There Was No One Watching. It Didn’t Matter.

I picked up Yesteryear because I thought it was about someone else.

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.

---

⚠️ 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.