How to wear out your brain by breakfast
On losing the ability to tell what you want
Most of my life I have known exactly what I wanted.
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.
The Sunday morning when I finally acknowledged I couldn't bear to go to church any more is 25 years ago now but I remember it like yesterday. I had to drive out of the parish to handle the guilt and I sat on a bench in a public park and just wept. Looking back, it didn't solve all my problems overnight but when I came out officially as AuDHD much later a lot of the territory already felt very familiar. You express it very well
Yes… the shared experience for me is orienting my whole life around the fulfilling (performing?) “goodness”.
Without someone else’s standard of goodness driving my life, who am I?
And yes… it’s a slow discovery of trial and error. A mentor of mine (James-Olivia Chu-Hillman) offered me this inquiry as a self learning tool: “what decisions did I make and what did I notice?”
Learning to slow it down, notice the decision, and then paying attention to how that felt, what it got me, do I like it, do I want more of that? Because… yay! I get to make a new decision.
Thank you for writing this. It’s a gift to read your experience and understand more of my own via yours.