I drove two hours from Philadelphia to Newark for an appointment I had confirmation of. I had the email. I had a screenshot, taken on purpose, because some instinct in me already suspected I would need proof of something that should not have required proof.
I sat down across from the director of the Ecuadorian consulate and told him, in Spanish, that I was there for my student visa appointment. He looked at his system and told me I wasn’t in it.
Not late. Not incorrect. Not there.
I had two weeks before I was supposed to leave for a semester in Quito, Ecuador. No visa, no departure. No departure, no program. I did not have room to wait for the system to be right about me.
The part nobody prepares you for
Most advice about advocating for yourself assumes a version of the problem where someone is willing to help you and simply needs to be asked. That is not what this was. The director was not resistant. He was indifferent, which is a different and more difficult thing to work with. He had no appointment on record, no urgency of his own, and no particular reason to invent either.
I could have argued that the mistake was his system’s, not mine. I was right, and it would not have mattered. Being right and being unstuck are not the same thing, and this was the first time I understood that difference in my body instead of just knowing it as a fact.
So I did not ask him to fix it. I asked him to let me fix it.
I told him it would take less than twenty minutes, that I would do the work, that it would cost him almost nothing to let me sit at his computer and enter my own information into a system that had somehow failed to hold it. I made the ask as small as I could make it, because I was not trying to win an argument about whose fault this was. I was trying to leave that office with a visa.
He let me behind the counter. Twenty minutes later, I had what I came for.
What actually happened in that office
It is tempting to tell this story as a lesson in confidence, and it would be a comfortable story to tell that way. I don’t think it was confidence. I think it was precision.
I did not walk in loud. I walked in with proof, with a clear read of what the director actually needed from me in that moment, and with a request scaled to exactly what he could say yes to without friction. Most people, when a system fails them, escalate the emotion. I narrowed the ask instead. Twenty minutes. Low cost. Easy for you. That sentence did more work than any amount of frustration would have.
This is the part of controlling your controllables that gets flattened when people turn it into a slogan. It is not about controlling outcomes. I could not control whether the appointment existed in that system, whether the director cared, or whether Ecuadorian bureaucracy moved on my timeline. None of that was mine to control, and pretending otherwise would have just cost me more time I did not have.
What I controlled was whether I kept waiting on someone whose job it was to solve this and who, for whatever reason, wasn’t. That is a narrower kind of control than most people mean when they use the phrase, and it is also the only kind that is real.
Where this actually shows up
I think about that office more than I think about the semester that followed it, which says something, because the semester held its own weight. I was teaching English to children of incarcerated and unhoused parents. I was building a senior thesis on how race and language shape perceptions of desirability for Afro-Ecuadorian and African American women, work that came directly out of what I had done with Zapotec speakers in Oaxaca that same summer. Both of those experiences changed how I think. But the visa office is what I return to, because it is where I first understood something I have needed again and again since.
Waiting for the person responsible to become responsible is a choice, even when it feels like patience. In high-stakes environments, this shows up constantly and rarely announces itself as a decision. The stalled approval you keep checking on instead of routing around. The unclear ownership you accommodate instead of naming. The sponsor who says they’ll raise it and doesn’t, while you wait for a version of them that isn’t going to show up in time.
None of that requires confrontation. It requires the same thing that office in Newark required: knowing exactly what you need, understanding what the other person can actually give you without cost to themselves, and asking for precisely that. Not more, because more invites a no. Not less, because less doesn’t solve anything.
Control your controllables is not a poster in someone’s office. It is the discipline of knowing, in the exact moment something is not moving, whether you are still someone waiting on it or whether it is time to go behind the counter yourself.
I made the flight. I still have the screenshot.
This is the second in a series built around a convocation speech I gave on staying present, controlling your controllables, and choosing your hard. If you missed the first, “Presence Before Proof,” you can find it here. Next: what controlling your controllables actually costs you.
That takes a lot of emotional regulation and self awareness !