A bit of madness is key.
Why Letting Go of Control Is the Beginning of Real Safety
The above picture shows me on the 1st of January 2021. The day my life took a fundamentally new direction.
It was the first day after to date one of the hardest years I’ve ever experienced. 2020. The year my life completely and utterly collapsed.
It was the year I quit my job in the architecture studio at the peak of an ongoing anxiety disorder and on the verge of a burnout. The year I left a 12 year relationship. The year I realised I needed to physically and internally move, and get myself the f* out of an incredibly tight and wrong life, and start looking for my actual authentic identity.
A traveling Yoga teacher?
A free-spirited nomad?
A Van-life girl?
All versions that definitely did not correspond with the anxious, crammed-in, stifled and frustrated Self I was at that time.
It was the year I heard my soul calling, screaming at me so loudly, and my body revolting so heavily, that I couldn’t ignore it anymore. When I finally gathered all my courage to make a big life-altering decision.
For a moment, it felt heroic.
Spending every single day with deep and thorough self-work. Spiritually. Physically.
I journaled. I meditated. I manifested. I raised my energetic frequency. I studied my Human Design.
And simultaneously I prepared myself to strip off the things that didn’t fit me anymore.
My Nervous System was on a constant edge of losing it, but I somehow managed to keep it together. I went to work. I did my Yoga. I breathed through my anxiety.
When Anxiety and Burnout Make Control Feel Like Safety
Even when the Pandemic hit and made everything so incredibly sticky, I kept holding on.
I quit my job not once, but three times, taking it back in between because of the fear of the uncertainty of the world. I made and remade my escape plans. I navigated living in the same apartment with my ex after the heavy step of splitting up during a lockdown while booking flight tickets to countries that had closed their borders.
You can guess it was a complete mess.
But I was trying to make a controlled fall, a gentle gliding out of an old life’s shell, slithering gracefully and safely into a new chapter.
I thought it worked.
Until the day I moved out, and finally and irrevocably kicking off the final deconstruction. It looked nothing like a graceful move.
Having shouted an awkward goodbye to my work colleagues through my mask over the prescribed safety distance, crammed all my vital belongings into my car, driven eight hours with a broken heater through a snowstorm, dragging my IKEA bags of stuff through my parents’ front door
- and then catching the expression on my Dad’s face that summarized it all in a single moment.
I had, despite all my best efforts to be a good, hard-working, honest and successful human, utterly and disastrously failed.
What had felt like a hero’s journey in its beginning suddenly seemed like a sad story of disappointment and delusion. And I’ve used up my last reserves of determination and survival, to drag myself back into the place I’ll be judged the most.
What was I even thinking?!
There I sat in my childhood room, wrapped in a blanket, face swollen and teary. Unemployed. Without a partner. Without a home.
With two handfuls of carefully selected seeds and dreams that I now had nowhere to plant.
I had no clue what I was doing, and felt the full weight of the bigness of my dreams, which suddenly felt too heavy and too bold, and impossible to put into action.
I couldn’t go back. But I also couldn’t go forward.
And it was in that liminal space, between December and New Year’s, within this darkest and most hopeless moment, that I finally grasped the most vital principle I have ever since applied to life:
If you want to ride the wild wave of life, you gotta let go of the shore.
And yes, a little madness is key indeed.
The Illusion of Control vs. Real Safety
I thought I was holding on to safety.
But in reality, I was holding on to control.
A control that cost me my aliveness. That had me bracing and shrinking. Control that kept my life from unfolding in ways I could not predict.
Letting go felt so risky. Slightly mad. Going against everything I’ve ever been told.
And yet, I was at the end of my capacity. I couldn’t hold it any longer. It hadn’t worked for me.
What did I really have to lose?
And so I started the New Year of 2021 with a different kind of New Year’s resolutions. A list of things I’ll be failing at.
A commitment to the most imperfect, messy version of myself, who definitely does NOT have it all together. (Trust me, my family did second that 🙂)
If curious about the full jist of that moment, you can read the full list in my original New Year’s resolutions here.
I sent off the version that expects too much. Who goes too far. Who makes dumb decisions and changes her mind. Who wastes money. Who disappoints. Who slides, slips and falls on her face.
I created a list of permission slips that finally allowed me to let out the girl who’s ‘too intense’, ‘too sensitive’, ‘too deep’, ‘too flaky’. Who takes the world by trial and error.
It felt like a personal rebellion. A surprising new commitment to dare to go wrong. To make mistakes. To get lost.
I felt a spark, and life starting streaming back into me.
Because contrary to what we’re sold under the quick-fix, symptom-based healing paradigm, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with not being fully defined.
En contraire.
It is when we drop the deluded expectation that we have to know, control, and guarantee who we’re becoming, that we open up the chance for us to actually become who we are.
Naturally. And all by itself.
Why Letting Go Feels Risky (and Slightly Mad)
Sounds paradox? Yes it does!
Because it is the opposite of what we’re taught all our lives, being raised to believe we need to lead from the head. From logic. To make ‘safe choices’. (Which, in my spiritual and metaphysical opinion, don’t exist. Read my article on ‘Playing it Safe’ being the most dangerous attitude on Elephantjournal here.)
And yet the sanest move you might ever make is the one that looks slightly mad from the outside.
And it’s at this awakening point that we gotta make a choice and try a different way.
The crazy way. The unconventional way.
Your way.
Bottom-up. Heart-led. Trusting your gut.
Five years later, my life is far from perfect, but I’m loving every bit of it.
All the things I let fall in 2021 have re-organised themselves around me in a much better, much more aligned way than I could have imagined.
Some things I lost. And it turned out I don’t need them.
So many things I gained.
I live in my favourite place on earth.
I work for myself, and I earn my income from my passion.
I got more freedom in my schedule than I ever thought possible.
My anxiety has eased. It still up sometimes, milder, shorter. It’s just that now, I can let it be part of my life. Not by suppressing, not by controlling, but by tending to it.
By riding the wave instead of fighting it. By trusting myself and my nervous system.
I don’t feel stressed, I feel alive.
I don’t feel stuck, I feel safe to move.
I don’t feel pressured, I feel thrilled about my work and its creative growth.
Because I’m free from having to control it all.
(If you’re wondering right now how to cultivate this kind of freedom, you can find out about my work with Somatics and Organic Intelligence and get started with your Inner Safety Session.
What Happens When You’d Stop Outsourcing Safety?
Life is not flat,it oscillates.
Growth is not linear, it’s multi-dimensional.
Outcomes can’t be forced, they unfold.
And safety is not a fixed state we can hold onto, it’s a living capacity we need to cultivate within ourselves.
Maybe you are somewhere on the cusp of this journey, too.
Maybe what feels like ‘madness’ is actually your awakening.
Maybe what feels risky is closer to the truth than the version of safety you’ve been clinging to.
So here is my reflection question for you:
If you were to give yourself one permission slip today, to drop something that feels heavy, outdated, stuck, frustrating. One plan. One expectation. One way things are supposed to go.
Just for today.
What would you drop?
What would you lose?
And what would you gain?
If you’d like to share your reflections with a real human who cares, join our Community Journal ‘the Undercurrent’ and simply hit reply to one of my emails.
With so much love,
Elena
