I'm Allergic to Surrender

the allergy of being out of control

To my subconscious, crowds are an existential threat.

They remove any illusion of agency in the name of the survival of the most indifferent. Suddenly, I’m not a person, I’m just one more organism in a Darwinian petri dish, swirling wherever the crowd stirs.

I can’t control my own pace, my own space, or my own sensory input. And my brain interprets that NOT as “mild inconvenience,” like most of you, but as powerlessness, which is one of the most helpless states my controlling nature wants to free itself from. It’s like being trapped in someone else’s dream. I’m defenseless and unable to wake up.

It’s like my mind has diagnosed me with an allergy to being out of control, which then gives me a mental rash in response.

My body has scrawled a label, in big red ink, across crowds:

Unsafe from loss of predictability.

Just the physical sensations of being hemmed in, slowed down, and unseen are now read by my nervous system as me being deprived of control. So my system flares up to protect me. How chivalrous! And debilitating.

I can name every mechanism of my misery, and still I can’t outsmart it.

Wretched woman am I! Who will deliver me from this body of pretend death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve discontentment.

What is the answer?

The gospel.

And it unfolds like this.

There is now no condemnation for this allergy because of Jesus Christ.

God has done what my anxious mind, weakened by the toxin of control, could never do. He sent His own Son to live in me—to carry what my body can’t regulate, to inhabit what I can’t manage.

The mind set on the allergy is hostile to God; it can’t submit, it can’t rest. But the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace.

If Christ is in me, then even though my body reacts like it’s going into anaphylaxis, the Spirit is raising me from the dead with a new immunity: His life regulating what mine can’t.

And if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead lives in me, that same Spirit can calm this mortal body and remove the “allergy” to not being in control because resurrection life now modulates me.

So when the crowd closes in, I don’t try to feel brave. I just remember whose breath is inside my lungs. I let the Spirit borrow my nervous system for a minute, let Him be the one who looks, moves, breathes. I remember the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is standing in the buffet line with me, waiting for the tender back to the ship, and moving with me one slow inch at a time, in every possible sense: physically, spiritually, and psychologically.

Maybe that’s what freedom looks like: not escaping the press of bodies or the loss of control, but remembering who’s doing the living in me. The allergy doesn’t get the last word. The Spirit does.

And maybe contentment isn’t a feeling I’ll ever master. Maybe it’s just this—the moment I stop negotiating with my own discomfort long enough to notice that Christ is already here, unbothered, alive, and unafraid.

If this hit home, you’ll love Weightless, my book on anxiety, control, and the freedom of trust. It’s the longer story behind this allergic reaction.