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 prevented. If only I had just kept myself clean enough to deserve the warning.

That is what I believed. That is what I was taught.

Then there were my brothers. Two of them gone before I was grown. And my children’s covenants. Whether we would all make it back. Whether I would be the reason we didn’t. And the natural man. The thing inside me that defaulted to damnation if I stopped watching it. If I looked away for even a second.

So I didn’t look away.

I was nine when my little brother died.

It was all there in the funeral. Over the pulpit. The plan of salvation. My brother died. Taken away from us at only 8 years old. But never fear. We will be with him again someday. My parents were sealed in the temple, so my siblings and I were born in the covenant. Under the laws of heaven we would be reunited.

My chest constricted.

Everyone around me was being comforted. I was receiving a verdict.

They didn’t know. But I did. About the darkness in me. The thing that made me different in all the wrong ways. You couldn’t see the Savior in my countenance. Just me. Just my face. The face of a girl whose room was so messy you couldn’t walk across the floor. Whose temper raged when she’d had enough. Who was inconsistent at everything good and right. Who lied when she forgot to do something.

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My family would be together.

But not me. Not automatically. Not the way it worked for people who didn’t have whatever I had inside me.

All I could do was keep trying. Not to be better. That wasn’t good enough. not for the celestial kingdom. To do it perfectly. When I’d do something childish… make a selfish mistake, I’d look over my shoulder. Was Braden there? Watching? Is he disappointed? Is he watching me drift away? Powerless to stop it?

When I left the church, I expected the monitoring to stop. Or at least to tone down. I’ve been doing the work. I had names for things now. I understood what had happened to me. I had language for the harm.

The auditor did not care about my language.

Same voice. Same inventory. Same verdict assembled and waiting. Taking any opening it could find.

Only then did I finally understand it was never actually about God.

The doctrine didn’t create the shame. It latched on to something older. Something that was already running before I had doctrine to explain it. The church gave it a frame. Eternal consequences. Stakes large enough to justify the level of vigilance I was already running on my own. But I hadn’t built the auditor inside the church.

I had brought something in. And the church had exploited it. Made it forever.

When the church left, the forever left with it.

The auditor stayed anyway.

It showed up at work. My coworkers dreaded giving me feedback. I couldn’t take it. It was a condemnation of me as a person. A problem. Someone’s day was ruined by my oversight, who then ruined someone else’s day over it, who then had to confront me… and watch me turn into a puddle.

The horror. These are my friends! I am representing their business. Our clients trusted me! And I failed them. My coworker started sending texts: No one is mad. But just so you know… My insides shredded across the middle. And then a kick. No apology was enough. Too profuse. Over the top. But from my end, still not enough. I didn’t have a god to grovel to. So instead it was Mercedes.

Recently, a friend of sixteen years told me that my liking the book Yesteryear had broken her heart. The word she used was evil. That’s not the Brittney she knows.

She needed some time. Again.

I know this pattern. The bomb dropping without warning. The destabilization. The knot in my stomach while I wait for her to work through it. Until it’s time to renegotiate. To figure out how to spare her pain next time.

I know it’s not healthy. I know our relationship has run its course. I know I can’t keep doing this. I don’t have the bandwidth. But as I try to assemble language around this, to have the conversation, the voices arrive. Right on schedule.

Selfish. Bad friend. Inconsistent. Quitter.

I recognize them immediately.

They used to have bigger stakes attached. Eternal separation. A brother watching from the sky. Children who needed me worthy enough to receive warnings on their behalf. The natural man asking to be squashed.

Now they show up like this. In everyday moments.

Same audit. Same inventory. Same verdict waiting to be delivered.

The auditor didn’t retire when I left. It switched tracks. It stopped checking whether I was worthy of the celestial kingdom and started checking whether I was worthy of the people in my life.

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The script still runs every day. The automatic thoughts kick me in the gut. My stomach turns. And that’s my signal. What’s true now? What do I believe? What do I value? What’s old news? And my body settles. My thoughts fall into their new places. Every time a little quicker. A little more automatic. A little less intense. Frustration, exhaustion, and then hope.

If you have something in your life that keeps catching in the same place, bring it to a Clarity Reset session.

One relationship. One decision. One recurring spiral. One thing you keep circling and can’t seem to move.

We’ll look at what’s actually going on underneath it and work toward concrete next steps that fit your real life and capacity.

You don’t need to bring everything. Just the thing that’s stuck.

Book a Clarity Reset session

After Obedience: When Freedom Doesn’t Feel Like Freedom

How to wear out your brain by breakfast

Most of my life I have known exactly what I wanted…

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23 days ago · 12 likes · 2 comments · Brittney Walker, ExMo ADHD

After Obedience: When Freedom Doesn’t Feel Like Freedom

Tiny Wants

A small follow-up for paid subscribers to Tuesday’s piece, How I Lost the Signal. (Here’s another related piece, Why You Still Can’t Trust Your Signals…

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a month ago · 1 like · Brittney Walker, ExMo ADHD

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 ambition was appropriate and what crossed a line. I knew which emotions to express and which ones to process quietly. I knew the remedy for “tired”.

I was quite decisive.

Easy. Because the decision had already been made. I was just executing it.

When I started questioning, one of the first things I noticed was how many decisions suddenly required actual thought. My priorities for the day. Or the month. What I was felt comfortable wearing. What did “good mother” look like? What was my part? What was theirs? Whether to spend three hours on a Saturday doing something just because I wanted to. Whether wanting something for myself was acceptable at all. Whether rest needed to be earned.

I didn’t understand why these felt so hard. They are not complicated decisions. They are the kind of thing most adults sort out before noon.

But I kept stalling. Deliberating. Checking. Checking what, exactly, I could not have told you. I was checking against something that wasn’t there anymore.

What I was looking for was the pre-answer. The one that was supposed to already come, built in.

It wasn’t there.

High-demand systems are efficient in a specific way that is rarely discussed.

They reduce the category of “things to decide.” Enormously. The architecture of your life. The shape of your week. The texture of your relationships. What a good person does with her ambition. Her body. Her afternoon. Her grief. Ger longing. Most of it is already decided before you arrive. You don’t experience this as constraint. It is clarity. You know what you’re doing and why. You know what you’re for.

The preference barely has to develop. Because preference isn’t the point. In fact, preference is an inconvenience. It makes us high maintenance. Go away, preference.

Compliance is the point. But compliance that goes deep enough starts to feel like self-knowledge. Like certainty about who you are.

I thought I knew myself. I had just never had to know myself without the scaffolding.

Here is what was decided for me, as specifically as I can make it.

What to wear on Sunday. What counted as modest. Which emotions were appropriate for public expression. What a good mother prioritized. What a good wife set aside. When to respond to a friend’s text. Who got to be tired and who was supposed to push through. How money should be managed, who should manage it, what it should be spent on. What counted as frivolous. How a woman should respond when she disagreed. Whether disagreeing out loud was an option. What rest was for and when it was permitted. What ambition looked like in a woman who was also righteous. (I know, oxymoron) How sexuality was structured and when it was acceptable. And what it meant about you if you wanted it at all.

What to watch. What to eat and drink. What to think.

These are not small things. They are the inner furniture of a life. The stuff you think is yours.

A lot of it wasn’t mine. It arrived pre-assembled.

The thing that undid me was not leaving. Leaving was hard but it had momentum. I had reasons. I had the anger to carry me.

What undid me was the Sunday morning, months later, when I sat in front of my closet and could not figure out what to put on.

Not because I had nothing to wear.

Because I was trying to dress myself without the rule. Without the image of a good woman that had always sat in the background, filtering. I didn’t know what I liked. I knew what was appropriate. Those had been the same thing for so long I had confused them. What mattered? Comfort? What was flattering? According to who? Is this too bold? Too tight? Who decides? Too short? By what standard? What does this say about me

I stood there for twenty minutes. Half my closet vomited on my bed.

That is not a rational response to a closet. Or a Sunday morning.

It was a person discovering, in a very ordinary way, that her preferences had not been allowed to develop. Mental meltdown before breakfast.

There’s a specific feeling this produces. This comes from my clients, not just me.

Pre-approved certainty doesn’t feel like compliance. It feels like you finally understand yourself. You move through life without a lot of friction because the friction was resolved before you even arrived. Other people seem to struggle with decisions you find easy. You attribute this to your faith. Your values. Your clarity. You feel sorry for them.

When the system disappears, the confidence evaporates, and you don’t understand why.

Because you thought the confidence was yours. It belonged to the architecture.

That self-interruption is its own tell, actually.

The architecture did the work. That is just what it did. It organized meaning, structured time. It answered questions before they were asked. It ran the decision-making machinery so efficiently that preference atrophied. Not because anyone was malicious. Because that is what high-demand systems do. They create certainty. Certainty feels like self-trust. The two things are not the same.

The signal gets mistaken for the source.

After I left, I started noticing all the places where I hadn’t developed a preference. Not because I was incapable. But because I had never been required to have one. I was often discouraged from having one. The answer was already there.

What do I actually like to eat. Not what I made. What I cooked. What the family liked. What was fast enough and cheap enough to feed ten people. What I would choose if no one else was the variable. What toppings would I choose on my pizza? If it were up to me.

What I actually believe about money. Not the version I was handed, the one about tithing and provident living and the spiritual dangers of debt. Not about camels and eyes of needles. Modesty. Humility. But what I, the specific person in this body, actually think is true about abundance and scarcity and what I want to build.

What I want a Saturday to feel like.

These are not deep, philosophical questions. They are the ordinary every-day ones. But when the answers were pre-supplied for long enough, you don’t develop the muscle. You develop compliance and think it’s conviction.

The next question I hear from people, once this clicks, is usually: then how do I know what is actually mine?

The honest answer is that it’s slow, and sometimes you can’t tell yet.

Preference that was suppressed or never developed doesn’t arrive just because you notice it’s absence. It returns in fragments. A moment of wanting something and noticing that you want it before you can check whether you’re supposed to. A flash of certainty that comes from inside instead of from the rulebook.

Or sometimes a long silence where the answer should be, and nothing comes, and you have to sit with that.

The sitting with it is the work. Not the answering. It’s very like how we were taught to follow the promptings of the Holy Ghost, still and small. The more you tune in, the louder they will become. This is the same work. Learning to follow a weak signal. The more you tune in, the louder it becomes.

I think about the closet a lot. Not as a symbol. Just as the most honest image I have of what it felt like.

Standing in front of a perfectly good closet, twenty minutes, no idea. The shape of a good woman quietly absent from the background. Nothing to check against. Just me and my clothes and a question I hadn’t been trained to answer.

I put on something I hadn’t worn in a long time. Something I’d kept but never reached for.

It turned out I liked it.

I just hadn’t been asked.

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. And now you’re already in the car. On the way.

Or there’s this time:

You’re at a friend’s house. Everyone’s drinking. You don’t drink anymore. You’re fine but it’s getting late, and you’re tired. You started fading out about an hour ago.

You want to go home.

Then: your friend is hosting. Will she feel bad if you leave? Another friend is drunker than you’ve ever seen her. Is that your responsibility? If something happens after you leave, is that on you?

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You sit with your water and do the math. How tired am I? How drunk is she? At what point does my discomfort become a legitimate reason to leave? Where exactly is the threshold where your want becomes valid.

You’re still there at midnight.

You’re just being thoughtful. Careful. Conscientious. You are just checking.

But checking has a cost. One that doesn’t show up right away.

The original signal goes quiet while the checking is taking place. It doesn’t fight. It doesn’t repeat itself louder. It just waits, and if you take long enough, it’s gone by the time you come back for it.

But it’s not gone. That’s the disorienting part.

You can still feel that something was there. The shape of it. The direction it was pointing. But when you try to locate it directly, it’s like trying to see something in your peripheral vision. The moment you turn toward it, it moves.

So you make a decision anyway. Based on what looks right. What you can explain. What seems like a reasonable thing to want given the circumstances. Acceptable.

You eat the salad. You stay until midnight. You answer the question.

But the answer isn’t quite what you felt. It’s what you were able to justify feeling.

I don’t know when wanting started requiring a hearing.

What I know is how it ends. The deflation first. Then the resentment. I knew what I wanted. The audit just got there first.

If this resonates, I’m running a free live session on exactly this stage.

Not the leaving. The after. Why it’s harder than you expected, what the system was actually doing for you, and why trying harder keeps backfiring.

No plan. No list. Just an explanation that finally fits.

Freedom Should Feel Better Than This →

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 that, in a person whose internal life is running normally, would be followed immediately by action. You want something warm. You make something warm. The moment closes.

I don’t make something warm.

What happens instead is something I have gotten very good at not noticing.

The thought arrives. And before I have moved a single inch toward the cabinet, something else arrives with it. Questions. Company that wasn’t invited and doesn’t announce itself.

Is it too late to eat?

Not too late in terms of time. Too late in terms of something else. Appropriateness. Sequence. Whether a person who had already had the right kind of afternoon would still need something warm right now.

I am still standing at the counter.

None of this feels like interrogation while it is happening. From inside it feels like thinking. Like being careful. Like making sure. The questions present themselves as reasonable. As the ordinary due diligence of a person who takes her choices seriously.

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The inventory begins. What the scale said this morning. How my clothes have been fitting. Whether I worked out today and if not whether that changes things. What my last labs looked like and what my doctor said about my eating patterns. Whether the thing I want has enough protein or whether I should have the leftovers instead so nothing goes to waste. Whether this will mess up my appetite for dinner. What we are even having for dinner. What time we are eating and what else is happening around that. How hungry I actually need to be by then. Whether this counts as a heavy meal or a light one and what the rest of the day calls for.

I am reviewing a morning (maybe months) I have already lived, in order to determine whether I am permitted to want what I already want.

The original thought is still technically present. Somewhere. Under everything that arrived to assess it.

At some point the window closes.

I don’t make a decision. I don’t decide against the thing. I just notice, the way you notice a smell is gone without catching the moment it left, that I am no longer considering it. The question dissolved. I am doing something else now, or I am standing at the counter doing nothing, and the wanting has gone wherever small wantings go when they don’t survive the process of being considered.

I am a little more tired than I was five minutes ago.

Nothing happened. That is the problem. Nothing happened, and I am tired from it. And I couldn’t tell you at which moment I stopped choosing and started waiting. For clearance that didn’t come. For a verdict the system isn’t designed to deliver.

I have been calling this thinking for most of my life. Reasoning.

But it isn’t only food. It isn’t only the kitchen.

This is the email sitting in my drafts for three days because I couldn’t determine whether I was allowed to need what I was asking for. This is the jacket I almost bought and then put back because I couldn’t get through the audit fast enough before the wanting ran out. This is the conversation I rehearsed so many times that by the time I had it I couldn’t find the original feeling anymore. It had been reviewed out of existence.

The same system. The same questions. Running on everything.

I know what this is now. Not in the moment. In the moment it still feels like reasoning.

I eventually make something to eat. I don’t remember deciding to. I stand at the counter and reheat something from the refrigerator and eat it without tasting it and the moment is already gone. That’s not what I wanted.

But that thought doesn’t survive long either.

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If you recognized this, you probably already know the place it shows up.

The thing that keeps not happening.
The decision that keeps turning into something else.

If you want to look at one of those together, I’m opening a small number of 15-minute Clarity Calls.

Bring one thing. Not everything. Just one.

We’ll look at what’s actually going on underneath it.
Not to fix it. Just to see it clearly enough that it stops looping the same way.

Or sign up for my next free live session here.

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

.

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 enter into it.

Now you’re out.

And people are having a completely different conversation.

They’re asking whether women should have children.
Whether they owe something to society.
Whether opting out is selfish or justified or necessary.

And you’re reading it thinking—

that question assumes I got to have an opinion in the first place.

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For a lot of us, the harder question isn’t:

Do I want children?

It’s:

What do I even want?

Because the answer used to be built in.

Your life had structure.
Your identity had edges.
Your decisions had a framework.

You didn’t have to figure out what your body was for.
That part was already decided.

When that system disappears, you don’t land in freedom the way people describe it.

You land in something quieter.

A kind of internal blank space where the answers used to be.

And underneath that—

there’s still a reaction.

Guilt that doesn’t quite make sense anymore.
Hesitation that shows up before you even know what you’re deciding.
A low-level suspicion that wanting something for yourself might still be wrong.

So when people talk about choice, it can feel like you’re missing a step.

Like everyone else got handed a question
and you got handed a script.

And now the script is gone, but the ability to answer the question hasn’t fully come online yet.

A lot of the women I work with are in that in-between.

Not trying to optimize their lives.
Not trying to take a stance.

Just trying to become someone who can actually choose.

That doesn’t happen all at once.

It’s slower than that.

Less like a decision.
More like noticing.

What feels good.
What doesn’t.
What’s yours.
What isn’t.

If this feels familiar, you’re not behind.

You’re in the part no one talks about.

The part where the system is gone,
but your own voice isn’t fully steady yet.

And that’s where we start.

Not with big decisions.

Just with the question:

What do I owe myself, now?

There’s a version of this conversation happening right now about whether women owe the world children.

I’ve been reading those arguments and noticing something.

They assume a person who got to have a relationship to wanting in the first place.

I didn’t.

A lot of us didn’t.

I wrote more about that and where this framing breaks. Coming tomorrow.

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If this question feels familiar—

What do I owe myself, now?

I’m hosting a small live session where we stay with that a little longer
and map what actually comes up when you try to answer it.

You don’t need a plan.
You don’t need answers.

You can join here.

All of that is unconscionable. I want to be clear about that.

But that’s not what made my body react first.

I was in bed watching with my husband when it happened. A girl on screen, speaking softly about how blessed she was. How fifty times happier. How she’d come to understand what a beautiful, holy thing she got to be part of. Her voice had that particular quality. Soft, certain, unhurried. Like she was teaching a room full of children something simple and true. And her eyes. Wide and searching and completely, serenely sure.

I know that voice. I know those eyes.

I didn’t grow up in Utah. But I grew up Mormon, which means Utah came to me. Through family, through friends, through every testimony meeting and girls camp and general conference broadcast I ever sat through. That voice came out of all of it. It’s been called primary voice in Mormon spaces. The gentle, childlike cadence women learn to use when speaking about sacred things. The reverence stare is what the rest of the internet calls the eyes that go with it. Wide. Earnest. Lit from inside by certainty.

I felt sick before I understood why.

And then I understood why.

It wasn’t that the girls in the documentary sounded strange. It was that they didn’t. They sounded like family. Like women I loved. Like a version of myself I barely remember.

Same tree. Different fruit. But I knew the bark.

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Here’s what that voice is for.

It isn’t just a speaking style. It isn’t regional accent or personality or the natural cadence of a woman who is soft-spoken. It’s trained. It’s the sound of a person who has learned that certainty delivered gently is more persuasive than certainty delivered with force. That wide-eyed sincerity signals truth. That the self, presented as small and grateful and submitted, is a self that cannot be argued with.

It’s the voice of someone who has been taught that she already has the answers. That the answers came from God, through the prophet, through her husband. That her job is not to question but to receive and to radiate.

And here’s the thing about that voice that made me feel sick watching a documentary about child abuse.

It works on the person speaking it too.

One of Sam Bateman’s wives describes her path to marrying him in three movements. First, she resisted for a very long time. Then she committed, submitted herself to it. And then Heavenly Father gave her the courage and the strength.

Read that again slowly.

She resisted. She knew something was wrong. Her body was sending every signal it had. And then she submitted anyway. And the moment she stopped fighting, the system had a name for that. Not capitulation. Not exhaustion. Not the extinguishing of her own protective instincts.

Heavenly Father gave her the courage and the strength.

Her compliance became a testimony. Her surrender became evidence of God.

This is the mechanism. This is the thing I need you to understand.

It’s not that these women were stupid or weak or naive. It’s that they were living inside a system that had a specific word for every signal their own minds and bodies sent them.

Doubt was the adversary. Fear was a lack of faith. Grief was selfishness. Resistance was the natural man that must be overcome.

When a girl cried, Sam Bateman told her to cheer up. To fervently exert positive energy until the feeling went away. And the framework she’d been handed her entire life agreed with him. Your feelings are not data. Your discomfort is not information. Your body’s alarm system is the enemy of your spiritual progress.

Cheer up, babe.

I have heard softer versions of that sentence my entire life. Said with more kindness, more genuine love, more distance from anything criminal. But the architecture underneath it was the same.

Your inner voice is not to be trusted. The still small voice that matters comes from outside you, delivered through the proper channels, confirmed by the right authority.

Which means the part of you that says something is wrong here was exactly what the system was designed to reach first.

I want to talk to the people who watched this documentary and felt what I felt.

Not just horror. Recognition.

You probably don’t have a Sam Bateman in your story. Your version was almost certainly legal. Loving, even. The people who handed you this framework believed it themselves. They weren’t grooming you. They were giving you the most valuable thing they had.

That doesn’t change what it built inside you.

Because the architecture doesn’t require a predator to function. It just requires a system that teaches you what to do with your own signals.

Belief isn’t created by a single dramatic moment of conversion. It’s created by repetition. The same phrase said the same way enough times until it stops feeling like a phrase and starts feeling like the shape of reality. Like home. Like the sound of truth.

That’s how primary voice gets installed. Not in one sitting. Through ten thousand testimony meetings. Through every time a woman you loved and trusted tilted her head and softened her voice and told you she knew. Through every time your own doubt got labeled before you could finish the thought.

That’s the adversary. That’s the natural man. That’s pride. That’s selfishness.

Your brain was trying to protect you. It sent signals. And every single time, the system was ready with a name for the signal that made you the problem.

Cheer up, babe.

You learned to cheer up. You learned to exert positive energy until the feeling went away. You learned it so many times, in so many small moments, that eventually you didn’t need anyone to tell you anymore. You did it to yourself. Automatically. Before the feeling could even finish arriving.

And then one day the system fell away. You left, or it left you, or it collapsed under its own weight. And you waited for the relief.

And what you found instead wasn’t freedom. It was the absence of a system that had been quietly running everything.

And you found that the internal voice — the one that was supposed to be yours — still sounded like the system.

Still organized your thoughts. Still told you what counted. Still decided what was allowed. Still called your grief selfishness. Still said cheer up when you needed to fall apart.

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That’s not a character flaw. That’s not weak faith or incomplete deconstruction or proof that you didn’t really leave.

That’s what ten thousand repetitions sounds like when the source is gone but the recording keeps playing.

Here’s the only hopeful thing I know about this.

Belief is built by repetition. Which means it can be rebuilt the same way.

But I want to be honest about what that actually means, because the self-help version of this idea is almost as harmful as the original problem. It’s not affirmations. It’s not deciding to think differently. It’s not cheer up, babe with better branding.

The new thought will feel wrong first. Not a little wrong. Completely wrong. Like lying. Like the adversary, actually; which is its own particular cruelty, that the path out feels at first exactly like what you were warned about.

You will try to trust yourself and it will feel dangerous. You will try to rest and it will feel like failure. You will try to let the grief be grief instead of selfishness and your whole nervous system will resist it.

That’s not you doing it wrong. That’s the repetitions not being outnumbered yet.

She knew she was mourning the rest of her life. She knew it. Her body was completely, accurately, correctly afraid. And the system reached her before she could finish the thought.

The work is learning to let the thought finish. To stay with the signal long enough to hear what it’s actually saying instead of immediately reaching for the framework that explains it away.

That takes longer than anyone tells you. It’s less dramatic than you want it to be. And it doesn’t feel like courage at first.

It feels like the adversary.

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If this essay named something you’ve been carrying, I made a free workshop for exactly this stage.

Not deconstruction. The part after.

You Left. So Why Aren’t You Okay Yet? is a free 45-minute session that explains what’s actually happening when you did everything right — you questioned, you walked away, you rebuilt your beliefs — and you’re still waiting to feel okay.

Not in crisis. Just not quite right. Like freedom arrived but the floor didn’t come with it.

This isn’t a fix. It’s the explanation nobody gave you.

When something finally makes sense, the shame loosens. And that loosening is where everything else becomes possible.

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Every day it’s a different version of my life.

One day I’m building something.

The next day I’m starting over.

The next day I’m convinced I picked the wrong direction entirely.

I can feel how fast I’m switching.

I can’t tell which one is real.

There are too many options.

That’s the part I didn’t expect.

I thought the problem would be figuring out what I believed.

I didn’t think the problem would be having nothing to push against.

I sit down to decide what to work on and everything feels equally possible.

And equally wrong.

There’s no way to rank it.

No way to tell which one matters more.

No way to know what I’m supposed to be doing.

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And underneath that, there’s this pressure about time.

Like I already used too much of it.

Like I don’t have enough left to figure it out slowly.

Like whatever I choose needs to be the right thing immediately.

So I try to decide faster.

Which makes it worse.

I change directions.

Again.

All of this is happening inside a house full of people who are also in the middle of their own version of this.

Different details.

Same instability.

Things are shifting at the same time.

Nothing is landing at the same time.

I thought I would feel better.

That part felt obvious.

You get out.

You stop doing the things you didn’t want to do.

You stop answering to something that never felt fully yours.

You get your time back.

Your money back.

Your body back.

Your choices back.

And for a minute, that’s true.

And then something else shows up.

The laundry sits.

Decisions get harder.

Simple things take longer.

You stand in the kitchen and cannot answer a basic question like what do you want.

Not what should you want.

Not what makes sense.

What do you actually want.

There isn’t an answer.

I don’t have a framework for choosing.

I only have options.

Every option feels like it matters too much.

And not at all.

At the same time.

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I keep thinking there’s something I’m missing.

Some piece that would make this easier.

Some way other people are sorting this that I never learned.

Because it feels like I should be able to do this.

There’s nothing stopping me.

No one is telling me no.

No one is setting limits.

No one is deciding for me.

And still.

I can’t get traction.

There is a part of this that didn’t start when I left.

It just became visible then.

For a long time, I didn’t have to decide like this.

There were right answers.

There were next steps.

There were expectations that filled in the gaps when I didn’t know what to do.

I didn’t have to build a system for choosing.

I stepped into one that was already built.

Now there isn’t one.

So everything is a decision.

Everything is a direction.

Everything is something I could build.

And I don’t know how to sort any of it.

I can feel my brain trying to recreate something.

Some kind of structure.

Some way to narrow it down.

But it doesn’t hold.

It keeps slipping.

So I change directions again.

I don’t think I expected this part.

Not the intensity of it.

Not the way it shows up in things that should be simple.

Not the way it spreads into everything.

It’s not just big decisions.

It’s all of them.

What to work on.

What to prioritize.

What matters.

What counts as enough.

What direction I’m even moving in.

I keep looking for something to anchor to.

And finding nothing solid.

It’s not that there’s nothing there.

It’s that I don’t know how to use it.

So I keep moving.

Switching.

Starting.

Stopping.

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If this feels familiar, you’re not the only one.

A lot of us got out and then ran into something no one warned us about.

Not grief.
Not doubt.

The collapse that happens after the structure is gone.

I’m hosting a free workshop where I walk through what’s actually happening here and what it looks like to start rebuilding without recreating control.

You can join here.

If you want to understand why this is happening before you try to fix it, start here.

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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The anxiety showed up on a Tuesday and didn’t leave.

Not the kind with a clear cause. There was no crisis. No obvious trigger. Just a low hum underneath everything. A tightness that followed me from room to room. A feeling like I was behind on something, except I couldn’t name what.

N…

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The house is working.

Not perfectly.

But visibly.

There is fresh paint drying in multiple rooms.

Projects that sat half-finished for weeks got pulled back into motion because we have a birthday party this weekend and people are coming over.

Surfaces are being cleared.

Objects are being put away in places that are starting to make sense again.

The fourteen-year-old comes home from school and does homework.

Every day.

Last year was a different story.

This year something clicked.

Not all at once.

But enough that the pattern has held.

The seven-year-old ran the credit card processing at the school dance tonight.

Tapped cards.

Entered totals.

Moved through the line without getting lost.

Last week he was the fastest nervous system in the room.

This week he was the most precise.

There is a new autism diagnosis in the house.

The second.

It lands quietly.

More like something being named than something being discovered.

From the outside, the system looks like it is stabilizing.

My nervous system does not agree.

The anxiety came in without a clear reason.

No single event.

No obvious trigger.

Just a sudden escalation.

It feels like a fire in my chest.

Heat that builds faster than it makes sense to.

Shortness of breath.

That edge where it feels like something is about to tip past control.

Like I might go up in flames and be fully consumed by it.

Nothing in the room matches that level of urgency.

And still, it doesn’t let up.

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They just never told me I was allowed to have them.

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There are fewer bodies in the house this week.

The shift is immediate and not.

Their room is almost empty.

Not clean. Not reset. Just… emptied of most of what made it active.

They come back for another load every couple of days. A few more things disappear each time.

It looks like a room that has been moved out of but not finished.

There is a specific feeling to that.

Not presence. Not absence.

Something paused in between.

The counter behind the kitchen sink is clear.

The bottle sterilizer is gone.

The row of binkies.

The bottle warmer.

The swing is no longer in the dining room.

The freezer door opens without resistance.

No rows of breastmilk bags stacked and labeled. No careful system for thawing and feeding through the g-tube.

The pole is gone.

It used to move through the house on its own rhythm, following whoever was holding him.

Now the floor is still.

My son came back for the cat last night.

She started in this house years ago, when he was a teenager and brought her in without asking.

Then she moved up to college with him.

Then back here again when the baby was in the NICU.

Now she is gone again.

Another small migration completed.

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Nothing heavy on the calendar. A few conversations with friends. Some normal life logistics.

And yet by the end of the day my nervous system tipped into migraine territory.

The signals were there earlier.

They usually are.

A lot of neurodivergent adults eventually develop a specific skill:

predicting the crash.

A little more fri…

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