My need for control

I guess I was a little bitch when I was a kid. I remember my mom and sister calling me a control freak, saying, “If Chelsea isn’t happy, no one is happy.”

Maybe I was a controlling brat when I was a kid, but I was just that — a kid. A very malleable child that grew up hearing those words in her head. They still echo. So much so that I wonder if hearing them as a child had some sort of pre-determined destiny on the person I grew up to be and the struggles I’ve had with either too much control or too little.

It’s like when someone tells you something or brings up a quality you hadn’t considered before, and you wonder if it’s true. And then you start focusing on it too much and it becomes true regardless. I’m tired of trying to control things around me, or control myself for that matter. And honestly, I don’t know if my struggle for self control is a symptom or a cause. Sometimes I don’t struggle. Sometimes everything is easy, and when it is easy I can’t seem to remember what it was like when it wasn’t.

Is a lack of self control a symptom of the stress I feel? The stress of it all being up to me? The stress of denying myself? Of not having something higher to lean on? Or better yet, am I feeling a pressure from everything I know that I’m struggling to implement? I know this kinda might not make sense, but is my lack of self control stemming from my desire to control everything? That’s what I’m really asking.

I look at the things I have on lock, the things that over time have become second nature and easy for me to do, like going to the gym, and I can’t help but wonder who the fuck I would be without it. Like I have to work out. It’s part of who I am and it makes me feel good, but it sometimes it makes me want to scream because in the end the thing I think I’m controlling is actually controlling me.

It’s a fucking riddle. Trying to control things goes right in line with what Nir Eyal says about our avoidance of pain. Because the psychology of restriction causes us to want to rebel. We end up losing control even though we were so determined to keep it because we’re “being driven by the desire to free ourselves from the pain of wanting.”

Recently I’ve been reading Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday. The chapter I read this morning was called “Accept a Higher Power.” He starts this chapter off by talking about Alcoholics Anonymous and how there is a religious component to it that many of the members seem to struggle with.

I find this interesting because when I was a sophomore in college, a psychology class I was in required me to go to an AA meeting and write about it. Well, I have sifted through my school emails all the way back to 2013, and found the paper I wrote about it. It’s funny. I start off the paper talking about a different meeting I went to, a cocaine anonymous meeting, and how I liked it better than the AA meeting because it wasn’t centered around religion. I wrote,

“It’s not that I don’t believe in God, or at least some sort of higher power working in favor of us all, I just have something against believing that a person is not able to help themselves without using religion as a crutch.”

It’s interesting to look back at that and see that I didn’t really want to accept the version of God they were spitting, because it meant giving up control of my own ability to self-regulate. It’s ironic that I saw God as a crutch when what I should have seen it as is an internal support.

Holiday mentions how people in AA question, “What the hell any of this has to do with sobriety anyway. What does religion or faith have to do with anything?” And I get it. I sat in that meeting years ago and I felt resentment.

When I was in a Pentecostal boarding school as a teenager, all I saw were rules. It’s a paradox. I actually liked boarding school in a way because I had no control. I didn’t have to set limits because they were set for me. I made no decisions for myself. I was told what and how much to eat, what to wear, where to stand, how many minutes to shower. Everything. It was easy giving up control to someone else. In a way, it freed up my mind to think about other things rather than my own self centeredness.

It’s hilarious that I never really understood until writing this that maybe that was the fucking point of boarding school.

Anyway. Back to Holiday’s book. He talks about how it’s not about God. It’s about surrender. It’s about realizing that you’re not in control. Regardless of whatever higher power you believe in. If addiction is “in a more practical sense, a process of becoming obsessed with one’s own self and the primacy of one’s urges and thoughts,” then “admitting that something bigger than you is out there is a breakthrough. It means an addict finally understands that they are not God, that they are not in control, and really never have been.” [p.134]

This speaks to me. Partly because I am not going to lie, in my search for God I have many times came to the conclusion that I actually … am God? — that we all are. Whether it’s through an idealistic feeling of the circumstances I attract, or because I know that fulfilling my creator is what would ultimately fulfill me. It’s almost as if through my actions and beliefs … I am creating my reality, so I must be God. And while you’d think that would be freeing, where I would feel in control, maybe dipping myself back and forth in that thought experiment is actually doing the opposite.

I guess that’s why they say we were created in his image, whoever you want him to be. Because although we can control certain things, like our attitudes and the stories we tell ourselves, there are things that aren’t in our control and never will be.

And maybe the sooner I give up this pressure on myself to have it all together or figure it all out or control situations, the more free of psychological stress I can be — the more I can dip into that playful zone where I’m not judging myself. The more I can explore. And maybe if I can learn to stay there — if I can be fluid — I can stop wanting things I tell myself I can’t have.

Maybe then I won’t feel this need to control and set limits on myself, because I simply won’t need to.