A story on CONTROL

All my life I was very controlling and impatient. Basically due to the responsibilities  I had since childhood but also due to the fact I believed that was the way to be: having everything organized and planned.

In work environments my personality and behavior were always great. Working on big companies and leading teams I could say that being controlling was required and extremely useful. 

In the other hand, on my personal life, I was able to understand that those characteristics were not very much appreciated neither positive. Throughout the years I was able to make adaptations and being more flexible in general, but still had the necessity to make sure that things were panning out in the way that I planned.

A major moment of transformation was when I moved to my current apartment, in 2021, as things started to go wrong before day one and I had not much to do, rather than keeping calm and letting things unfold by their own. It took me more than expected to get my keys, sign all the documents and finally move.

I hired a carpenter to do all wooden work and signed the contract with him even before I moved, to give him enough time to finish all by the time I would move. He decided to ignore completely the deadline and only started to effectively work on my project by the time I had already moved.

In the first moment I was freaking out that things were not looking perfect for me to live there, but then I started to think that the service was already paid, I knew that the carpenter was a trustworthy person who would deliver the work, but he was not good with deadlines (and I was aware of that even before hiring him this time), so what could I do either than wait? Nothing. 

After that realization I became completely relaxed about the situation. During few visits to my mom’s house, she would even question about how I was not going crazy with that situation: “Aren’t you complaining?” “Aren’t you calling him all the time?”. To which I was answering that this would be a waste of time as he would only give excuses, making me upset and stressed; so it was better to simply let him finish the work whenever he was able to do that.

After few months all carpenter work was done and I was incredibly chilled about living in the apartment for three months without furniture. There were still some other contractors coming and going to finish other stuff. They were never on time, there was always an issue, but I was pretty ok with that, as I finally realized it was not possible to have control over everything.

It was much better for me to simply enjoy the apartment – the mess included on that – rather than freaking out and getting anxious daily about things that anyway would not unfold as per my plans.

Now, almost one year after moving here, I’ve decided to upgrade my kitchen flooring. On the second day of work the contractor got sick and had to interrupt the service. What could I do? Nothing.