Acceptance is much like a form of art. It’s something you may not start off good at, but you can develop your skill and talent with practice and technique. The more you do it, the easier it gets. Personally, this was a struggle I faced for a long time because so much of my younger life just didn’t work out how I had hoped.
I was faced with a lot of difficult situations and lost opportunities because of my mental illness and trauma. But I learned how to accept reality with grace and even come to love it. Let me share with you what I learned.
1. Accept that all things change. All things pass.
Everything. Both terrible and joyful things will pass, sooner or later. All I had to do was keep surviving until they did. At least, that is, for the terrible things. But being aware that the joyful things would pass too helped me stay grounded in the moment. I focused on enjoying the time I was spending there with whoever I happened to be with at the time, or even just the time alone.
But when things were bad, truly terrible for me in the extremes of bipolar disorder and severe depression, it helped to always understand that things would change. Sooner or later, my mental illness would shift, or my life situation would change, and I’d have an opportunity to try to make it better.
Change is the only guarantee in life. If you can remember that in both the good and bad times, it will serve you well.
2. Amor Fati – love your fate.
Amor Fati is a principle from the philosophy of Stoicism. As The Daily Stoic shares, it means to love your fate. People who aren’t versed in Stoicism or that method of thinking tend to misinterpret this phrase as some kind of toxic positivity – forcing yourself to be happy about bad things. But that’s not what it means at all.
I largely blame the commercialization of love for this confusion. To turn love into a consumer product, one needs to make it as appealing as possible. One way to do that is to deny or obscure the pain of love.
Amor Fati represents a far older understanding and acceptance of love, including the pain that inevitably comes with it. After all, how deep is that love if you can’t see yourself sitting beside your loved one, holding their hand while they’re on their deathbed? Everyone wants to focus on the positives and brightness of love, but they refuse to consider the times when love is needed most.
To love my fate isn’t to pretend it’s all sunshine and rainbows, but to accept whatever comes that I have no control over, no matter how wonderful or terrible it is. It’s mine, it’s here, and I have to find a way to navigate it. Trying to deny it or avoid it isn’t going to fix it. Instead, I need to embrace it.
3. Focus on what you can control.
What is it that you can truly control? Your own choices, your own actions. A common mistake I’ve seen others make is that they focus on everything they can’t control, then decide to do nothing. After all, if it’s outside of their control, what’s the point? Right? Well, sort of, but no. Let’s say, for example, that I get fired from a job.
What can I control in that situation? I can’t force someone else to hire me. I can’t force them to retain me. All I can do is make the choice on how I need to proceed. I can make the choice to file for unemployment and then start putting in more applications. That’s all I can control in that situation.
I can certainly mourn the loss (and should). It’s hard to lose a job because you wind up with so much anxiety about how to make ends meet. But I also know that throwing up my hands in frustration will just set me back even further. Does it suck? Why yes, yes it does. But it will pass.
4. Let go of your attachment to the outcome.
There’s a practice that’s rooted in Buddhism about letting go of attachments and expectations. One such attachment is to the result of your actions. That is, we spend a lot of time agonizing over what may or may not come of our actions. Maybe you’re trying to land a new job, and you keep putting in application after application, and nothing is coming up.
It’s frustrating, and rightly so. There were stretches of time where I was putting in dozens or more applications with nothing coming up. I would get angry that I wasn’t getting hired. However, I learned that I could never control that outcome. All I could control was the effort I put into searching and applying for jobs, and then the rest was in someone else’s hands. I stopped allowing myself to dwell in the negativity of what wasn’t happening. I did my best to make it happen, and then I let go of the outcome.
Does that mean that everything was suddenly ok? No. But it made the stress a bit easier to carry because I wasn’t making myself as angry on top of dealing with the stress of bills and a lack of money. I focused on what I could control instead, which was continuing to apply for jobs and pinch my pennies.
5. Stop waiting to be ready to move forward.
Peace comes with alignment. Alignment is to be moving in the direction of where reality is trying to take you. In plain English, life isn’t a storybook, and it doesn’t have neat character arcs and developments. Sometimes, all you get is some chaos that’s thrown at you, and you have to figure out how to best roll with the punches.
The longer you wait to “be ready”, the more stress and suffering you’re going to put yourself through. Too many people get wrapped up in waiting for the “right time.” They set some arbitrary conditions on when they’re going to try, rather than just getting started. Don’t sit around and wait. Taking a proactive approach will help you reach acceptance much faster.
For example, consider a particularly bad breakup. It may be worthwhile to go to therapy while going through the breakup to help process any leftover emotions that need to be handled. Now, you could wait six months until you’re finally feeling ready, or you could go in now and let the counselor guide you on the healing path. If you took the proactive approach, you could be mostly healed by the time that six-month mark rolls around.
6. Understand that not every bad experience needs to have a silver lining.
Toxic positivity exists in several flavors. One such flavor includes the crowd of people who like to tell you to look for the silver lining in bad experiences. It’s BS. Not every situation has or needs to have a silver lining, and it can be quite detrimental to look for one. Acceptance is about embracing reality, and the reality is that there are a lot of terrible things that happen to innocent people for absolutely no reason.
That’s just the way that life is. You don’t have to try to find meaning in your trauma if you don’t want to. You don’t have to be thankful for an experience that left you damaged and struggling. You can be angry, you can be sad, and that’s okay. In fact, it’s better than okay, because it’s the healthy thing to do. If you deny your feelings, then you get stuck in place.
I screwed this up about my mental health for years due to toxic masculinity. I adopted the role of the emotionless, stoic man (not to be confused with Stoicism, which is an entirely different thing). The result is that my trauma festered, boiled, and bubbled beneath the surface for almost 20 years. But if I had let myself feel my emotions? I may have been able to accept and not lose decades of my life.
Final thoughts…
Acceptance is one of the hardest arts to master. And it doesn’t mean you will be free from all pain and suffering once you get there, but it does make things a whole lot easier. Some things still hurt me plenty and cause me to struggle. Instead of dwelling on it for years, I take a little time to feel what I need to feel before I get back to the business of living life.
The more you do it, the easier it gets. After a while, I find I can let most minor to moderate things easily slide off my back and just keep going. Life is a continuous journey, and every end will bring a new beginning.
