Letting Go of Control

Control works—until it doesn’t. This is what happens when the system that built you starts to limit you.

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes not from effort, but from gripping. From trying to shape the moment into something it was never meant to be. Control, when weaponized against uncertainty, becomes its own form of self-abandonment. I know this intimately.

For the past six months, I’ve been engaged in a deep process of presence work. Some might call it emotional rebuild, some call it nervous system retraining. I just call it remembering. Relearning how to live from the inside out, not from fear, not from the hunger to prove, but from alignment. The process has changed everything. My sense of time, my emotional regulation, the way I relate to my body, even how I see others.

But not everything has followed at the same pace.

There’s one domain in my life where the shift has been slow to arrive. And it’s the one I spend hours inside every day: my work trading in the financial markets.

For years, I treated trading as a craft. Precision, structure, edge. A canvas for discipline. And also, if I’m honest, a performance arena. It was where I went to win. To redeem. To assert competence when other parts of life felt unstable. I never admitted it in those terms. I called it ambition. But it was more like identity projection.

And even now, after so much internal work, when I can walk, sit, write, and now relate from a grounded place, something still fractures when I sit in front of the computer.

Not always. But often enough to notice the pattern.

It shows up in a specific way: I lose the ability to exit a trade; change my mind when the idea is not working. I don’t mean metaphorically. I mean literally. My fingers hesitate. My breath shortens. My clarity fails. I watch the market shift and I stay. Not because the setup says to. But because some deeper part of me still equates staying with control. And control with safety.

I’ve built beautiful systems. The structure is sound. The risk framework is optimal. The edge is proven. But when I breach those boundaries, it’s never because the market tricked me. It’s because my nervous system, still wired for control, overrides my plan.

I know I’m not alone in this. You don’t need to be a trader to recognize the pattern. It happens to athletes who can’t pull the trigger after a slump or an injury. To executives who micromanage instead of delegate. To parents who overreach when their children start individuating. It’s the same internal mechanism:

The body doesn’t trust the world to hold what we release.

So we grip. We stay. We override the plan. And we call it discipline, or responsibility, or drive. But really, it’s a wound. A rupture in the contract between self and reality. The inability to surrender to randomness, not because randomness is wrong, but because it exposes our lack of control.

A few weeks ago, I had a moment of clarity.

I realized that every time I stayed in a trade or an idea past my plan, I wasn’t trying to win. I was trying to not feel the small death of letting go. The grief of being wrong. The shame of exiting when it “could’ve worked.”

It’s not about money. It never was. It’s about control.

So I began experimenting with a small ritual: automatic exits at pre-determined price levels. Not just as risk management, but as an identity release. A way to hand control over to structure. To build containment that protects me from my own ghost patterns. Patterns of needing to stay. Of needing to fix. Of needing to be right.

At first, it felt I was failing. Like I was giving up agency. But slowly, something shifted. I started noticing the space that emerged when I no longer had to “decide” in the moment. I could watch my own reaction without acting on it. I could feel the old wiring try to activate and not obey.

It was subtle. But profound.

I’m not suggesting automation or delegation solves everything. The point isn’t the tool. It’s the surrender. The willingness to admit that sometimes, discipline isn’t about more effort, it’s about less control.

And I see now that this goes beyond my personal experience trading in the financial markets.

We all have places in life where we’ve confused control with safety. Where we stay too long, hold too tight, or try too hard, because letting go feels like dying.

But letting go is not death. It’s the beginning of truth. The beginning of trust. The moment when life, uncurated, starts to emerge.

We don’t need to abandon structure. We need to trust it. Let the systems we built do their work, even when we feel shaky. Especially when we feel shaky.

Because that’s when control becomes corrosive.

Control whispers: “If you don’t hold this, it will all fall apart.”

Clarity says: “You’ve already built the container. Let it hold you now.”

So yes, I will keep trading. But I will do it from a different place. Not to win. Not to redeem. Not to fix. But to practice presence under pressure. To train the nervous system to stay soft in moments of instability and unpredictability. To trust that truth doesn’t need control to stay alive.

The lesson does not just apply to my personal work in the markets. It’s everywhere:

When your child says they no longer need your help. When a friend doesn’t reply for days. When your Instagram post does not get the lkies you hoped for. When a client chooses someone else. When the outcome you wanted doesn’t arrive.

The question isn’t: “How do I fix this?”

The question is: “Can I stay present without control?”

Because if you can, you’re free.

Let the structure you built hold you. You don’t need to hold everything anymore.