This week, I’ve had to practice a lesson that has historically not been a strong suit of mine – learning acceptance.
I’ve taken this class many, many times, in both personal and professional aspects of my life. And I suppose, as is required with achieving mastery in any topic, I will need to keep re-taking the final until I pass.
The Past
In my almost fifty years, I’ve had trouble learning acceptance in unexpected losses in friendships. I’ve had trouble learning acceptance in losses in romantic relationships. Of lesser importance, at least until now, I’ve also had trouble learning acceptance in the loss of professional relationships. See, accepting something just feels so…accept-y. Like, I can’t ruminate on it at ALL? We’re just accepting it!? It’s just…that’s final? For real, though? But…
Anyway, let’s just say that it’s been hard.
The Present
In the past several months, I once again enrolled in this course against my will. I have faced two baffling situations in my life that seemed to have inexplicably gone off the tracks. The fact that they were happening simultaneously in two completely different situations with two completely different people truly felt like I was living in some alternate universe. Certainly not reality.
In the past several days, both of those issues got suddenly worse. After months of thinking that things weren’t that bad, I faced the realization that they both absolutely were.
As one who firmly believes that most bad situations are one honest conversation away from being resolved, I kept putting my head down and trying again. Failure meant fine-tuning and reaching back out. If I couldn’t break through one way, I’d just try something else. And I couldn’t help but think that my putting up boundaries had something to do with both situations. The what-ifs were relentless, but it wasn’t helpful to budge on this.
When I realized that this was bigger than anything I could single-handedly fix, I retreated within. I listened to podcasts about conflict resolution. I remembered something I had learned in therapy a couple of years ago. And then, today, I found an essay that really dropped the perspective.
Learning Acceptance: The Farewell
Brianna Wiest’s 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think is an outstanding series of essays that does as the title promises. I bought it almost two years ago and have taken the time to read it thoroughly, as every.single.page feels important and worth an immediate re-read in the moment.
Today, I opened it to “The Art of Awareness, or How to Not Completely Hate Yourself.” This essay was comprised of 12 easy-to-read tips, and yet I found myself reading it repeatedly as if each re-read was the first.
While I recommend all 12, it was Tip #8 that slapped the hardest. By slapped, I mean that it felt like someone slapped me right across the face with the entire book. I’m gonna drop it below in case any of you needed the same lesson without even realizing it:
At any given time, you’re mostly just concerned with how one (or maybe two) people perceive you.
– Brianna Wiest
We never know what’s going to resonate deeply with us, but boy did this resonate deeply with me. I realized that I was very specifically worried about two individuals who, even when added together, were little more than a blip in the collective radar of my life. Furthermore, I realized that I had already spent months worrying about what these two individuals thought, which was wild in itself, as both warranted a fresh-ears re-listen of a very specific recent hit song by our Queen and Savior, Taylor Swift.
As other lyrical geniuses once said, life is very short, and there’s no time for fussing and fighting, my friends. While the artists ultimately maintained that We Can Work it Out, sometimes it comes down to another lyric:
We can work it out and get it straight or say goodnight.
– The Beatles
In the spirit of a new desire to pass the Learning Acceptance final for good…I bid you both goodnight.
A postscript to this piece: I wrote this prior to the horrific shooting yesterday in Pennsylvania. It has been devastating reading countless calls to violence and assumptions that one person’s decisions speak for an entire population. While practicing acceptance is important, what is more important right now is peace. I hope that we can all take an extra moment to breathe and remember that we are all humans on this planet with our own struggles, and that violence is never the answer. Thank you for reading. <3