Acceptance is never surrender, never defeat, never an event, never victory. It’s easier if you treat it as a skill because sometimes it is. Living matters so much more than striving to be perfect. There are pros and cons, facts and incorrect beliefs. You can always improve but you have to get real about the underlying self first. You don’t, can’t need to be anything else. Let’s get out of the conditional mindset. Self-acceptance is not about appreciating some underlying level of physical attractiveness, intellectual prowess or the achievement of some other metrics. If you can only find acceptance if X or when Y, you’re still at square 1. Yet it’s a bad idea to base your self-worth on traits like beauty and success. We all need external validation to survive. ![]() If people who care about you get an inkling that you hate yourself, they’ll tell you you’re beautiful, talented, fun to be around, successful, cool etc. How do you learn to accept yourself? Regard your Self as a fact of existence, like the colour of the sky or the feel of rain on your skin. Try on gratitude like an old shirt that might fit down the line. *** Take stock of yourself and acknowledge that this is it. Dum dee dum, would you look at me, folding this laundry as if it matters, as if I am not crushed by the weight of my impending death, as if everything isn’t a pile of shit. All the while, observe everything like a piece of fine art. It’s a different sort of living to the kind you do in the fog of self-hatred as you drift along, passively praying for it all to stop.Įmbrace the mundane minutiae of life: cash a cheque, empty the vacuum cleaner, cook rice, open the mail, go somewhere to see someone or something. This is who you are, this is what you are going to do.Ĭommit to accepting. Once you do that, you don’t need to learn. How do you learn to accept yourself? You commit to living. But at some point that ceases to be an option. Digging it out hurts so much more than leaving it. We run from it. When we are the thorn in our own side, we either destroy ourselves to escape the pain, or we pull out the tweezers and dig and dig and bleed to get it out. As humans, our most natural instinct is to move away from pain. Maybe that sounds dramatic, but it’s not. You don’t remember how to think one thought without its presence. Everything gets so much worse when you first try to change because you see how your self-hatred is tied up with every part of your life. You are forced to confront your self-hatred. So tired.Įventually, you can’t stand it any longer. You become the class/ office/ family clown. Maybe you get good at overcompensating in the company of others. You can’t and don’t and won’t think of anything else. It turns down the volume on everything, shrouds life in a dark mist, saps your strength. Between the pages of my notebooks and within my laptop keyboard, I found something I didn’t hate: words. Every time the horrible truth hit me that I could never be anyone other than myself, I erupted with fury. ![]() Perhaps I had done something terrible in a past life. As torture, it seemed too skillfully crafted to be incidental. It was hard to envision a worse fate than being myself. ![]() In school, I’d stare at classmates, wishing I could swap places with one them, even for 24-hours. Even here, I’m skimming over so much, crafting a narrative from jumbled images. I never talked about my nights with anyone. Counting down the hours until my mind would slow down and stop. All day long, I looked forward to sleeping. Anything that would tire me out enough to sleep was good. I’d run past millionaires’ houses, glancing through the gates at glowing rooms, resentful of their warmth. I’d run past estates where people yelled out at me from bus stops, their faces cloaked in shadows. Maybe I’d slip out of the house and run breathlessly through the dark streets. Fury would wash over me until I had to do something, anything to let it out. Like my insides were twisting into a knot that got tighter and tighter as I struggled to hold myself together, I thought at the time. Every part of my mind laser-focused on hatred. I used to get home from school every day and lie on my bedroom floor crying, crushed by the pain of being myself. Originally written as an answer on Quora and also published in The Startup.
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