Letting Go: Confessions of a Control Freak

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Musical accompaniment (listen while you read): Fiona Apple, A Mistake, from her second album, When the Pawn . . . (1999). “I've acquired quite a taste. For a well-made mistake. I wanna make a mistake. Why can't I make a mistake?”

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I score way to the right on the introversion/extraversion scales on personality tests. I’m an extravert. No question about it. Many euphemisms describe my general way of being in the world, ranging from outgoing to assertive to aggressive.

Confessions of a Control Freak

I’m accustomed to being in control. In my earlier life, you would have called me a control freak – some people still do – but I have moved on. I’m a pre-crastinator (the opposite of a procrastinator – always ahead of schedule). I’m an inveterate planner and multi-tasker. All great skills honed to near-perfection by the control freak I once was. As my first boss once remarked, our weaknesses are typically the excesses of our strengths.

And yet, I am also quite spontaneous, even a bit impetuous. Because I get bored easily, doing new things has always been part of my DNA. I rarely make a catastrophic decision, but I sometimes find that I have to . . . recalibrate.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to reconcile these two quite divergent tendencies: control and spontaneity.

When my first marriage began to crumble, I became obsessed with cleaning. I’d grown up in a tidy household; everything in its place. My ex was a slob, and like many boys of his generation, he grew up in a traditional household where his mother took care of the business of living. The vacuum created by his disinterest in participating in the daily activities of managing our life created the perfect environment for me to step in and take over, a tendency that reasserted itself over and over throughout my adult life.

I couldn’t control the fact that our marriage was falling apart, but I could control stupid stuff like making sure that our clothes were perfectly folded, that the kitchen sink was always free of dirty dishes, that the magazines and paper detritus of our lives (this was the pre-internet world – everything was on paper) were carefully ordered and lined up. I imagined that this was a substitute for order in our emotional lives. It wasn’t very satisfying, but what was a control freak to do?

Positive Reinforcement (So Not Helpful)

My tendency to take control served me well in my early career. I stepped in and solved problems even when I hadn’t been asked to. People began to see me as someone who would take care of messy, complicated problems, so they deferred to me. I earned a reputation for getting things done. I got promoted and moved up quickly in my first several jobs, landing the role of director of the University of Minnesota Press several months shy of my thirtieth birthday. Suddenly, I really was in charge.

Being in control is heady. It’s also great cover for insecurity. I was perpetually anxious and frequently terrified that I would make a mistake. But I knew how to fix functional things – broken processes in particular – and I was paradoxically quite fearless about making decisions that no one else wanted to make. Gradually, people around me simply ceded responsibility for decisions to me. This was even more true in my second marriage – to a brilliant intellectual with even less interest than my first husband in the mundane aspects of living.

The thing about being in control all of the time is that you lose the ability to ask for help. Worse, people stop offering differing opinions. I buried my vulnerabilities under a veneer of competence. It was like putting up a big sign that said, “Don’t worry, I’ve got this. Leave me alone.” (Not what an extravert needs or wants!) In my later career, when I led a team of human resources professionals in a large NYC-based cancer center, I got feedback that people resented me for always showing up like I was smarter than everyone else, assuming I had all the answers. Nothing could have been further from the truth, but my control freak self just plowed ahead.

When the pandemic hit, and John’s health began its precipitous decline, it became crystal clear that being in control wasn’t an option anymore. I had to let go of the idea that I could fix everything. He was dying; I couldn't fix that, no matter how hard I tried.

And so I began to recalibrate. 

It turns out that letting go is both easier and harder than it's purported to be. Easier because once you decide to do it, in theory, all you have to do is nothing. Harder because breaking ingrained habits is Sisyphean. The pop-psych literature tells you it takes at least a month to break a habit. In my experience, that estimate borders on ludicrous. You are never, ever done (the definition of Sisyphean). 

I’d make a commitment not to pick up all of the stuff that littered the tiny one-bedroom apartment in which John and I had hunkered down in the early days of the pandemic (with a puppy, heaven help me, what was I thinking). I’d make it a couple of days and then indulge in a frenzy of organizing. 

The team I was leading at work – I’d been head of the department for less than six months when we were sent remote in March of 2020 – was in utter chaos. All of our work had historically been done in person. No one had any work to do, which caused enormous anxiety and distress among my team on top of the fact that we were all suddenly working remotely. In the midst of the personal and social disruption that erupted during the early days of the pandemic. 

I stepped up and in and began what would turn into a two-year whirlwind of program redesign, shifting all of our learning and performance programs to virtual platforms, redesigning our approach to performance management, launching an engagement survey, licensing new technology to deliver customized learning, overhauling our leadership development approach, retraining staff to facilitate over Zoom, convincing the senior leadership of the organization that this was a better way to do things. I took control.

Two years later, when most of the structural reorganization and program redesign was complete, I found myself inexplicably depressed. I knew that my highly competent and dedicated staff had done great work, but I found little personal satisfaction in what we had accomplished. Being in control is not all it is cracked up to be.

Forced to reconsider why I continued to assert control over something that brought me little joy or satisfaction, I seized the opportunity to walk away from my job. Suddenly, I had time to focus on the other side of myself, the spontaneous, creative side. I'd spent most of my life trying to control that, too.

Walk It Back

So how do you let go?

Recognize that you don’t control as much as you think you do. While I don’t recommend watching someone you love die, it was effective. Consider less traumatic examples of situations in which you didn’t have control. What was the worst thing that happened as a result?

Lean into spontaneity. I already had this tendency, but I typically experienced waves of guilt when I did something others perceived as rash or ill-considered. I rehomed my year-old puppy several weeks after John died, realizing that it was not the right time or place to deal with that on top of everything else. I made the decision very quickly. I felt horrible – she was adorable, she loved me, she needed me. But I found her a new home with a fenced yard, kids, and a live-in grandmother. It was the right thing to do, and I knew it. Six months later, I booked a trip with National Geographic to the Galapagos literally two hours after I first thumbed through the brochure that had serendipitously arrived in my mail. It was exactly the right thing to do, at exactly the right time. Have the confidence to go with your gut once in a while.

Give yourself permission not to have to fix everything in sight. It’s not always your fault or your responsibility, even if it feels like it is. Just because I could fix something didn’t mean that I had to. I wasn’t letting people down (though I was certain I was). I regularly volunteer for City Harvest in New York, distributing rescued food to underserved populations. It’s a deeply rewarding but sometimes chaotic few hours as we unload 50-pound bags of produce and hand out food to hundreds of people lined up with carts and bags. Some of my fellow volunteers aren’t as organized as I am, but I try consciously to resist the temptation to suggest how they might be more efficient. It’s liberating not to be in charge.

I have always been a fan of the Serenity Prayer, the god part aside (I’m a humanist, which is to say, an atheist with a deeply humanitarian moral compass). The world’s religions have imparted some great wisdom despite the damage many have done. 

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

It’s taken me more than a couple of years to acquire a modicum of wisdom and serenity (I had no problem with the courage part), and I still have work to do (Sisyphean, as I said). Still, each time I hear myself encouraging myself or someone else to let something go, I feel a genuine sense of pride and accomplishment that far exceeds what being in control afforded.