Control Is Just Another Word for Fear
Real Friends Don’t Mock the Goofy Ones
This week I felt like I lost control a bit.
Not in a bad—Imma gonna eat five tubs of ice cream—way, but in a way where I lost all my systems that keep me moving forward, keep me getting my work done, keep me focused.
That’s because we rescued an adorable, mischief-driven puppy of bounding love.
Anyway, one of my dads was all about systems. Dinner was at 5 p.m. Breakfast was at 6 a.m. Bedtime was at 8 a.m. It’s a major reason my mom would cite about why she divorced him.
“He was so rigid, Carrie,” she’d tell me. “I knew you could never thrive growing up in the same house as him.”
I’m not so sure how true that was, but it was a truth to my mom, and that was enough, you know? Truth can be wiggly like that.
Here’s the thing. When you have a new puppy and a slightly resistant original dog (it’s all good now, it just took four days), life teaches you that you don’t have control and all your systems get shot to heck.
And that’s okay.
When you give up that rigidity of how your day has to look, it frees up a lot of mental energy that you’ve been using to make sure that you spend 7:15-7:40 on putting out a newspaper story, 7:40-7:45 on leg exercises, 7:45-8:05 editing a client’s novel, 8:05-8:10 more leg exercises and so on.
Sounds exhausting? It’s kind of how I live my days.
Here’s the other thing though. I am really good at hustling and scheduling my work. But it’s keeping me from connecting deeply with friends, family, the pups.
Pogie the pup is like that, too. She has routines, spaces, ways she likes her world to work. The new puppy flopped and gallivanted and played right through all Pogie’s beloved systems.
And there’s this other thing that happens sometimes: you start to trust the system you’ve created more than your own abilities to deal with the unexpected, the spontaneous, and so on.
Giving up that absolute control of your schedule (or others or your beloved tennis ball or your everything) can lower your anxiety. You get to focus on things you can actually control (mindset, responses).
New possibilities? Surprises? Opportunities? Those all can happen when you embrace the unexpected and lean into it a bit more.
Self confidence? That might go up too, maybe? But allegedly when you deal with things that don’t go according to plan, your confidence increases.
Over on Tiny Buddha they write, “We try to control things because of what we think will happen if we don’t.
“In other words, control is rooted in fear.”
I’m kind of tired of living in fear.
Yesterday, I went to breakfast with two friends and I actually just said what was worrying me, which I don’t often do. I told them a big raw truth about how I feel like I’ve had to let go of some friends who sort of constantly make fun of me for just being me—goofy, sort of uptight about things, having a weird voice, not being a hottie.
“Those aren’t friends,” one woman told me from across the table.
“Not at all,” said my other friend.
They were right.
But in my world of systems, I hadn’t really allowed myself to really think about who brings light into my world and who brings darkness, I just sort of let those friends slide. In my system, it was easier to do that, to lean away from change and just let it be.
“Control is a result of being attached to a specific outcome—an outcome we’re sure is best for us, as if we always know what’s best,” Tiny Buddha writes. “When we trust that we’re okay no matter what circumstances come our way, we don’t need to micromanage the universe. We let go. And we open ourselves to all sorts of wonderful possibilities that aren’t there when we’re attached to one ‘right’ path.”
Systems are great, but they can also keep you from being open to change unless you really work possibilities into them. Jack the Puppy taught me (and Pogie) that this week. So did my friends, my real friends, at breakfast. And that? It’s a pretty big deal.
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SO MANY LINKS TO LEARN MORE ABOUT CONTROL
https://www.betterup.com/blog/how-to-let-go-of-control
https://www.verywellmind.com/letting-go-of-control-can-help-you-enjoy-life-5208817
https://medium.com/@dualisticunity/letting-go-to-gain-the-paradox-of-control-f07a5eda144b
https://tinybuddha.com/blog/let-go-of-control-how-to-learn-the-art-of-surrender/
Your breakfast friends are absolutely right! ❤️ And I have a really hard time not having control over certain things in my life (that's when my eating disorders really kicked in) but I'm trying hard to work on that. Thank you for the inspiration, my friend.
♥️