There is something intimate about being yourself. To be in control of something inexplicable, unknowable even to itself. It indeed is a strange realization that you have unbridled power over everything—over your actions, your thoughts, the way you interact with your environment. Nothing is left to chance.
But to think about control in the sense of yourself can go two ways.
It is a blessing that our mind was put in a body capable of experience, of life, of love and many such emotions that the price outweighs any lack. Of course, not all are blessed with perfection, but if anything, at least to make the best of what one has, one should feel a twinge of gratitude in life itself. Even for the small moments. But that aside, the fact that our mind and body is our own is astounding, akin to the feeling one might have at the thought of their children, their own in so many ways ineffaceable.
However, there are parts of ourselves we don't command. Our irrational fears, intrusive thoughts, habits formed without awareness, actions performed without thought…some of these could be conditioned through practice but some emerge without consciousness. But if consciousness is the self, quoting René Descartes “I think therefore I am” , what can we attribute these to?
Debate over the existence of free will has lived on for centuries. On one hand the fate of impotence over anything is disorienting, it strips away the meaning of life. Why must one endure a predestined fortune? Or, be blessed with potency—complete and utter control of everything. The architect of your success and a blame to your misfortune. We either fall into one or the other, but knowing the answer to which won't benefit us in any way.
Like all animals who live a cyclical lifestyle, tending to the basic necessities to sustain life—nutrition, survival, reproduction, only humans seem to have developed this sense of inquiry. The explanation must lie in the fact that our intellectual complexity was not triggered due to a cosmic world but perhaps it was our innate intellectual complexity that created the cosmic. The struggle between acceptance and question assuages our happenstance of sophistication.
Maybe like animals, we ourselves are trapped in cruelly perfect biological machines which cannot exist without the illusion of control.