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Feeling Great Isn’t Easy
How we feel is a balancing act between being in control and a willingness to surrender to the unknown
Just yesterday I had a flashback of myself from 1999.
I was 33 years old, sporting a 38-inch waist, and had recently agreed to pay my first wife half of my 401K which had thankfully ballooned up from the dot com bubble hysteria.
Oh, and also, my skin was red and blotchy, and I was so profoundly undersexed I couldn’t even watch cartoons without sexualizing the female characters….yet…after a few months of normal disillusionment, I was surprisingly….even, enormously happy.
I had mourned the loss of my idealistic first marriage and was ready to feel great again.
It’s not easy to surrender control…
Both my wife(s) and my serious girlfriend called me some variation of a control freak.
It didn’t help that my explanation for being so bossy was that my choices were the “correct” ones…implying I was smarter, wiser, and more industrious than them….even though, in hindsight, I really wasn’t.
Despite having the best intentions as a husband, father, and provider, my “control-freak, know-it-all-self” was a byproduct of societal pressure, and a sincere desire to “create the life” my family wished to live.