When I left the church I knew I’d have to figure out what I believed.
I didn’t realize I’d also have to figure out how a regular day actually happens.
It’s two in the afternoon. There’s a form on the counter that needs a signature and a dentist appointment that needs making. I have been busy ALL DAY. I have done neither of those things. And I don’t know where the rest of the day went.
In the church, my days were never mine to figure out.
Flashback: Allen and I had been asking the bishop to cut back on meetings for a long time. He wouldn’t. Every meeting was important. Every meeting needed to happen. They were what it took to keep the organization running. We just needed more faith.
Then one night the bishop and the stake president were sitting in our living room for a check-in. And I couldn’t help it. Everything I’d been holding came tumbling out between heaving breaths.
Here’s what I told them a Sunday looked like for our family:
Allen and I left early for ward council while the kids got themselves ready for church alone. Allen had bishopric meeting on top of that. Our priesthood-aged sons had their own presidency meetings, and then had to set up the sacrament before nine.
Then church. Two or three hours of it.
After church: Visits with ward council members. My presidency meeting. A presidency meeting for each of the girls’ classes. More boys’ presidency meetings, plus stake council. Primary meetings and youth meetings. Firesides for the youth and firesides for the adults. Choir practice. Set up, take down. The boys taking the sacrament to elderly members who couldn’t come, then visiting the less active. Allen and the boys out home teaching. Family dinner wherever it fit. Whatever broadcast was on that night.
I saved my visiting teaching for the week, like a reasonable person. I was self-righteous about it, too. This was one of those higher-law things the women understood and the menfolk just couldn’t reach. I kept that part to myself, and finished my breathless monologue with a tear escaping each eye before I could catch it.
The stake president looked at the bishop and said we needed fewer meetings.
The bishop couldn’t picture it. How could we do all the same things with less? These were the guidelines. It was in the manual.
And that was just Sunday.
The rest of the week held midweek activities and stake activities and girls camp planning and fundraisers and ward parties and preparedness nights and special committees and service projects. Watchful, involved visiting teaching. Family home evening every Monday. Morning and evening prayer, morning and evening scriptures, alone and as a family. A clean house and modest clothes and neat hair, because people were watching and we represented Christ and his church. Every member a missionary, so we were supposed to be weaving ourselves into the neighborhood too. The temple every month. Every week, if we were really trying. Baptisms with the teenagers. Afternoons on the temple grounds with the little ones, so they could feel the spirit there.
I never once had to figure out how a regular day happens. I just had to keep up with the avalanche.
It was exhausting. It also held me up. We need room to say both. Because when life gets harder or messier after leaving, the missing support looks an awful lot like proof that you were wrong to go.
We were instructed constantly in the art of maximizing our time. And we were taught that if we had enough faith, the Lord would unfold our time like an accordion, so there would always be room for one more thing.
It started way before callings. In high school there was seminary every morning, where I led the devotional or played the piano or participated in a challenge. Class presidency meetings to plan. Something to prepare for, always. I never had to find a reason to start. The reason came with a time slot, and on the days a time slot wasn’t enough, guilt picked up the slack.
A regular day now is a pile of things with no labels. A coaching client. A kid insisting his homework is impossible. A Substack draft. My grandson. Dinner for ten. And sleep, which my therapist keeps telling me is NOT optional.
They are not ranked. There’s no handbook. No bible. No one to give a general conference talk on it. And the accordion stays exactly the same size!
And here’s the tricky part. The more guilt and shame I dig out of my brain, the less there is shoving me to “get my act together!” So the push has to come from somewhere new. From the inside. Which is still very much an emerging skill.
So I’m developing other ways to start. A smaller first step. Someone sitting at the table with me while I work (body doubling). Sometimes a task that’s actually mine, one nobody handed me. Those, shockingly, tend to start themselves.
Reading my own limits remains the hardest part. In the past, exhaustion just meant I needed to pray more. I asked God every single night to take away my desire for comfort. (Yes, the same prayer from my last post. I prayed it a LOT.)
I’ve written about my dinner prep breakdowns before. Five o’clock, dinner for ten, and a drink already poured before the onions were chopped. My therapist and I came up with a rule: when I’m cooking, nobody talks to me unless someone is bleeding. And it worked! For quite a while. Then it didn’t. Turns out the accordion did not account for onions, a very cute but very needy seven-year-old, and the missing ingredient I swear I bought, all dancing on my last nerve at once.
Every time I hit empty, the same question shoved its way to the front of the line. Am I being selfish?
Everybody says listen to yourself. Okay, but which self? The one who wants to spin around and answer my seven-year-old’s very urgent question? Or the one who’s already fried and terrified that saying no will make him stop loving me?
I’m figuring it out by guessing, and then changing my answer. Often in front of my kids. Who have OPINIONS.
Friendships went the same way.
Visiting teaching put me in other women’s living rooms every month. Relief Society meant meals to deliver and somebody to call. I never had to wonder who I’d see that week. The church took care of that.
I had a best friend. We talked almost every day. I traveled just to spend time with her. We had always moved in the same direction and worked through life side by side.
Then I started making choices that felt wrong to her. Watching me make them hurt her. It disrupted her life, which disrupted mine.
After sixteen years of near-sisterhood, we don’t talk anymore.
I still don’t have a tidy sentence for that one.
Losing her and my church community also showed me how much of my social life had been set up for me without my noticing. Because the friendships I’m building now? They take a ridiculous amount of administration. Think of her. Text her. Suggest something. Compare calendars. Forget to follow up. Remember at eleven at night. Decide it’s too late to text. Six months disappear. There is no calling for this. I checked.
I never really learned how to start a friendship from scratch. Church always laid the first few bricks for me.
So if you miss the church’s version, the Sunday rhythm and the casseroles and being expected somewhere, that doesn’t mean you secretly want the beliefs back. Maybe you just miss knowing where you’ll be on Sunday. And somebody noticing when you’re not there.
I’m not trying to become some fiercely independent woman who doesn’t need anyone, either. I still need reminders and structure and other people. I just want to be the one picking which ones. And I want to actually know how to build them. Text first. Put a standing date on the calendar. Notice the kitchen rule wearing thin and put it back before I go looking for a bottle.
That’s what I grieve, actually. Not just the rules I followed. All the practice I never got.
I wasn’t learning nothing all those years! I raised six kids and kept countless presidencies organized. I could run a youth activity in my sleep. (Please don’t ask me to.) I don’t have to call that whole life a waste to be very clear about what it never taught me.
In those early days post-religion it really felt like I couldn’t handle freedom. Now I know that wasn’t it. It was more about what used to be handled for me.
My social calendar? Sunday. Who to call? The visiting teaching list. Getting started? Seminary, plus guilt for anything I missed. What mattered? Some man at a pulpit decided all of it.
It’s all mine now. My therapist and I built it slowly, and it’s still very much under construction. I discovered my own values. I decide what makes the cut and measure everything else against it. And I’m learning to tell myself I’m okay without needing a bishop to sign off.
I have that classic ADHD problem, though: EVERYTHING wants in. I want to do all of it. All the way. I picked my knitting needles back up and they helped me stop drinking. I travel alone now and leave very gay dishcloths all over my brother’s apartment. I got a hummingbird tattooed on my arm. The world turned out to be so much bigger than I was ever allowed to notice, and I want all of it. And nobody is unfolding my time like an accordion anymore.
So I choose. I choose wrong sometimes. And then I get to choose again, which apparently is allowed.
I wanted freedom. I’m so glad I have it. The rest comes along one piece at a time.
If this piece got you thinking about what used to hold your days together, I made “What Was Handled for Me?” to help you sort that out. Pick one thing you miss and one support you’d like to try. Nobody is assigning you a whole new life to start on Monday.
Get the worksheet in the Investigation Library.
And if you’re tired of trying to figure all of this out by yourself, you can work with me, Brittney Walker, certified ADHD Life Coach. We can look at where your actual days get stuck and build support around your brain, your capacity, and what matters to you now.