There is a great deal not to get worked up about.
It is not anyone’s responsibility to comment on everything, to evaluate every bit of our shared experience and pass judgment on it.
It has become performative. One the best methods ever invented for a quick fix of self-esteem is calling out people who don’t talk like your team talks or don’t act like your team acts.
Self-esteem is overrated. It won’t be there when you need it. People do things they regret later to get some.
Self-acceptance is more reliable.
Sometimes you hear someone say it took them a long time and a lot of difficult work to really feel at peace with everything about themself. Maybe it did. Maybe that’s just a story they tell themselves for whatever reason. Maybe it wouldn’t be that way for you.
Part of what holds us back is exactly this well-known idea that the work is so long and difficult. We’re too busy with Life to take on another long and difficult project right now, thank you very much. Self-esteem boosts are much easier to come by in a consuming culture dedicated to making us feel better if we have the money for it.
But what if it isn’t so long and difficult and you don’t have to buy lots of stuff?
What if you could take a self-acceptance pill and just be in that place where you wouldn’t be chasing approval because you wouldn’t need it? Would you?
I wouldn’t.
I’d rather do it myself and I bet you would too.
I am doing it and it turns out that it’s not a long and difficult project. It’s not even a project, not something else you need to take on with everything you’re already doing.
It’s something more like adopting a different attitude and then just staying with it.
The things that we think are going to be so hard to face and accept usually aren’t. We know them already. There’s no surprises.
But we’ve been sold a bunch of bullshit that served other people’s interests, even though they mostly intended no harm — that we are deficient and in some cases, just plain bad.
We’re all just trying to cope with the world we find ourselves in, always have, that’s all we’ve ever been doing since as far back as we can remember. Other people label how we try to do it and then we buy into the labels. We believe we are that person being described.
Well in a way we are.
We become what we believe and buy into about how the world sees us.
Self-acceptance doesn’t mean facing our awfulness. It means looking closely at everything the world has told us we are, and continues to tell us — all stuff we believed and let ourself become.
There’s no shame in it. Looking back at how you and the world formed you is like cleaning out the closet and finding something old that evokes a entire past mini-chapter. You feel it. It just was. Shame comes from still seeing yourself as the central character in a melodrama, which you weren’t and never are. You were just aspect of a complicated set of dynamics.
Self-acceptance as an attitude is quite a bit easier than getting worked up over everything that is not in lock step with your sources of allegiance and self-esteem. You don’t need to get approval and constantly affirming your specialness any more.
Since it’s not a project, it’s also never done.
I do not think of myself as having achieved self-acceptance or as striving to. I see myself as operating more of the time than not in a self-accepting way. I know I am still deeply conditioned, that unconscious forces I have not yet come to know fully influence my behavior in major ways.
I don’t give myself a pass because I’m a semi-old person really working at it. I am self-critical. I push myself to do hard things and I am disappointed in myself when I don’t. And I watch all that from a perspective of not pushing and not being disappointed. Just noticing that I am, both of those views, all at once.
Montaigne has been one of my favorite writers for a long time but I only realized recently that his famous essays were blog posts that he used in his on-going self-acceptance process. All he cared about was the content of his experience, which meant everything from sensations and habits of thought to a few other people and important concepts like death, which Montaigne took personally.
A human paying attention to his or her own experience and not getting engaged in what the culture at large says you’re supposed to care about was radical in the 1500s. Montaigne lived in a time of war, with religion marking the different sides. He got into at first, in a leadership role. He realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t for him and pretty much checked out of the culture’s thought streams for the rest of his life, which was regarded as blasphemous for the next few centuries.
He was in a kind of walking meditative state all the time. Maybe not like a Tibetan Monk controlling autonomic functions through mental muscles developed in specific meditative practices, but in a condition of self-acceptance and focused attention. True, it was easier with no Internet and social media. But managing what we let in, examining what is already there, and easily letting go of everything except what matters to us is never a simple matter at any time or place.
The distractions are obvious in a formal meditation practice. Replaying the loop of feeling hurt by someone, the pain of back aches, worrying about getting everything done, a sudden terrible itch. We learn to not get engaged. We never notice the itch going away, which is engagement. We notice that it has gone away, maybe.
The distractions in the rest of life, our informal meditation practice, are equally obvious and seemingly more compelling and irresistible all the time.
For the sake of self-acceptance, I advocate resisting the irresistible.
When self-esteem, is not needed, engagement can be curtailed and limited to personal choice. Not ignoring the rest, just noticing it. Then turn back to what matters to you.