Losing Control of My Control
A note from my good pal, Dani.
I have the best friends in the world who gave me the encouragement to share my story. Here we go.
I want to preface this note with 3 things:
I am privileged to be able to write this. I acknowledge people come from all different hardships and experiences. This is not to discount or compare my experience, a struggle is a struggle is a struggle.
This is my personal experience. I am sharing it in the spirit of openness and acceptance. Not as a complaint or to interfere with anyone else’s journey.
I am proud to share this part of my life, emphasis on the word part. I have had lots of beautiful, sad, enlightening, loving and learning moments throughout this time. This is only a portion of my experience.
Ok, so some personal context on me and my control.
Control is a strength and coping mechanism that I learned years ago. Growing up there were many things that I couldn’t control, specifically in my personal life, that led to me to latch on to all the things I could control. Makes perfect sense if you think about it.
Control, like any other strength, can be a service or a disservice. I’ve learned that it’s about having the ability to see when each comes into play. It’s a balancing act. If you know me, you know when I do something, I do it HARD. I am passionate as it gets about everything from running to TikTok and loving my friends and family. In many ways, control has served me and brought me lots of success. I worked extremely hard at my job, my relationships and my hobbies. But, it’s no surprise that my control has not served me when it comes to my control around eating and exercise.
I leaned heavily into controlling my exercise and food because I found so much comfort in it. It’s what I knew. It’s what I could fully control. If I ever felt out of control in other pillars of my life, I would up the control ante with my food and how hard I was working out. It was damaging, but it was also familiar, so I would hold onto it because it felt good in the moment. I was always aware of it, but never wanted to accept it as a problem. I never got physically sick so I felt like I didn’t need to address it full on. This was almost worse.
Diving into my issues with control would mean me having to talk about other aspects of my personal life that aren’t my story to tell, and things that made me really sad to think about. Having controlled my weight and exercise for so many years, I also felt like my identity (how others saw me, not how I saw myself) was tied up in how fast I could run, how many workouts I’ve tried, and how I look. This added layer made it even harder for me to deal with it.
What’s funny is in recent years in conversations with close friends, I’ve brought up wanting to slow down and be less regimented with how I eat and workout. I would slowly beat around the bush but then shut down the conversation, because I wasn’t quite ready to relinquish the control.
The biggest thing that held me back from sharing openly, and why I felt the need to write this is the embarrassment and shame I felt around people assuming I was doing this from a place of vanity. I was worried that people would or were already judging me. It’s really hard to understand the reason why people are the way they are, unless they tell you. So for me, it has nothing to do with looking a certain way. It was simply a matter of being able to control something.
You might be wondering how I made the shift from KNOWING I needed to relinquish control to WANTING to.
This journey wasn’t as simple as it appears on paper, it took a lot of time to get there. Here’s a few things that got me here:
The realization that control wasn’t making me happy. I found comfort, not happiness, in controlling my food and exercise. And I can find comfort in so many other thing like my friends and family
To be a good partner, daughter, sister and friend I need to be the healthiest version of myself.
The world is huge and is filled with BIG problems. Why am I wasting my energy trying to control things that don’t make me happy?!
The feeling of surrender, nourishing my body, letting go of strict routine, and exercising in a way that restores and strengthens my body feels amazing. Like, really AMAZING. Like any other habit, it takes time to unlearn something that felt like a natural reflex. I’ve been almost hardwired to think about how clean I can eat. How hard I can run. The truth is, I have actually leveraged my control muscles in building new healthy habits. It’s a balancing act of finding evolving routines that serve me, like a slow morning walk and my Nespresso with oat milk, versus the ones that don’t, like intense workouts first thing in the AM when my body just wants to rest. It’s also been about being ok with routines changing, routines being non-existent and life happening!
Why am I talking about this now?
I have come to a place where I know with complete certainty that I don’t need to be ashamed of my journey. I am not wrong or flawed. I am human, whole, complete and this is just a part of my story. It makes me, ME, and that’s ok. Coming to this feeling of levity and acceptance has supported me in being able to speak openly about it. Life is hard and we’re all going through something. The more we can open up, the more we can find compassion for ourselves and for each other.
My biggest regret ( I still have pits thinking about it) is the time my loved ones spent worrying about me and checking in. I can never give back the energy they used worrying about me and loving me. I am so thankful for all the space, grace and patience everyone gave me.
So, now what?
Letting go of control was something I did on my own, it was a very personal journey. There wasn’t a massive “ah ha moment,” therapy session or intervention. It’s been a slow burn over the past year that has really sunk in over the past 5 months.
Again, this is my own experience and what is true to me. I don’t feel like I can give advice, but what I hope is that anyone who reads this leaves a little kinder and loves harder. We never know what people might be going through, all we can do is listen and do our best to make people feel like they belong.
In this new era of uncontrolled, control there’s some things I am really looking forward to:
Spaghetti and meatballs with Liz
Burnt toast & PB with my dad in the mornings
Swimming in Kits pool and having beers at The Local with friends
Enjoying all of @dans.plate (shameless plug)
The new routines that come and go, and the beautiful sense of surrender knowing that everything is going to be okay