My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
Letting Go of Control: How I Finally Learned to Receive
By Alex, 36 — Atlanta, GA
Letting go of control was never something I thought I needed to learn. I was good at managing — projects, timelines, people, outcomes. I ran my life the way I ran my team at work: with spreadsheets, contingency plans, and the quiet belief that if I just held everything tight enough, nothing would fall apart. But that grip was costing me something I didn’t notice until it was almost gone — the ability to simply be held.
This is the story of how I unlearned control, one small surrender at a time.
The Woman Who Could Not Stop Managing
I became a project manager at twenty-seven. By thirty, I was running a department. By thirty-four, I was running myself into the ground. Not in the dramatic, burning-out-in-a-blaze-of-glory way. More like a slow leak. The kind where you don’t notice the tire is flat until you’re standing on the highway shoulder wondering why everything feels so hard.
At home, I was the same. I planned the meals. I scheduled the appointments. I initiated everything — conversations about feelings, date nights, even intimacy. My partner, Rae, once said to me: “You know you’re allowed to not be in charge of this, right?” I laughed it off. But something in her voice stayed with me. A kind of tiredness. Not of me, exactly, but of the wall I’d built between us by always being the one driving.
I didn’t know how to stop. Stopping felt like failing. Receiving felt like weakness. And weakness — well, I’d spent my whole adult life making sure nobody could ever accuse me of that.
When My Body Made the Decision for Me
The shift started with exhaustion. Not sleepiness — a bone-deep fatigue that made my skin feel too tight and my thoughts too loud. I was thirty-five and my body was telling me something my mind refused to hear: you cannot keep running at this capacity.
I started getting tension headaches every afternoon. My jaw ached from clenching. I stopped wanting to be touched — not because I didn’t want closeness, but because even pleasure felt like another thing I had to orchestrate. Another performance to manage.
Rae noticed. Of course she did. One Thursday night she ran a bath for me without asking. Set out a towel. Lit a candle that smelled like eucalyptus. And when I started to say “you didn’t have to do that,” she just looked at me and said, “I know. I wanted to. Can you let me?”
I stood there in the bathroom doorway and felt my throat tighten. Such a small thing. A bath. But the act of someone doing something for me — without me asking, without me directing — felt foreign. Almost uncomfortable. Like a language I’d forgotten.
What Letting Go of Control Actually Looks Like
It didn’t happen overnight. There was no dramatic moment of transformation. It was more like chipping away at a habit so ingrained I barely recognized it as a habit.
The bath became a ritual. Not every night — maybe twice a week. Rae would draw it. I would get in. No phone. No mental to-do list. Just hot water and the sound of the house settling around me. Sometimes I’d cry for no reason. Sometimes I’d just float.
One night, about a month into this practice of letting someone else take care of me, Rae brought me something. A small waterproof device she’d ordered — a wellness product from HiMoment, she said, something she’d read about. She set it on the edge of the tub and said, “No pressure. It’s just for you. You don’t have to do anything with it tonight.”
That sentence — “you don’t have to do anything” — cracked something open in me. My whole life had been built on doing. On producing, managing, directing. The idea that something could just exist for me, without a task attached, without needing to perform or reciprocate immediately — it was disorienting. And then it was freeing.
I didn’t use it that night. I just sat in the water and let myself feel the weight of being cared for without having to earn it.
Learning to Receive Without Guilt
The hardest part wasn’t the external surrender. It was the internal one. Every time Rae did something for me — made tea without being asked, rubbed my shoulders while I sat at my desk, suggested we try something new together without me having to research and plan it first — I felt a flicker of guilt. Like I was taking too much. Like I wasn’t pulling my weight.
I started therapy around this time. Not couples therapy — just me. My therapist said something I still think about: “Control is a trauma response that got promoted to personality trait. You don’t have to fire it. You just have to stop letting it run every meeting.”
I laughed. But it landed.
Slowly, I started practicing. Small things. Letting Rae choose the restaurant. Not correcting the way she loaded the dishwasher. Saying “yes” when she asked if I wanted something instead of automatically deflecting with “I’m fine.”
And in our intimate life — which had become almost transactional in its efficiency — I started letting go there too. Not choreographing. Not worrying about whether it was good enough, long enough, reciprocal enough. Just being in my body. Feeling instead of directing.
That waterproof device became part of my bath ritual. Not every time. But on the nights when my mind was loudest, when I needed something to pull me out of my head and back into sensation, it helped. The warmth of it. The steadiness. Something that asked nothing of me in return.
How It Changed My Relationship With Myself
Six months later, I am not a different person. I still make spreadsheets. I still run my team with precision. I still sometimes catch myself reaching for control in moments where I could simply let go.
But the grip is looser now. I can feel the difference in my body — less clenching, fewer headaches, a softness in my shoulders that wasn’t there before. I can feel it in my relationship — Rae and I talk differently now. We take turns. Not in a performative, keeping-score way. In a way that trusts the other person to show up.
Last week, Rae was having a terrible day. I drew the bath. I set out the towel. I lit the candle. And when she started to say “you don’t have to —” I smiled and said, “I know. I want to. Can you let me?”
She got in the water and closed her eyes and I realized — this is what it looks like when control becomes care. When the same hands that used to hold everything in a death grip learn to hold gently instead. To offer instead of manage. To receive instead of direct.
The project manager in me wants to say I’ve achieved something. Completed a milestone. But the truth is simpler and messier than that. I’m just a woman who finally learned that letting someone love you — really love you, in the small unglamorous ways — requires you to stop running the show long enough to feel it.
Some nights I still fight it. Some nights surrender comes easy. Both are fine.
This is my highlight time: not a single moment, but a slow, ongoing practice of putting my hands down and letting life hold me back.
Have your own Hi-Moment to share? We’d love to hear it. Send your story to [email protected], or tag us on Instagram with #MyHighlightTime. You may also enjoy: How to Actually Relax When You’re Alone and After 18 Years, We Relearned Each Other. All submissions are anonymized and edited with care.
