Confessions Of A Control Freak

I wake up between 5:00am and 6:00am every day without an alarm clock.  I have egg whites and oatmeal every morning.  I drink my coffee black. No coffee. No talkee.

I microwave my ice cream for 10 seconds when it’s too hard, I like my dinner so hot it burns my face off,  and I have to eat soup with a large spoon. I can’t watch TV when someone else is talking and a million other weird preferences. Like everyone, there are just some things I like a certain way.

I used to have a very hard time when things didn’t go my way. I’m not sure if it was through getting older, dealing with life’s inevitable failures, heartbreaks or hitting a few rock bottoms, but whatever it was, I learned that I cannot control what happens to me. I can, however, control the way I respond to it. I have learned to look at life through a lense of my life as a journey. We all have our own. We all will, without a doubt, be handed some massive knuckle sandwiches from time to time.

In my experience,  every failure, heartbreak, bump, knuckle sandwich – whatever you want to call them – rather than play the victim (permanently), I have always taken away a lesson. I have allowed myself to come out the other end a wiser, more introspective person. That’s not to say, there are facets of my life where I don’t still hold onto some regret, resentment or unpleasant emotion. I try to go deeper with that and figure out how to resolve it. I look at things like that like a knot. The only person that is capable or responsible for detangling it is me.  I’m always going to be a work in progress and my goal is never perfection (because that’s exhausting and something that will never be attained), but learning and evolving and potentially helping others along the way.

I have also learned that if I rely on others to solve my problems, I will almost always be disappointed or let down. That’s not to say I don’t lean on people for support. We all need friends to bounce ideas off of, but at the end of the day, I am the only person that is living my journey. 

What I have recently wrapped my head around is paying attention to what triggers me. Those are the things I need to work on the most. Paying attention to the people who trigger me or piss me off, because I believe those are the people I have the most to learn from. They are lessons that show up disguised as annoyances when in reality they are a mirror showing me something that is unresolved internally.

Once I started looking at things from this perspective, my anxiety and constant battle for control started to relinquish. Are there days where I swear at the person cutting me off in traffic? Of course. Are there days where I am a raging bitch? Definitely. But, life just seems easier when I pay attention to controlling my response to what comes rather than trying to control the outcome.