When Grace Quietly Becomes Permission

The Mental Gibbs Slap I Didn't Know I Needed

If you’ve ever watched NCIS, you know the Gibbs Slap. No warning. No long lecture. Just – smack – back of the head, snap out of it, get moving. Anybody else know exactly what I’m talking about?

I’ve been thinking lately that I owe myself one. Not because I’m being lazy. I want to be clear about that right up front. What I’ve been living through – grief, financial stress, business fluctuations, caregiving exhaustion, medical stresses and changes, relationship challenges, ADHD freeze so thick I could set a table on it – that’s not laziness. Those are real things. Heavy things. And I’ve given myself a lot of grace around them, as I should have.

But here’s the honest truth I’m sitting with:

Grace has quietly become permission

I’ve let dopamine – or more accurately, the lack of it – have far more control than I ever intended. Somewhere along the way, I stopped moving.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. It crept in the way these things always do – one skipped shower, one load of laundry left idle, one unpaid bill set aside, one “I’ll call them tomorrow” that turned into weeks. Then month. I can explain every single one of those decisions with something real, valid, and true. Every. Single. One. And that’s why they were so convincing

And that’s exactly the problem. I’ve gotten very, very good at rationalizing myself into a standstill.

Like many with executive function challenges, dopamine dysregulation, RSD, grief, etc – I know what I need to do. I even want to do it. But between knowing and doing, there’s this gap – and my ADHD brain has set up camp there, built a fire, made itself comfortable, and started hosting dinner parties. I call it my  ADHD brain here because this isn’t really about being neuroextra. This is executive function. Plain and simple.

It’s not that I don’t understand the problem. I understand it deeply. Maybe too deeply now that I have been diagnosed. Because sometimes understanding becomes another reason not to move.

• I can’t do that right now – I’m still processing
• I need to get my mind right first
• My hormones are unbalanced
• I'll start Monday
• I'm failing with "this"...might as well not do "that"
• Tomorrow will be a better day
• Need to change my medication  
• Once things settle down

Truth is, things don’t settle down. We settle into them. So here I am, giving myself the mental Gibbs slap.

Not the cruel kind. Not the shame spiral kind where you beat yourself up until you feel worse and do even less. I’m talking about the wake up kind. The “hey – come back” kind. The kind that says: you’ve had time to feel it, and you still have time to feel it, but you also have to live.

Cleaning the house is not going to fix itself while I think about it.
The bills don't care about my grief.
My friends don't need the polished version of me. They miss the actional me.

I don’t need to have it all together. I just need to do the next right thing. I tell that to my coaching clients all the time. It’s time I listen to myself. One thing! Not the whole list. Not the perfect plan. Not after I’ve processed everything and reorganized my feelings into a tidy framework.

Just. The. Next. Thing.

Here’s what keeps me from drowning in shame, I’m not the first person to sit in this exact gap. And God doesn’t do shame.

Paul – yes, that Paul – wrote about it so plainly it almost makes me laugh (because it is so true). Paul wrote that he didn’t understand his own actions. The things he wanted to do, he didn’t do. The things he didn’t want to do…those somehow kept happening (see Romans 7, if you want to read it again).

That’s not a man who didn’t know better. That’s not someone without faith, discipline or even drive. That’s just…human.

If Paul could write that out loud, I can say it out loud also. We can all say it.

We’re not stuck because there’s something uniquely wrong or shameful about us. We’re stuck because this is part of living in a broken world. And there is grace for this – not the kind that lets us stay frozen. The kind that says get up, the journey’s not over, and you don’t have to do it perfectly to do it.

So here’s mine.

Gail…stop waiting to feel ready.

• Wash the dishes
• Make the phone call
• Answer the email
• Pay the bill
• Take a shower
• Walk the dog

You don’t need motivation. You need movement.

Gibbs Slap administered. Not because I’ve failed. Because I’m still alive. As long as God gives me today, there’s still a next thing to do.

Time to do it.