How-to: Take control of your Life

Life has gotten in the way of my blogging, and it makes me upset. It turns out that being an intern at Sherwin-Williams 28 hours a week + working part-time at good ol’ Panera + trying to manage some kind of social life = absolutely no time for anything. I’m sorry, I’ll try to be better. Now, without further ado (I had to look up how to spell that), here are my thoughts today:

I’m a control freak. I like knowing how things are going to turn out, and I like having control over my life. In fact, I’m such a control freak that I try to control every aspect of my life. Even things that I cannot possibly have any control over.

Death scares me, well, terrifies me actually, and I’ve talked about that before in a previous post. What scares me the most about dying is that I have no control. I don’t know when or how it’s going to happen, and I hate it.

In fact, many of the things about life that give me anxiety stem from not being able to control it. I worry about things that I cannot possibly have any say or control over, and that is why I am stressed/anxious 99% of the time. It’s exhausting, and I’m over it.

In the beginning of May, my boyfriend’s grandpa passed away, (He was an amazing man. I’m sorry if you didn’t get the chance to meet him.) and at his funeral service, his daughter, Maxine, spoke. She talked about a number of memories. Some made everyone laugh and some made us all cry, but there was one thing that she said that stuck with me. She was reading off his famous quotes, when one caught my attention:

Don’t worry about things you can’t control.

Don’t worry about things you can’t control. Well, duh. It makes so much sense. I sat there with a perplexed look on my face and thought about it for a second. Why would I cause so much worry and anxiety and stress worrying about things that I have absolutely no control over? It’s nothing but a headache, and I decided right then and there that I would stop. And guess what? Life has been so much better ever since.

Don’t get me wrong, I still have that (stupid) little voice in the back of my head that comes up with these hypothetical scenarios of situations that I have no control over, but I don’t listen to it. I’ve made a conscious effort to tell myself to shut up and just let my life take me the way it wants to take me.

And I have never felt more in control.

You have to realize that, with some things, you have no say in what will happen. You have to take a deep breath and release all of the worry inside of you.

Taking control of your life is realizing that sometimes you have no control. Everything will find a way to work itself out, just relax.