You know that feeling when you’re trying to convince someone of something, and the harder you push, the more they dig in? Or when you’re waiting for news—a job, a diagnosis, a reply to a message—and the waiting itself becomes heavier than the actual outcome would be? I’ve been thinking about how much energy we pour into things that aren’t really ours to control.
There’s this seductive idea that if we just work hard enough, think clearly enough, plan carefully enough, we can bend the world to our will. Self-help books promise it. LinkedIn tells us it every day. And sure, effort matters—I’m not suggesting we become passive. But I think we’ve gotten confused about the actual scope of our power.
The truth is softer than that. We have agency in a narrower band than we like to admit. We can choose how we show up. We can decide what we care about. We can control our attention, our words, the kindness we offer. But we cannot control how others receive us. We cannot control timing. We cannot control what other people think or feel or do with the gifts we offer them. And that’s actually okay—I think we’ve been trying to do someone else’s job for a long time.
I notice this especially in relationships. We meet someone we love and somewhere in the back of our minds we think, “If I just love them right, I can keep them safe. If I just understand them perfectly, they’ll never leave.” But that’s a deal we can’t actually make. We can show up. We can be honest. We can try. But we can’t control whether they stay, or whether they hurt us, or whether they change their mind about us. That’s on them. That’s their thing to live with.
The strange freedom I’ve found comes from acknowledging this. When you stop trying to control the uncontrollable, something shifts. You’re not fighting gravity anymore. You notice where your actual power is—in small choices, in how you treat someone on a Tuesday, in what you decide to learn, in the stories you choose to believe about yourself. These things are tiny and enormous at the same time.
I think a lot of our anxiety comes from trying to secure outcomes we were never meant to control in the first place. We exhaust ourselves. We second-guess ourselves. We rehearse conversations that never happen. And the whole time, the actual levers—the ones we can actually move—sit idle.
This isn’t about surrender exactly. It’s more like alignment. It’s remembering that some things are yours to carry and some things aren’t. And the sooner you figure out which is which, the lighter you get to be.
What would you stop trying to control if you really believed you didn’t have to?