The Last Thing You Try to Control

My thumb hovered over the send button for the fourth time that evening.

The kitchen was dark except for the phone screen. I'd been sitting there long enough for the coffee to go cold, long enough for the neighbors' lights to turn off one by one. The message on my screen was 847 words. I knew because I'd counted. Twice.

I was ending a professional relationship that had lasted years. No drama, no confrontation - just a quiet recognition that it was time to stop.

The hard part wasn't making that decision.

The hard part was what came after. They asked why. And something in me couldn't let the question sit unanswered.

Version one had been 2,400 words. A detailed timeline of my growing concerns, complete with examples and a section I actually titled "What I Noticed Over the Years."

What was I writing, a case study? Did I expect them to take notes?

I deleted it. Started over.

Version two: 1,100 words. More restrained. Still included four paragraphs explaining the difference between healthy collaboration and patterns I'd only recently named.

Version three: 600 words. Getting warmer. Only two paragraphs of justification.

Version four: 847 words.

Wait. How did it get longer?

I scrolled back through it and found the culprit: a new section on what they could consider going forward. Helpful suggestions. Action items, basically. A little roadmap for life without me.

Ah yes, Soren. Very gracious of you to assume they'll be lost without your guidance. Truly the picture of humility.

Here's what I've noticed about people who've spent years being "the one who helps": we don't know how to leave without leaving a manual.

The relationship's over. The decision's made. And yet there I was, at midnight, writing instructions for a future I wouldn't be part of.

It felt generous in the moment. Necessary, even. "I owe them an explanation," I told myself. "They deserve to understand."

Do they, though?

Or was that just what I needed to believe so I could keep helping - one more time?

There's research on this. Psychologists call it the "illusion of transparency" - our tendency to believe others can see our internal states much more clearly than they actually can.¹ We think if we just explain it right, they'll understand exactly what we mean. They'll see our intentions. They'll get it.

They won't. They never do. Not fully.

And the more I wrote, the more I started to notice something uncomfortable: the explanation wasn't for them.

It was for me.

This wasn't new. I'd done this before, almost word for word, in a departure that took years instead of months.

In a spiritual community I've been part of, I became "the one who does things" - graphic editing, producing videos, processing thousands of photographs. Almost everything that went out publicly had passed through my hands at some point. Nobody knew. And that was fine by me.

Until it wasn't.

When I finally stepped back from that role, I didn't just leave. I wrote. Not an email. A document. Pages and pages explaining my reasoning. Why the current approach wasn't sustainable. What I thought they could do differently. How things might work better without me in that particular position.

I told myself it was helpful. Constructive. The responsible way to transition.

How do you leave a place where you're "the one who does things"? How do you say "I don't want this anymore" without feeling like you're abandoning everything you built?

Turns out, you write a manual. You explain. You make sure everyone understands exactly why you're leaving and exactly how reasonable your reasons are.

You do everything except actually leave.

There are two kinds of explanations.

The first kind is informational. It answers a practical question. "Why won't the code compile?" has an explanation. "What time does the meeting start?" has an explanation. These are questions with answers that exist independently of anyone's feelings about them.

The second kind is performative. It doesn't answer a question so much as manage an emotion - usually our own.

Guess which kind I was writing at midnight?

"Why are you leaving?" looks like the first kind. It's not.

Because the person asking doesn't actually need to understand your internal process. They're not going to do anything with that information. They're not taking notes for next time. They just want the discomfort of not-knowing to go away.

And your elaborate answer? That's also about making discomfort go away. Your discomfort. The discomfort of being misunderstood. Of being seen as the bad guy. Of leaving without leaving everyone in a state of perfect clarity about how reasonable you were.

When I finally looked at my fourth draft with fresh eyes, I noticed something: the longer it got, the more I was defending myself.

Not informing them. Defending.

My thousand-word explanation wasn't generous.

It was armor.

This connects to something I've written about before - the performance of being ourselves. Even in our exits, we're still managing an image. Still curating how we're perceived. Still, in some sense, on stage.

Here's the part that should embarrass me more than it does.

I've been meditating for over twenty years. Two decades of sitting with thoughts without chasing them. Two decades of practicing non-attachment. Two decades of learning - supposedly - to let things be what they are.

And yet.

There I was, at midnight, obsessively crafting the perfect explanation because I couldn't bear the thought of being misunderstood.

Fascinating, Soren. You spent all those years learning to let go of attachment, and here you are, desperately attached to being seen as the good guy in a story they'll tell differently anyway.

Meditation teaches you to observe thoughts without following them. To notice the impulse without acting on it. To sit with discomfort instead of immediately trying to fix it.

Apparently, that works great for thoughts about dinner or the neighbor's dog barking at 6 AM.

But thoughts about how someone might perceive me? Thoughts about being seen as ungrateful, or difficult, or - worst of all - wrong?

Those thoughts don't get observed. Those thoughts get a 847-word rebuttal.

There's a pattern here that researchers have a name for: when we can't control the outcome, we scramble to control the narrative.² The moment I decided to leave - to give up control over the situation - my brain immediately found something else to grip: how I'd be understood.

I'd accepted I couldn't fix the relationship.

I hadn't accepted I couldn't fix their perception of me.

Twenty years of practice, and this is still where I get stuck.

I deleted the 847 words.

Sat with the empty screen for a while. The cursor blinking felt accusatory.

Then I wrote five sentences.

I thanked them for the years. I said the collaboration had run its course. I wished them well with what comes next.

I did not explain why. I did not offer analysis. I did not suggest what they might consider doing differently.

It felt incomplete. Insufficient. Like walking out of a room mid-sentence.

And that's exactly what it was.

Because here's what I finally understood: the real goodbye isn't when you decide to leave.

It's when you stop trying to control how you're understood after you've left.

My elaborate drafts were proof I hadn't really left yet. I was still there, still managing, still doing my one job of making everything clear and okay for everyone.

Five sentences were enough. Not because they explained everything - they explained almost nothing.

But because they didn't try to.

I'm not presenting this like I woke up the next morning at peace. I didn't. I checked my phone six times before breakfast to see if they'd responded. Old habits - the kind that twenty years of sitting still apparently don't touch.

I don't know what they think happened.

Probably not what I think happened. Almost certainly not the nuanced, contextual, both-sides-have-a-point version I'd constructed in my deleted drafts.

They have their story. I have mine. And the space between those stories is uncomfortable, yes - but it's also the only place where genuine letting-go can happen.

When you explain everything perfectly, you're still holding on. You're still invested in the outcome. You're still, in some sense, there.

When you allow yourself to be misunderstood - when you stop writing paragraphs aimed at correcting whatever wrong impression they might form - you give both of you something unexpected.

Space.

Space to remember things differently. To construct different meanings. To move on without having to agree on what happened first.

"Letting someone misunderstand you might be the final act of actually leaving."

There's a reason I've written about sitting with discomfort without drowning. The discomfort of being misunderstood doesn't vanish because you've intellectually decided it shouldn't matter. But you can hold it without needing to fix it.

That's the practice, really. Not on the cushion - that part's easy. But here, in the dark kitchen, with your thumb over the send button and your ego screaming that they need to understand.

Here's the uncomfortable paradox: letting go of control feels like failure.

We're trained to believe that clear communication solves everything. That if people just understood, things would be okay. That explanation is a form of respect.

Sometimes it is.

But sometimes it's the opposite - a refusal to let the other person have their own experience of what happened. A kind of narrative imperialism where we insist our version of events colonize their understanding.

The real respect might be letting them be wrong about you.

I stepped back from that spiritual community role. I left that professional relationship. Both times, I wanted to write the definitive account. Both times, the urge felt like generosity.

Both times, it was the last thing I was trying to control.

Twenty years of meditation, and I'm still writing manuals for doors I'm walking through.

Before You Hit Send

If you're drafting a farewell message right now - to a boss, a colleague, a friend, a community you're leaving - read it one more time.

How many paragraphs are information they actually need?

And how many are justification you need to believe they'll accept?

Write the long version if you have to. Get it out of your system. Let all those words exist somewhere, even if it's just a note you delete tomorrow.

But before you hit send, ask: is this for them, or for me?

If it's for you - which is fine, it usually is - consider whether you need them to receive it for it to do its job.

Maybe you don't.

Maybe the writing was the closure.

Continue Exploring

The Authenticity Trap - On the paradox of performing yourself, even when you're trying to be real. Especially when you're trying to be real.

How to Process Emotions Without Drowning in Them - The discomfort of being misunderstood is real. Here's the third option between suppressing it and letting it consume you.

Notes & References

¹ Gilovich, T., Savitsky, K., & Medvec, V.H. (1998). "The illusion of transparency: Biased assessments of others' ability to read one's emotional states." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(2), 332-346.

² Schlenker, B.R. (1980). Impression Management: The Self-Concept, Social Identity, and Interpersonal Relations. Brooks/Cole Publishing. Schlenker's research found that our need to manage impressions intensifies precisely when control over outcomes is slipping away.