​You can’t control the weather - learning to let it go

​You can't control what someone thinks of you.

You can go over a conversation ten times in your head, choose your words carefully, try your absolute best: and someone can still walk away with a version of you that has nothing to do with who you actually are. That's not yours to fix, no matter how much you'd like it to be.

You can't control the weather on the day that matters. You can't control a decision someone else has already made, even one that affects you deeply.

You can't control how your children turn out, not really, no matter how well you raise them or how many mistakes you lie awake worrying you've made. You can't control getting older. You can't control what people say about you when you're not in the room. You can't control whether someone stays or goes.

And yet so many of us spend enormous amounts of energy trying to anyway. Replaying the conversation, wondering what you should have said instead, and hoping that if you just explain yourself better, someone will finally understand and everything will settle.

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So many of us spend our time holding on to a decision that was never yours to make in the first place, as if enough thinking about it might somehow undo it.

It's an exhausting way to live. And here's the hard part: it rarely changes anything, except how tired you feel by the end of the day. The conversation still happened the way it happened. The decision still stands. The weather still does what it does.

There's a strange kind of relief in admitting that a thing simply isn't yours to carry. Not because it doesn't matter, because some of it matters enormously, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

But carrying it isn't the same as doing something about it. Worry can feel like action. Most of the time, it isn't. It's just weight, sitting on you, doing nothing for anyone.

I meet a lot of people in my therapy room who are exhausted not from what's actually happened to them, but from how much energy they've spent trying to control things that were never within their reach to begin with.

So here's something worth trying this week. Next time you find yourself circling something, ask yourself one honest question: is there actually anything I can do here? If the answer is genuinely no, that's not you giving up on it. That's you finally putting something down that was never yours to hold in the first place.

Next week, we'll look at the other half of this: the things that are ours to carry, and why that shorter list matters even more than the long one.

Deirdre Ryan is a psychotherapist and Clinical Director of Tipperary Counselling Service.