Lose control

Control. Everyone thinks they have some level of control in their lives. But people underestimate the fragility of the balance between your decisions and the decisions of those around you. You cannot stop your peers from making choices that affect your person. You cannot stop their words having a huge impact upon you and thereby influencing your own choices.

People attempt to manage other’s lives and therefore lose all of the little control they actually have. Your judgments are the product of a lifetime of advertising and other people’s advice, and are not in fact your own. The world operates without your assessments just fine, and it’s hard to accept that we have little control over the events in our life.

There is a difference between going berserk and knowing you do not have control. Going berserk is letting go of your sense of sanity, whereas not having control is just the acceptance that the movie of your life would still have a start, middle, climax, and end without your direction.

You can choose your friends. You can choose how to act. But you cannot choose how your friends will behave and unwittingly change you, or where your actions will take you. Every step you take could send you in an entirely different direction than you thought you were going. We are caught in the dark without a flashlight, and all it seems we are capable of doing is stumbling through the corridors by feeling along the walls.

No one can ensure they will end up where they had planned. You cannot stop the world from altering you, shaping you, molding you without your consent. Do not fight the losing battle of attempting to do everything with the assumption that you will finish it and continue to be the same person. The best we can do is accept our own lack of control and learn to walk confidently in the dark.