I built the FlyLady control journal exactly the way she said to. Did you ever do FlyLady? I know, I’m dating myself.
The big three-ring binder. A cover I designed myself with scrapbooking markers on loose-leaf notebook paper. A zippered paper pouch in the front with stamps and pencils, because she said to keep stamps and pencils in there. A through Z dividers for addresses. A calendar section. Every zone of my house mapped out on its own page. Routines. Umpteen dividers.
I had a baby.
Fine. I had babies. Plural. Overlapping.
I clung to that binder. I referred to it all the time. I never once ran it as a full system, because it was far too complicated for my brain to actually manage.
The morning and evening routines were the parts I really tried to keep. Then the baby would be up all night, and in the morning I’d sleep late with him instead of getting up to work through his nap. By the time I opened my eyes the routine was already broken. My brain does not do partial credit. Broken meant over and done.
At church, broken had a different interpretation. Weakness. Sin.
There’s a promise in the Book of Mormon that God will make weak things become strong for the humble. That read as a work order to me.
I had more than my share of weak spots. At the time I didn’t recognize this as neurodivergence in an ill-fitting environment. Just failure. Just weakness. Just a long list of things I was doing wrong that needed fixing.
So I set about turning those weaknesses into strengths one at a time. First, I stopped being late. Then I was on time, every time. Then early. Then I did my visiting teaching every single month, perfectly, and moved on to turning my judgmental streak into charity.
It sort of worked. The problem was the list. It kept not ending. Every weakness I fixed gave way to three more.
So I prayed. All day, silently, in my heart. Repentance. Constant repentance. And at night, I’d kneel on the floor beside the bed with my elbows on the mattress and my hands clasped against my forehead, begging for forgiveness.
Dear loving, gracious Father in Heaven, I’m so grateful for... and I list everything. Then I’m sorry for everything. Then I beg. Please help me become more like thee. Change my heart. Turn it toward thee. Fill me with thy spirit so that I have no desire for comfort or laziness, only to do thy work and move thy kingdom forward.
Ugly tears. Every night.
Had I a whip, I’d have used it.
If you grew up in it, you know how this works. Nobody had to tell me that sleeping in with the baby was a spiritual problem. Every lesson about becoming more like him had already said so.
Then I learned about ADHD.
ADHD gets in the way of remembering intentions, starting things, and keeping a routine going when circumstances shift. Now look at what faithfulness requires. Pray daily. Study daily. Be there on time. Prepared. Without anyone reminding you.
Read that with an ADHD brain. It’s a symptom checklist with whip-cracking sound effects.
I meant every word of those prayers. I still overslept with the baby.
I don’t kneel anymore but the little judge in my brain didn’t get the memo.
Right now, there are fur tumbleweeds rolling across my floor courtesy of three dogs (one is on loan) and a cat. The camping stuff from last weekend is still out. My car looks like a crime scene.
I see it, and the cold shower of shame pours over me.
I hate myself.
Or the other one. I’m such an idiot.
It lands before I’ve had a conscious thought.
What’s different is how fast I catch it now. No. I don’t believe that. I can’t do everything. I’m choosing what comes first, and the camping gear lost.
Then I get nosy instead of mean.
The camping gear made it home. It made it out of the car. It stalled at putting away. Why there?
Maybe the bins live somewhere annoying, or the tent still needs to dry. Maybe I’m just DONE after a long trip… which is allowed. Or we’re going again really soon, and we want to sort through everything before it gets packed away.
For most of my life, I skipped right past questions like that.
Take punctuality. I really did fix that one. Chronically late to reliably early.
My method was to move my entire life up an hour. Everything laid out the night before. Every route mapped, plus twenty or thirty minutes of cushion. No stops on the way. No gas stops, no “quick” errands. So plan accordingly.
It worked beautifully. Unless you lived with me. (Ask my kids. Actually, don’t.)
Picture me at the front door with my keys in my hand, yelling up the stairs at a house full of children who did not share my feelings about rushing out the door to sit in a parking lot for twenty minutes. I fought with anyone who seemed too cavalier about time. And I took that cavalierness personally. We were going to be on time if it killed us! It very nearly did.
But I was early!
Weakness made strong. Check.
What I never did was ask why I’d been late in the first place.
Turns out ADHD has a whole buffet of ways to lose time. A shower obviously takes four minutes. (I have believed this my entire life, and it has never once been true.) The eleven tiny steps between deciding to leave and the car actually moving don’t exist until you’re in the middle of them. And sometimes I’m staring straight at the clock and my body still won’t get off the couch.
So what I’d built was a workaround. A pretty good one, honestly. I still lay things out the night before. I still pad my drive time.
The yelling, less so.
I hadn’t solved anything for my brain. I’d just found a way to force the required result out of it, whether it understood the assignment or not. Nobody was asking what that cost. Least of all me.
I see this constantly in coaching. Urgency, fear, and a frankly heroic amount of effort will get an ADHD brain to do almost anything. Do it long enough and we forget it was ever a workaround. We just become the one who’s always early. Or the one who finishes everything at two in the morning, because a deadline has to be close enough to smell before our brains will show up.
I’m looser about the clock now. Part of that is knowing where my time leaks out, so I can plan around it without turning every departure into a military operation.
The other part surprised me. I started counting my own time as worth something.
For years, other people’s comfort was an obligation and mine was an indulgence. Being late was disrespectful. Burning an extra hour of my morning so I’d never be late was righteous.
Apparently, the respect only needed to go in one direction.
I’m still digging through these old adaptations, trying to figure out which ones were built to help me live my life and which ones were built to make me acceptable.
Which brings me back to the camping gear.
Sometimes the mess really does cost somebody. Someone needs the cooler and can’t find it. Someone trips over a tent pole in the dark. I apologize, and I move the tent pole. No sermon required afterward.
Sometimes, though, it’s just camping gear on the floor.
I could make a rule about that. I could design an unloading routine, print the checklist, laminate it, and give it its own tab in a binder. I know exactly how. I still have the scrapbooking markers.
Maybe some version of that would even help. First I want to know what the actual problem is. Too many steps? A storage spot I hate? Am I just wiped out after a trip? Or is this not a problem worth solving this week?
And then there’s the question I never once asked on my knees.
Do I even want to be doing this?
Does the camping gear need a home by tonight, or is that FlyLady talking?
The urge to make a plan to become a better person hasn’t gone anywhere. I’ve been building those plans since I was old enough to believe God was keeping score. And I mix up the things I struggle to do with the things that are wrong with me. Constantly. Knowing how ADHD works did not undo decades of believing that trying harder was the answer to everything.
But these days I’m more interested in the woman who’s already here, with this brain and these dogs and this car. I’m curious what makes things hard for her, and which of her elaborate coping mechanisms are still earning their keep. Mostly I want to find out what she’d actually like to do with her time.
The tumbleweeds are still there tonight.
Nobody’s soul is in danger.
A little something for paid subscribers
If this essay has you wondering which of your own rules, routines, and coping mechanisms are actually helping you, I made you something.
Is This Actually Working for Me? is a two-page reflection guide for examining one of those old adaptations. Where did it come from? What problem was it solving? What’s it costing you now? And do you even want to keep doing it?
No new routines to maintain. No self-improvement project. Just a chance to get curious.
You’ll find it in The Investigation Library, available to paid After Obedience subscribers.