I lean closer to the mirror, pressing my hips against the straight edge of the bathroom counter. I trail my finger sideways across my right cheek and tilt my head for a better angle. There is a bump on my jaw, and I touch it, feeling its swell. I turn my head, bringing the left side of my face to the mirror now. I lift up onto my toes, inching closer still. I take in the sandiness of my skin. The way the freckles line up along the edges of my mouth. The purple wells under my eyes. The broken capillary crawling out of one nostril. I find comfort here, in the knowing of something so well. I move on to my forehead, shaking my bangs away. I notice a freckle.

A new freckle.

A freckle in an area where there are no others. High on my forehead, near my hairline. I’m unsettled by its presence and remember a similar panic from the year before—a freckle that had suddenly appeared on the bottom of my left foot. I wonder how the forehead freckle got here and how it grew to this size (the size of an ant) without my noticing.

My mom used to say that she knew my body so well when I was little that no scratch or freckle or knot went unnoticed. As I got older, she said this with an air of nostalgia when I came home injured or pierced or with tight muscles in my neck. Full of this aching pride and sorrow that I can only imagine one feels as someone who once shared a home with her body separates into their own.

I don’t know if my mom’s feelings about my body colored mine, but I’ve had this relationship with my body for as long as I can remember. Not critical but observant, like someone memorizing another and relishing in the knowing. As if my body is not me but something that is mine.

—

There is an aspect of control here that brings me comfort.

It is not the controlling of my body by changing it but the control I feel from anticipating its shifts. From predicting pink shoulders after an afternoon on the beach to expecting a tense jaw if I haven’t had enough water, I so profoundly desire to know what is happening in my body before it happens, and I often do.

This is why the freckle on my forehead has thrown me off kilter. I didn’t see it coming. Even now as it stares back at me, I have no idea how it could have gotten here, hidden at all times by a hat or my hair or sunscreen. I stare at it a little longer, memorizing its size and color as if cramming for a test I’d forgotten about.

Minutes later, in bed, I’ve not moved on. I examine my arms for surprises but find none. I flip my dog Winslow onto his back, examining his belly and in between his toes for changes (embarrassingly, I do this most nights). Nothing new there, either. I settle deeper into bed, reassured that it’s nothing more than one surprise freckle.

—

In the morning, I lift my bangs from my forehead and check again. It is the same as the night before, which gives me some solace.

I wonder why I’m so paralyzed by being caught off guard. Why I have this relentless desire to know.

This compulsion is not only self-focused. I treat close relationships with other people this way, too. I have little desire to control others’ actions, but I have a crippling need to be able to predict them. I live in fear of the “Gotcha!”

There is a little person inside of me, dressed in armor, playing offense at all times. This little person has one job, and that job is to ensure I am never surprised. He (he seems like a he, doesn’t he?) carefully constructs the inner workings of my closest friends and family so that they don’t have to. When said friends and family come to us (myself and the little person) with a problem, we can help because we have already predicted it. We are not shocked. We already have advice in the chamber.

Unfortunately, because I am so sure about these armchair theories, I forego the act of discovery for myself and, in turn, steal that opportunity from the friend as well. It takes my full concentration to shut up and be surprised. My strongest impulse is to say, at any moment, “I know,” followed closely by, “That makes sense.”

I think about my dogs, Winslow and Georgie.

I have had Winslow for almost seven years, since he was ten weeks old (allegedly—I took him from a woman named Candy at a rural Texas Walmart, so the truth is a little cloudy). Our souls feel fused in a way that extends into the ethereal. He is constantly communicating with me, and I with him, and I understand his every exasperated huff because I have watched him become. There is a trust between us because of this deep familiarity. We love each other by knowing each other.

Then there’s Georgie, whom we’ve had for a little over a year after she got pregnant on the streets of Tijuana, went into labor in the rescue van, and nursed the babies for two weeks before she lost them all. Since then, I’ve been trying to predict her behavior. I attach emotions and intentions to her very action, pulling from what trauma I do know, but there will always be things I don’t. I think about this constantly.

When I ask Evan if it drives him crazy not knowing what her life was before, he says no. He is fine looking at the dog in front of him and taking her as she is, learning about her in the present. He does not have this unrelenting urge to go backwards and fill in her life so he can predict her future.

And, try as I might to write a narrative for Georgie, I have to accept that I’ll continue to be wrong. That she’ll surprise me. That I’ll never know when seemingly unrelated, unthreatening things might trigger her reactivity, and I have to love her outside of the confines of my expectations. This is hard for me because I feel unsafe loving something I cannot predict or control.

That realization lit up a bulb in my brain: I am so deeply uncomfortable with the unknown.

This is brand new information to me. I’ve always been the first one to jump in head first, following my emotions or curiosity. I thought this meant that I was carefree. That I was a go-with-the-flow kind of person. Looking back, it’s glaringly obvious that I have only been comfortable paving my way in the dark because of the trust and control I’ve always felt with myself. As long as I was jumping with myself, I didn’t feel the threat of the unknown on the other side.

Realizing that I’m a control freak makes me feel a bit out of control. It shatters the understanding of that self I trusted so fully. How strange it is to live with this brain and body for 29 years and just now learn something so fundamental about myself.

The little person inside of me has been working overtime the past few weeks, shining a flashlight on my memories, trying to regain a grip on my identity. Was I once so badly embarrassed that I refuse to let myself be bested again? Did a surprise traumatize me so deeply I cannot stand to be caught off guard? Where does this compulsion for control originate?

Maybe my desire to answer that question is part of the problem. How nice it might feel to accept new information passively and with a shrug. To notice a new freckle on a face of thousands and think, “Oh, a new freckle,” with no threat to my identity. Or to realize I am a control freak and say only, “Huh, that’s a surprise.”

—

Maybe I can learn to live between identities without a label at all. To experience the full range of human emotions whether they support my pre-written identity or not. To discover who I am without trying to beat myself to the answers.

Maybe—and this is a crazy thought—I don’t need to know everything about myself or anyone else.

I still want to know when this yearning for control seeded inside of me and why, but maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe the parts of life most worth living are in between the questions and their answers. I don’t know how to unlearn this impulse so deeply embedded in my psyche, but I’m not going to Google it, even though I’ve already opened a tab to do so. I’m going to instead let myself sit with the not knowing for a little bit. At least for today.