“You don’t need to control everything, Miss Ruffing.” A professor said those words to me at a graduation party. I’m not sure if he was drunk, but believing he was has softened the blow, for he threw that statement at me with more vitriol than goodwill. I felt the wind flee my lungs like I’d been hit in the gut with a two-by-four. The background noise of thumping music, short tempers, and my desperate attempts to keep a situation from spiraling into chaos faded into silence. All I was cognizant of was this fact: I would remember these words for the rest of my life, and every event that unfurled afterward would be warped, forever catching, wrinkling, and tearing around this moment.
As the rest of the night unraveled and drove me to tears, as that night melted into morning and that morning melted into the long summer break, I retained the feeling of having been slapped across the face. Could others see the burning in my cheeks that still hadn’t faded months later? I felt like my eyes had been shocked open a half-centimeter wider and they’ve never returned to their previous squint.
All my life, I had been commanded to control myself, to take responsibility for everything I could, and to make every situation as comfortable for everyone else as possible. That was the example given to me by the saints. That was what the Church preached to me, what friends and family implied with passive-aggressive comments and heavy-handed suggestions. Control every situation that could possibly end with someone else being hurt, but when it comes to your own feelings and wants, be open. Be flexible. Have faith. You know what happens when you make plans? God laughs.
How many times have you heard that? I hear it every day; it’s a broken record that spins around over and over in my subconscious.
That was the delicate balance I had been striving to maintain my entire life. I urged myself: control your sleep, your appetite, your temper, control the fallout of others’ bad decisions so that you appear noble, while relinquishing control over the outcome of your own plans, over how pathetic and groveling you appear to others, over whether you eat enough or exercise enough or ever get what you want so that you appear humble.
I was so desperate to be good. I was so desperate to do the right thing, to make the most of a college experience at a school that was too small for me and my ambitions because I believed that experience was all I deserved and that if I was ungrateful, the little I had would be ripped away and I would never get anything better. I wanted my professors to like me, I wanted my fellow students to like me.
But nobody likes a control freak.
The thing is, up until that night, I truly believed I wasn’t one. I felt like I didn’t have control over anything. My semester abroad had been completely de-railed by COVID, all the weight I had so meticulously starved off of myself was coming back at such a fast pace my wardrobe could barely keep up, and events that I lost sleep planning for the student body ended in some students crying while others staged a hostile take-over (I wish I was joking).
Everything had been steadily falling apart for months and I had been bearing it with grace because what choice did I have if I wanted to get to heaven? I had let go of my desire to look beautiful, of my need for sleep, of my need for respect, of what I wanted to get out of my education. I was lucky to even be there, I told myself over and over again as I donned a mask to sit in a nearly-empty chapel for daily mass, as I watched my friends’ support turn to judgment and unease when I shared my worries over how fast our world was changing, as I fell apart in my dorm room every time I was alone. I didn’t need to control any of this; I couldn’t control any of it. What I thought and what I wanted didn’t matter, so I left it “in God’s hands.”
But, of course, my professor was right. I was trying to control everything about that hellish night because I didn’t want other people to get hurt and I didn’t want to get in trouble. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t avoid either of those realities. It was an excellent case of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t.’
The absurdity of the notion of control: that is what haunts me every February. It stays with me through the long, cold days, stretching into March and April. As the years pass and I grow more independent, the tail-end of Winter brings me back to the verge of collapsing into fear and overwhelm because I am responsible for myself. I have to make the things I desire and the things I feel a priority because, if I don’t, no one else will.
If I continue to dissipate my strength by sewing it into everyone else’s business, by numbing my instincts with meaningless distractions, by censoring every uncomfortable thought I have, I will achieve exactly this: I will be more tolerable to the people around me. I will not overwhelm anyone, I will not make anyone uncomfortable. If I continue to relinquish control over fulfilling my needs and desires, I will appear perfectly pleasant and inconvenience no one except myself. That greatly increases the odds of everyone liking me, but it does nothing to turn the dial on people loving me.
And, even then, it does not rule out the possibility of one special asshole hitting me where it hurts and telling me I’m a control freak.
So, every February, as I get dragged back into this muddy, agonizing cycle, I remind myself that when I trade control over what I need and want for control over the opinions of others, I lose. And the forfeit is my soul. So, as much as it scares me, as much as it wears me out and sends my anxiety and depression responses into overdrive, I will dive into the waters of the people-pleasing cycle and fish myself out, over and over again. As often as necessary, I will remind myself that “it is a serious thing / just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in the broken world”1 and that responsibility for my soul is not something I can barter for a seat behind the pearly gates.
Just a quick note to let you know I've read this. A number of times. I feel what you're writing, and can see it in myself through my own set of lenses and filters, though (to carry the metaphor too far) the resulting image has developed very differently.
Why February?