Lose Control

This post first appeared on Move LifeStyle

I am a capital C, capital F, Control Freak. I love labels, label makers, colored pencils and all the tools of organization that the Container Store has to offer. When I was in high school, my friends called me ‘MOM’ because of the enormous day planner that was my constant companion. Yes, you know the one… with all the colored tabs, the numbered weeks with lines for every fifteen minute increment of every day, the attached address book, and all the different colored sticky flags … ahhh, so glorious. But, I digress.

I didn’t realize that all that organization stressed me out, until I went to college and met Mark.

You see, I lived and died by my watch. It was the metronome that kept my life from falling apart. I could parcel my life into incremental bite size moments that I could control, measure, file away and admire after their completion, but when I was with Mark, I had to take the watch off. It was his rule. Because when I was with him, I was off the clock.

Without my watch, I felt so naked. So vulnerable. So scared. He knew that my watch was my Linus blanket, the single thing without which, I felt like I could not breathe. He made me trust him. I freaked out. A lot. And I fell in love.

The romance ended with the summer, but I learned a valuable lesson. Life is unpredictable, but it’s in that chaos where we grow. I grew more from that experience than from any college lecture course that year, because I learned that I could be brave. The heartbreak made me stronger, because he taught me that in my most vulnerable, naked state, I was beautiful, worthy, and strong.

So, for the New Year, I want you to remind yourself to be brave. Be vulnerable. Take off that proverbial watch every once in a while and lose control. Yup, that’s me in that picture, jumping off a bridge in New Zealand. But hey, you don’t even have to take my word for it. You can listen to smarty pants researcher/storyteller Brene Brown and she’ll tell you a little something about vulnerability: