Confessions of a Control Freak (Plus Preview Kate's New Song!)
“Control freak” is one of those terms we throw around to describe a whole spectrum of people - from a horrible micromanager of a boss to an outrageously over-prepared traveler who forces everyone to stick to a rigid itinerary the whole vacation.
It’s usually a moniker that’s often associated with negativity, and I always thought that because I was neither a crazy micromanaging boss nor a traveler with so much as a dinner reservation I was free and clear of ever landing myself among this controlling crew. Kate here, and this year was the year I realized I was wrong.
Today I’m unpacking and sharing a little bit about why I’m confessing to control freak-dom, and I’m also super excited to share a snippet of my upcoming single, “Anxious” - which is all about the struggle of feeling out of control in life.
At the time of writing this blog, the world is in the midst of the now infamous Corona pandemic - and there’s really not enough space on the internet to list all of the adjectives we could use to describe this crazy season. It’s scary. It’s weird. It’s bizarre. It’s confusing. It’s …. anxiety-inducing, to say the least.
Like so many of us, I have always struggled with anxiety. It’s no question that the world can be an unpredictable and unfamiliar place, even after we’ve gotten our bearings, started careers, and lived on our own for a long time.
Though I always recognized that feeling anxious was just going to be a part of life sometimes, I never really knew what was at the root of it. Anyone who’s ever felt anxious knows that it can be triggered by a multitude of things, and that it’s not always easy to pinpoint what’s at the heart of it. That fact in itself can be even MORE anxiety-inducing, because now you’re not even sure what caused you to feel this way in the first place. It can be a frustrating and exhausting merry-go-round to say the least.
As a songwriter who has been writing music for over half my life now, there have always been songs that sort of just ‘fall out.’ You don’t really know where they come from, and they often write themselves weirdly fast. Every song is brutally honest and vulnerable in its own way, but I tend to feel like these songs that simply ‘fall out’ one day are the most honest.
“Anxious” was one of those songs.
As I was writing it, I realized that often times the root of my anxiety and worry is a wild amount of uncertainty. Uncertainty about the present, the future, and even sometimes about making sense of the past. And the reason uncertainty is so difficult for me to handle is usually because I feel like I have zero control over anything. Nothing is totally certain, and there’s nothing I can do to make it so.
During this pandemic, I’ve seen so many people write about the ‘illusion of control’ we all have in life. Before things got turned upside down by Covid-19, many of us had a false sense of control over our lives. We thought that because our lives were relatively routine and privileged and predictable that that meant we were effectively controlling our lives and steering ourselves in the direction we wanted to go. The truth is, once this virus became a real part of everybody’s life the world over, we realized we weren’t controlling much of anything all along.
So the bad news is I’m officially a control freak. The good news is, so is almost everyone else. And if you count yourself among us, know that you’re not alone.
As I’ve started to come to terms with the fact that I am, in fact, obsessed with trying to control my life, I’ve also been looking for things I can do to take care of myself in this state and feel a little less anxious.
Here are a couple small shifts that have been helping:
1. Look For the Beauty in Vulnerability
When I feel anxious, it’s often because I feel vulnerable to outcomes I can’t control. Nobody likes this feeling (because it sucks), but one thing that’s helped me combat it is to reframe the way I view vulnerability itself.
Many of you are probably familiar with Brené Brown, who has spent years researching and writing about vulnerability, and I love how she describes vulnerability as “having the courage to show up when you can’t control the outcome.”
As evidenced in everything going on right now, it turns out that we can’t control the outcome most of the time. While that’s SUPER hard for me to face, it’s also somewhat freeing. Being vulnerable is scary as hell, but as Brené goes on to say, “People who wade into discomfort and vulnerability and tell the truth about their stories are the real badasses.”
It doesn’t make us weak to feel anxious about uncertainty. It makes us human. And being able to embrace those vulnerable feelings and show up anyway, keep going anyway, is a superpower we can cultivate.
2. Focus On What You Can Control
This might seem counterintuitive to say within a post that’s all about trying to overcome control freak tendencies, but I think it’s important to emphasize that not everything is out of our control. In fact, there’s actually a decent amount of stuff we can control.
I’m not sure how many of you guys went to schools with cheesy quote posters in bad fonts all over the walls, but I did, and I feel like there was always some tired poster with something like “the two things in life you can control are your attitude and effort!!” written on it. Quotes like this have always been a HUGE eye roll for me, but as much as I hate to admit it, they’re kinda right.
I saw this tweet the other day and it made me laugh:
The reality is, accepting that we can’t change or control everything becomes a tiny bit easier when we focus our energy on changing and controlling the stuff that we can.
So if one of those things is my attitude, some of the best strategies I’ve found to help me control it are:
limiting my use of social media and news apps (because they can make me feel blah and bummed out)
going outside and being in nature
practicing gratitude and being present in the moment
It’s by no means a magic formula, but it always puts my attitude in a better place if I do those things.
And if the second thing I can control is my effort, then the best way I know how to do that is to decide what’s important to me and put my efforts toward those things as much as possible. I’ve mentioned this book in a few blogs recently but I’m almost finished with Atomic Habits, and it’s really helping me create a picture of the habits and practices I want to cultivate in my life. I’ll never be able to control the circumstances of every day, but I can definitely control how much work I put in toward the things that are important to me.
Preview “Anxious”
So with all of that said, here is a little snippet of my new single, “Anxious!”
It drops this Friday, May 29th, on all platforms.
If you use Spotify, you can PRE-SAVE “Anxious” here and automatically be entered to win a video message from me, plus a shoutout on IG!
Can’t wait for you guys to hear this song!
Do you ever feel like a control freak? How do you deal with the struggles of uncertainty??
