The More Control I Have, The Less Control I Have

I've been saying this phrase to almost everyone lately, so many times I'm starting to wonder if I'm actually saying it to myself. "The more control you have, the less control you have.” It slips out in coaching sessions, in card readings, in random conversations with women who are powering through something. AND every time I say it, some tiny part of me flinches, because I am, at this exact moment, one of the main culprits!

Almost 21 years ago, my husband and I got married. We never sat down and had "The Conversation" about money...we didn't decide anything, really. We were both already established (yes first marriage but more mature?), both had our own accounts, so we just kept them. We still bank at two completely different institutions to this day.

For most of those 21 years, that setup meant one unspoken rule: we split things evenly. Half and half. I never questioned it because I never had to.

Then 2020 happened. COVID hit my income, but not through my business exactly...it hit the role I'd been doing as an independent consultant for another company, the thing that was actually paying the bills while I slowly started building my own business on the side. AND I felt shame about not being able to contribute like I once did. Real, physical, think about at night shame. Like I'd broken a rule nobody ever actually wrote down, but I'd been enforcing on myself for two decades like it was law.

As of this January, I'm only doing very limited work for that company now. I'm finally in the season of building my own business into the full-time thing I desire to create.

Here's what I'm slowly unlearning: my husband makes more money than I do right now. That's just a fact, not a failure. AND thank goodness he does!! I don't need to contribute half to everything to be a full partner in this marriage...I need to contribute what I actually have, and trust that the number will keep growing as my business does. My desire isn't to stay here. It's to keep building until I'm bringing more in again. But that's a direction I'm walking toward, not a debt I currently owe.

I think this is the part nobody tells you about control: it's rarely about the thing itself. It was never really about the bank account. It was about an old belief that said if I'm not contributing equally, I'm not safe...I'm a burden, I'm somehow less than. Gripping the "half and half" rule felt like control. But it was actually just shame. I'd just never called it that before.

Where does this show up for you? Is there a rule you made once, maybe so long ago you don't even remember deciding it, that you're still enforcing on yourself today...long after the reason for it disappeared?

I don't think the answer is to swing to the other extreme and stop caring about balance altogether. I think the invitation is smaller than that. It's asking the rule a question instead of just obeying it: "is this actually protecting something, or is it just familiar?"

My word for this year is Harmonizing, and I keep coming back to the idea that harmony was never about every note carrying equal weight. Some seasons, one instrument carries more of the melody, and the song is still whole.

I'm not fully there yet. I'm just more honest about it than I used to be.