Rediscovering You: Acceptance

Accepting something how it is can be a painful process sometimes. In this entry I discuss some of my thoughts and what I've learnt about acceptance.

Acceptance is one of the hardest concepts to get my head around. I’m constantly attempting to maintain the balance between acceptance as a weakness and acceptance as a strength. I always used to have one category for acceptance. I always thought that accepting something meant that you gave in, that you gave up. It’s only as I get older that I’m slowly learning, like so many things, there’s multiple sides to everything because, when it comes to the mind, there is only perception and the more you learn about others’ perceptions, the more you learn.

“Let it play out. "I can't." "You can. Accept what happened to you. Don’t fear what might have been."

My Battle With Acceptance

My first battle with acceptance happened when me and my family lost someone close. I refused to accept they were gone because if I accepted they were gone, I committed myself to a life without them in it. On the other hand, if I told myself they were just away for a little while, on holiday perhaps, I could hold on to the life I had when they were alive and all the memories and all the love that came with that. I felt acceptance severed that connection to that feeling and so I held onto an ideal that healed the temporary wound and ripped open the permanent one. The longer they were gone, the more pain it caused me until one day I realised they weren’t coming back. I know it sounds stupid because everyone tells you they’re gone but your brain does everything it can in that moment to survive and so it invents the reality that will cause you the least pain.

I’d love to say that acceptance itself can bring you peace but in truth it hurts more than the false reality you created. It feels like you hit the rocks ten times harder as if the pull of gravity was ten times stronger than it would usually be. I know it’s not what you want to hear but that’s what acceptance is - it’s accepting the situation even if it’s not what you want it to be. This may sound like a depressing thought and I apologise for that but read on and I promise I won’t end this entry on a down note, there’s another truth I haven’t mentioned yet.

To help explain, I’ll continue with my story. After my brain accepted what had happened, it went into a state of shock and it turned out I was struggling with prolonged grief which landed me in therapy. The therapy helped at the start and I made quick progress but then progress started slowing up and, metaphorically speaking, I began rolling back down the hill I’d just climbed up. It was the hardest thing to witness, seeing years of effort crumbling away. Because of the lack of development, I got transferred to another kind of mental health professional. I’d love to be of more help and be specific about the care I received in the hope it might help others but, being a child at the time, I honestly have no idea who was who at the clinic. Anyway, this new therapist ended up being the one to get me back on my feet. She was different to the others, she was human in her approach, she was calm, sensitive and tough and if she hadn’t been I would have a very different life to the one I have now. I have so much to thank her for and yet I know nothing about her except her name.

When I first entered the room, she was supposed to do an official assessment but she didn’t. She was supposed to rate me on different scales so that someone that didn’t know me, a doctor perhaps, would be able to see the numbers and in that moment know exactly who I was, what my problems were and how to fix them. Guess what, she didn’t. She adapted a report later after I was gone but during the session itself she made no notes, no robotic procedures like the other ‘professionals’ I’d seen. Instead, she just sat me down and talked to me like I was a human being, not a patient, not a client, but a child who had had a bit of a rough few years.

A few months went by and I started progressing again. Then, just like before, the progress halted again. Nothing seemed to be helping and the lack of progressions was making me more and more agitated. I started messing up at school in exams and fighting my parents at home all the while trying to maintain my friendships with a group of people that didn’t know what was happening - after all, how do you explain something when even you don’t know what’s happening to you? In the end, the therapist sat me down and asked me why I wasn’t progressing. I found it frustrating and aggravating that she was asking me when in fact it was her job to find out what was wrong with me and help me to overcome it. After I said this, she said that she had a few theories but just wanted to confirm it and that my outburst had done just that. Confused, I sat and listened. She said that while I had accepted the death of this family member and accepted that life was different without them, what I hadn’t accepted was that I was different without them, that I had changed and I wasn’t ready to accept that yet. For one of the few moments in my life, I was completely silent. I usually had a response for everything but I couldn’t argue with something that was so true in every way. It made me sad and I cried, I guess I was grieving the old me. In losing a part of him, I had lost a part of me and I wasn’t ready to accept that change. The beauty about acceptance is also the thing that makes it so challenging. It’s having to accept the thing that’s holding you back in order to propel yourself forward. The problem is, the reason you want to change is because you’re not happy accepting something the way it is and so to accept it feels counterproductive. I know, I’ve been there. The truth is that if you want to build future goals - you have to be realistic about how much work you put in and realistic about the challenges that you meet along the way. If you’re not willing to accept where you’re starting and you’re not willing to accept who you are or what you are then you do yourself a disservice because you end up creating a false starting line that isn’t representative of where you’re really at. If you have no accurate way of measuring where you started, how are you going to measure your progress?

What I've Learnt...

Acceptance itself is the hardest thing in the world. It’s painful and tough and quite honestly exhausting. On the other hand, what comes after is exhilarating. It’s the feeling of starting from scratch, it’s the process of knowing who you are and not what anyone else wants you or needs you to be. Accepting where you are is not a weakness as long as you also accept that there is always room to grow - to become more than what you were before. I’m still accepting what I am, who I am and where I’m at. I’m by no means perfect and that’s a good thing otherwise how boring would the rest of my life be if I had the answers to everything and every challenge that came my way. Accepting that I don’t have power over everything that happens, including this pandemic, but I do have control over what I do with that knowledge and how I react with that in mind.

I hope this entry helps and if you feel that someone you know could benefit from it then share it with them.

Good luck with coming to terms with any challenges you have in your life at the moment and I’ll speak to you soon.

All the best,

Eight