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Letting Go of Control and Expectations

posted 9th June 2010    Written by: Heather Rae    CATEGORY: Heather Rae, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 2

I’m going through something these days.  There’s something inside of me that wants to burst out and be free.  I keep getting these urges to do something crazy and step outside of my comfort zone – as if some part of my being has been stifled all these years and is finally ready to show itself.

I’m not sure what’s going on. Or why I feel the need to do things that are so out of character.  I find myself craving adventure and the unknown – I want to jump out of airplanes despite my fear of both flying and heights, go skinny dipping, have wild sex, go hang gliding and quit my job (oh wait, I already did that).

All of my life, I’ve been a control freak.  I’ve done everything just so and have fully expected said things to turn out exactly as I planned. Why?  Because I needed them to.

The truth is, I put a lot of pressure on myself to be perfect – a perfect student, a perfect employee, a perfect friend, a perfect fiancé, a perfect daughter.  Only now have I stopped to ask myself where this pressure came from.  Who was it that first told me I couldn’t make mistakes?  And, for that matter, is there such a thing as perfection?  What I described sounds more like a Stepford Wife than a real person.

As you might expect, life hasn’t met my expectation of perfection.  Sometimes things have worked out the way I envisioned.  But the opposite has generally been truer – things have worked out in completely different ways than I anticipated.  And in these situations, I often ended up feeling lost or out of control.  I know it may seem odd, but I’ve just now realized that being in control of everything isn’t even close to possible.

And this ridiculous need to control every outcome has had a way of making life rather difficult.  So, for some reason, I’ve found myself moving in the exact opposite direction.  I’m taking chances and calculating risks and putting myself in situations that I don’t know how to navigate. I actually want to make mistakes and just see what happens.  Loss of control is a weird feeling.  At times, I’ve even found myself trying to control my loss of control.  Now that sounds ridiculous.

I guess right now I’m just working to let go of expectations.  And one way of doing that has been to let go of my need to be in control.

When a person wants to control every aspect of life, they often end up feeling the need to do everything themselves, as counting on other people for that level of perfection is almost impossible.  I’ve decided I don’t want to be so independent anymore.  I want to learn to lean on people, to ask for help and count on friends for support.  I want to cry on someone’s shoulder and feel okay about it.  I want to be completely open for other people to see.  I hope one day I’ll figure out how to do that — without hiding behind a smile and vague niceties.

Wow.  I feel like what I’ve just described sounds more like a midlife crisis than a quarter life crisis. It’s the type of thing you see all the time when a middle aged man hooks up with a twenty year old, buys a Porsche and goes bungee jumping.  In an odd way, it’s kind of comforting — to know I’m not alone in this confusion.  Does that sound absolutely crazy?

I don’t know.  What I do know is that in reality I have so few answers and so many questions.  And maybe life isn’t about seeking answers.  Maybe it’s just about experiences.  And growing.  And learning.  And finding ways to accept yourself for exactly who you are.

photo credit: her wings

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