The Illusion of Control

Accepting what I cannot control

The Illusion Of Control 

I asked my therapist recently if she thought I was a narcissist. It's a narrative my ex-wife has convinced my daughters of, and seems to be a label ex-wives always slap upon their ex-husbands (which doesn't mean it isn't true 90% of the time.) My therapist chuckled and said:

“You have such a hard time setting boundaries between how much you give of yourself to others and your own wants and needs that you overload yourself trying to be everything for everyone in your life. Narcissists don't have a hard time putting themselves first. You are the exact opposite of a narcissist. You are controlling though.”

Control. This was something we had talked about many times before. A few weeks ago she said to me that I have “A strange relationship with power.” She remarked that, because of growing up poor, Black, bullied and teased, my experience had been that people were always trying to take power away from me. And so I have spent most of my life making sure no one would ever be able to take away my power again. That's why I tend to be so fixated upon accomplishing goals and tackling obstacles. It was my way of claiming my power. She elaborated upon this in our most recent discussion. 

“Control is an illusion. But you have been uncommonly successful at overcoming obstacles and barriers and maintaining control that you still believe the illusion. It might be good for you to be out of control for awhile. To just relax and let things happen.”

Whew! This woman has a way of seeing right through me. Now, she was talking specifically about my relationships when she said it might be good for me to be out of control. But, my entire life has been constructed around the model of control. I have treated life like a game of chess and have always tried to stay two moves ahead. But now, I feel like I have lost most of my pieces and I am just a king standing all alone on the chessboard. Vulnerable on all sides. It is not a comfortable feeling for me. Allowing myself to be vulnerable is not one of my more developed skill sets.

Allowing myself to be out of control is uncomfortable for me. I imagine it is for everyone. But, some are better at it than others. As my therapist said,  throughout my life I have been uncommonly successful at overcoming the usual obstacles that make people feel out of control, so I probably feel even less comfortable than most people when things are beyond my control. Sitting in that type of discomfort and uncertainty is new to me. Or is it?

As an author, the only thing I have control over is what I write. I cannot control what the publisher does with it after that. Have I mentioned that I have begun to self-publish? Another attempt to maintain the illusion of control. Yet, even self publishing I cannot control production delays. I cannot control what critics write about it, or whether readers actually buy it. 

When going through a traditional publisher, they can take months or even years to respond to a manuscript submission. When I submitted Succulent Prey to Leisure Books 20 years ago, it took them two years to respond. There's no guarantee an author will even receive a response to a manuscript submission. And, even when they do respond, there's no guarantee you will receive an acceptance or even a rejection with constructive criticism that will help you improve your book. Often it's just a form rejection letter. 

It can take months or years to finish writing a novel-length manuscript, not knowing if it will be published, whether or not critics will like it, or if it will sell. That's a lot of uncertainty for someone who struggles being out of control. I have a manuscript right now that has been sitting in the hands of a major publisher since April, waiting for them to accept or reject it. Talk about “sitting in discomfort and uncertainty.”

My point is that, as writers, we sit in discomfort all the time. We sit in uncertainty all the time. We have learned to accept that which we cannot control and keep doing what we do. We finish a manuscript , submit it to a publisher or self - publish it, then immediately begin working on the next manuscript , leaving the first one to fate. The key for me is to apply those skills and lessons I have learned being a writer to other areas of my life, particularly my relationships. Accepting that I cannot control the outcome of a relationship, whether someone truly loves me or is just faking it. I cannot control whether the person they are in those first few months, when they are high on NRE (New Relationship Energy,) will bare any resemblance at all to the person they will be after being in a relationship for two or three years after that NRE has worn off. I cannot control whether or not they stay or leave. All I can control is how I will react to it all. I have to accept that I have to accept that to be in a relationship is to be out of control, to love is to be out of control, to live is to be out of control, and sit in that uncertainty and discomfort without freaking out. This is hard for me, but, as they say, nothing worth doing comes easily. Wish me luck.