being tested, am I being punished, what did I do wrong, is not a religious question by the time we’re hearing it. It’s a nervous system in a pattern it learned so long ago it doesn’t remember learning it.

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⚠️ What follows is where the book goes, and where I went too. If you haven’t finished it yet, you may want to stop here.

What is chilling about watching Natalie move toward crisis is that it doesn’t ever wind down. The voice just keeps running. The checking keeps failing to produce relief. The gap between who she is and who she’s supposed to be keeps demanding management she no longer has the resources to provide.

There’s a version of this pattern I can relate to in Natalie, and a version I can’t. She had a perfection delusion I never had access to. I always knew I was failing. I could see the gap between the standard and my actual life with complete clarity, every single day, and I flogged myself for it anyway. I held myself to a standard I quietly judged other people for not meeting, while simultaneously hating myself for not meeting it either. Someone would call me amazing and I would smile and something inside me would keep running the audit, because the external verdict was never the point. The point was the standard. And the standard was never going to say I was enough, because a standard that said you were enough would have no power over you. That’s the version nobody warns you about: not the woman who believes her own performance, but the one who sees through it completely and cannot stop performing anyway.

She becomes a shell not through a single breaking point but through accumulation. Every moment spent managing the internal auditor is a moment not spent on anything else. Every resource that goes toward performing acceptability is a resource taken from something real. The system doesn’t announce that it’s consuming her. It just keeps asking for more, and she keeps giving it, because she learned a long time ago that the cost of not feeding it is worse.

Until there’s nothing left to give. And then she is no longer herself, or anyone. Just the performance, running on empty, in a world that has stripped away all the scaffolding that used to make the performance sustainable.

I recognized that place. I had been there. Not in 1855, not in a wilderness, but in my own life, years after leaving the church, still running the same internal audit, still feeding the same voice, still trying to close a gap that I had built my entire identity around managing. The crisis I found myself in didn’t look like a religious crisis from the outside. It looked like exhaustion. Executive function collapse. It looked like a woman who couldn’t quite function the way she used to. It looked like a lot of things that had plausible secular explanations.

What it actually was: a system that had been running for thirty-something years finally running out of fuel.

I don’t have a clean ending for this. I don’t think it deserves one.

What I can say is that recognition is not the same as recovery. Watching Natalie and understanding exactly what I was watching did not undo anything. It just gave me language for something that had been shapeless for a long time. And language matters, not because it fixes the thing, but because you can’t really begin to see something clearly until you can name it.

The institution doesn’t have to still be standing.

The voice learned to run without it.

And the first thing, the very first thing, is just knowing that the voice is not you. It sounds like you. It uses your memories and your specific fears and your exact vocabulary. But it was installed. Which means it is not the same as being true.

That’s not nothing.

It’s not everything either.

But it’s somewhere to start.

If this landed somewhere familiar, I'm running a free live session that goes deeper into exactly this: why leaving didn't fix everything, and what's actually happening instead. No preparation needed. Just show up.

She’s right to make that distinction. But there’s a category of women her framing doesn’t quite reach.

Not childfree women. Not women who chose the auntie path.

Women who were told, from before they could articulate an opinion about it, that having children wasn’t a choice at all. That it was the point. That their bodies were on loan from a God who had plans for them, and those plans involved a specific number of children and a specific kind of mothering, and any deviation from that wasn’t a lifestyle preference. It was spiritual failure.

I raised six children inside a high-control religion. My worth was not subtly tied to motherhood. It was explicitly, theologically, structurally tied to it (as stated in the Family Proclamation that hangs on the walls of most of my family’s homes). The question of whether I wanted to have children was not a question that existed. Wanting was beside the point. Obedience was the point.

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So when Lisa frames the natalism debate as women having to weigh their own interests against some abstract societal obligation, I read it and think: that framing assumes a woman who got to have interests first.

A lot of us didn’t.

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You didn’t weigh options.
You didn’t picture different versions of your life and choose one.

You were told.

Not always harshly.
Not always explicitly.

But clearly enough that the question never really formed.

This is what your body is for.
This is what a good life looks like.
This is what a good woman does.

Wanting didn’t e…

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My knitting light in my room is the only one on.

Everything else is dim.

The bunny is in my lap.

I push the needle through and pull the yarn tight, then stop and look at it.

The first version curled in on itself.

Too tight.

I pulled it out and dropped the yarn on the table and started again.

This one sits flatter.

I turn it over and check the front.

Press on it with my thumb.

It holds.

I am waiting for my husband to get home.

Earlier, my seven-year-old held the bunny, an Easter gift for my grandson, out in front of him and looked at it.

Long enough that I waited.

“It doesn’t have a G-tube.”

He handed it back. Grandson has a G-tube. I see the problem.

The house has more space in it now.

Not empty.

Just less compressed.

People are in different rooms.

Doors are closed more often.

Movement doesn’t stack on top of itself the same way.

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The boys are using an app to clock in and out for their work in our home.

One of them came in, opened it, and started his time without saying anything.

He moved straight through the block.

No renegotiation.

No checking back in.

When he finished, he logged out and left.

The work was done.

I did not track it.

The fourteen-year-old came home, dropped his backpack in the same place, and sat down at the table.

He opened his laptop and started.

He got up once to get a drink and came back.

He stayed until it was finished.

No one followed him.

The younger kids left with their backpacks and went to their brother and sister-in-law’s house.

They came back with their work done.

Shoes off.

Backpacks down.

No loose papers.

Outside, the house is half-painted.

The new paint is clean.

It stops in a straight line where the old paint begins.

The ladder is still leaning against the wall.

The rollers are sitting in a tray that has started to dry around the edges.

Inside, the living room walls are finished.

The paint is bright enough that I notice it when I walk through.

Corners are clean.

A chair has moved back into place.

A blanket is folded over the arm.

It looks like a room that is being used again.

I set a day and time for a knitting group.

I wrote it down and sent it out.

No plan beyond that.

I am phasing out Tiktok. Can’t pretend I don’t hate it anymore.

Writing more.

Thinking about workshops.

Phasing into Youtube. More my vibe.

Easter things are on the counter.

The bunny is there now.

There are still moments where something in my chest tightens.

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