Lately it feels as though I'm not in control of myself. That's not to say that I feel out of control. It's more that I'm in some kind of strange autopilot and that what I do or say has very little conscious control from me.
Have you ever woken up and found yourself at work, but you don't really remember how exactly you got there? Obviously your mind was in charge of taking from your bed to work, but you weren't fully aware of the fact that you were doing it. Maybe you can chalk it up to muscle memory or your mind's capability to run routine tasks without input from you. So if you aren't the one in charge of what's going on with your own body then who has control over you?
I've known several people who feel the need to constantly be in control of the world around them. It's a weird idea though because the world is inherently out of control at any given point. I've talked about how even when you think you're in control, you may in fact be experiencing the illusion of control. Still these people worry and stress about all the things that they must have power over, because if for some reason they aren't in charge then...well I'm not entirely sure what they believe will happen. I remember asking someone once what would happen if they couldn't have things a certain way. I asked what would they do if they couldn't be in charge. The answer I got was something along the lines of "If I couldn't have it my way then I wouldn't have it any other way", which I suppose is to be expected because it's a hypothetical question. If one was forced to give up control about something you have two options: 1) Accept it or 2) Fight against it. There is a somewhat controversial idea to break OCD-type behavior where you force the person to experience whatever it is they are being compulsive about. For instance someone has to open and close a door five times before they can walk through it, well you don't allow them to open it more than once and then force them to walk through it. This way it makes them understand that they can continue on even though their brain is screaming at them that it can't unless a certain criteria is met.
My point is that sometimes our own mind is working against us for control. So in a sense we are fighting ourselves for control and in some cases we lose the battle against ourselves. When that happens I wonder where we go. I think everyone has experienced this one. You're reading a book. You get to the end of the page or several pages and realize you have no idea what you just read. Your body was in the process of reading, which was controlled by your mind in some way, and yet you yourself were no longer conscious of what was happening around you. So where did you go while that was happening? You could have been thinking about any number of things, but essentially you walked away from your body to do something else. The same thing happens when you're in class or a meeting. If it were possible to visualize, I bet during a meeting you'd see several people leave their bodies at various points, snapping back into place as needed.
Going back to what I was originally talking about. I feel like my mind and body are running without me. I'm aware of what's going on though. When asked a question the answer comes automatically, even though I didn't really think about it. I do various tasks and it's almost like I'm watching someone else do them. It's almost as though I'm a passenger in my own body. Occasionally I regain control and carry on with things as normal, but I can never tell when another part of me is going to push my conscious mind into autopilot again. It makes me wonder if my body can run without me behind the wheel then what could I be doing while some other aspect of me takes care of the mundane tasks.
