surrendering.

Last year I was the sickest I have ever been: for an entire month, I fought a virus that depleted all my energy, obliterated my stamina, and drove me wearily to my bed each night as soon as, if not before my children were asleep. Not unlike the decade I spent crippled by migraines, I none-too-quickly realized there was no use in struggling through the exhaustion and pain. First, I gave up exercise; then, diet; next, I turned over laundry duty, cooking responsibility, grocery shopping, and finally, childcare. By the time I made it home from work each afternoon, it was all I could do to drag myself to my bed to drown myself in a stupor of streaming media. Days I didn’t make it to work, I sent my kids–battling their own coughs, colds, and flus–to school so that I could rest.

My Type-A, nearly OCD personality initially panicked at my inability to make sure lunches were made, bills were paid, and children were bathed–or at least, loved. But as my illness wore on, I became too focused on making it through each day to worry about anything beyond showering, dressing, getting to work, through work, and home from work to worry about anything else. I gained weight. I lost strength. I let go.

Just when I started to wonder whether I’d ever care about anything ever again, I found myself restless in bed one evening. That night, I made it through a stack of papers I’d needed to grade for weeks. The next morning, I hustled four loads of laundry through the washing machine, the dryer, and back to drawers, neatly folded and sorted. As I emerged from my cocoon, I found that everyone was as I’d last seen him and her. Everything was as I’d left it. Life had gone on without me.

And ironically, I realized that when the going gets rough, sometimes the best way to cope is to surrender. For someone who was always suited up for a fight before the match was even announced, the concept of giving up control was foreign. I fought even as I knew there was no way to win; success had never been defined, and so I continued to battle, convinced I’d know when I’d succeeded even though I didn’t know what success was, exactly.

The problem with this strategy is revealed when success remains elusive. When I was sick, I defined wellness as success–and eventually, I felt better. When I’d battled migraines, success meant being pain free–and eventually, each migraine dissipated. But when I fell in love with someone who was not my husband, who did not love me in return, who had no interest in coming between my husband and I nor sharing me with him, suddenly success became impossible to achieve. Did I want to end my marriage, traumatize my children, lose my house, and struggle to survive financially? What did it mean to win this battle? To convince myself I didn’t love this other person? To convince myself I did? To find a way to rekindle my feelings for my husband? To settle for family love and give up on romantic love? As the questions multiplied, my ability to find satisfactory answers dwindled. Each time I thought I’d settled on a solution, I quickly became dissatisfied and insecure.

And so I struggled, and fought, and resisted: myself, my husband, my kids, my life. I went to bed every night resolved to find peace in the life I’d created: to revel in the newly painted house whose color I had obsessed over and still loved almost a year later; to enjoy my brand-new dishwasher and custom-built kitchen island; to adore my children and bask in their adoration of me; to find comfort in a good bottle of wine shared with a good friend. But I found myself spending more time away from my home than in it; while I adored my children, I resented that it felt like any time I spent with them was on my husband’s terms; I drank to escape rather than for comfort, and found little peace with my friends, who were struggling to win their own battles.

Eventually, I grew weary of the struggle. I was tired of talking about it to my therapist and felt like I’d exhausted the patience of my friends. I was tired of not talking about it with my husband, of pushing him away, of running away, of missing my kids and my house and my life. My attempts to craft a life outside of the one I shared with my husband were failures: nothing I could achieve without him held a candle to what we could do together. And still, I was restless and unhappy–needing something to change but unsure just how much change I really wanted.

And so, I gave in–I finally let go, stopped fighting, stopped hiding, stopped resisting, because I knew I could not succeed. Instead, I decided to live by the advice I’d heard from so many of my friends: sometimes you just need to keep doing what you’re doing until you can’t do it anymore. I stopped judging myself for being unable to figure out any other way to live my life. I stopped criticizing myself each time I set an intention and promptly ignored it. I started telling myself that anything was possible, no matter how frightening the possibilities might seem.

Strangely enough, once I gave up trying to win the battle, I realized I’d won the war.