From the start, I've been a perfectionist. A perfectionist to the degree that it has ruined so many things in my life because the situation or person is not "perfect." I will be the first to admit that I am extremely controlling, and want to have my thumb over everything I possibly can because, to me, that means nothing will ever go wrong. But my, oh my, have I been wrong.

I have gone almost twenty years trying to obsessively control almost every aspect of my life, and when I cannot control something it sends me into a wild panic and a dark depression that spirals out of control until I am completely miserable. I worry about things that do not exist because in my mind, if I've already thought of all the possible outcomes then nothing can surprise me and I will be in total control.

I lay awake at night sorting through things in my mind that have happened---or things that have not happened (and probably never will), trying to find the perfect solution, the best reaction, my plan of action when or IF something goes outside of my preset plan. When I was younger, I refused to have sleepovers with friends, hang out with them after school, or make plans past 5 p.m., because then I couldn't plan exactly what would happen.

I stayed like this for so long — entirely way too long, until my saving grace finally looked me in the eye and practically told me, "Maddie, calm the hell down." (Trust me, I love my boyfriend nonetheless because I NEEDED someone desperately to tell me I was acting crazy.) I obsessed, re-obsessed, and tried my hardest to control what might happen. Constantly looking over my boyfriend's phone to make sure he wasn't texting another girl, trying to calculate the space and speed at which my parents traveled home so I could make sure that if their timing was off, I'd have a course of action because they had probably gotten hurt.

In this madness, I lost myself. Losing myself became an awful experience because I grappled for comfort and for a person I was not. I could barely force myself to write because anything that came out seemed fake and washed up, and not a true reflection of the inner war going on within me. I lost hours of sleep, I lost valuable memories because instead of living in the moment I constantly looked towards the future. Until recently, I never truly learned the art of letting go. The practice of observing my "worry thoughts," and making peace with myself instead of either succumbing to the anxiety or trying to tamper it into oblivion (which NEVER works). I learned that although "letting go," may terrify me, there is so much more world outside of the boundaries to which I have put myself in.

Now, I am at a comfortable place in my own inner world. I've learned to understand myself and appreciate the beauty in the struggle because the struggle means you are a human coping with the world how you see fit. There will always be another battle to fight through, and the anxiety that lives within me will never simply disappear. But now, instead of trying to evict the anxiety, I've learned to let it live and let it go because the harder you hold on the faster all the good will slip away.