z: Buying a car part 2

So, when I first started meditating, it felt like I was having more thoughts, not less. In an earlier post, I compared this to buying a new car: once you buy one, you see that car everywhere; not because there's a sudden increase in the number of those cars on the road but because you're suddenly noticing and paying attention to that car. I think it's happening again, but this time, it's with my intention: letting go.
In an earlier post I described how, in attempting to let go, I was noticing when I didn't let go. And I noticed that I seemed to be doing this all the time; that, like, 80% of my time was spent trying to change my experience. And that was bumming me out. It felt like all day long I was constantly grasping and avoiding and rephrasing and controlling things. It felt like no matter what I did I was doing it wrong- I could never seem to let go of anything.
It happened too when I was trying to practice Sila: trying to do those things which support your practice. I knew that in order to support my practice of sitting in the morning, I needed to get more sleep, that at 9:00 each night I needed to be in bed. And each night, at 9 o'clock, I was noticing that I wasn't in bed. I was watching myself checking email, cleaning my room, taking a shower, trying to squeeze in that last thing before my normal bedtime of 10:00 rolled around. And this was bumming me out too. I was annoyed at myself for never seeming to be able to do what I needed to do. I was noticing that 90% of the time I wasn't practicing Sila.
I asked Paul about this in my dokusan- that perhaps the reason I felt like I was failing so much wasn't because I was suddenly grasping more and letting go less, but more because I was paying attention to it.  He said that that might be what was going on, and that eased me up a bit. It made me look at my behaviors less in a "you're not doing it" way and more of an "oh, look at that" way.
It's funny, I was going to say that I feel like I'm grasping less and letting go more but actually, that isn't the case. I'm just not even looking at it. I'm still paying attention to what I'm doing but it's within the context of just looking at myself, not within the context of whether or not I'm letting go. When I see myself doing it, I notice it and do one of two things: change it and actually let go or say, "Well, I guess that's what you need to do right now. Sorry about that, but that's what you're doing."
It kind of makes me think of what we talked about in Young Urban Zen when we talked about setting goals; that when you set a goal as a fixed notion, it actually narrows your experience into a categorization of "did I or didn't I achieve my goal." I think I planned to have just an intent to let go, but I turned it into a goal to let go when I started judging my behaviors against it, when I watched myself not doing it instead of just noticing what I was doing.
I don't know if it was my dokusan with Paul or it was just time passing but I'm not beating myself up so much about it. I know for sure that I still try to change my experience, pretty much all the time, but now I'm finding it interesting, instead of bad.