Self Acceptance

I used to be quite religious, and I think now part of the reason I was religious was because I had a hard time accepting human nature, accepting myself or accepting other people; indeed I ‘lost my faith’ and left religion when I discovered that religion did not and could not, that I could not, make other people be better people, could not make other people want to be better, or even want to be bettered. I had to either accept other people’s nature and desire as they were, or at least accept I could do nothing about them, and in this need for acceptance I realized neither the religion nor my faith could fix my inability to accept people as they were, they could only change the relative parts of our human nature, of my human nature, that I could and couldn’t accept.

I like to think I have finally gained the acceptance I needed to have, finally learned the acceptance I needed to learn, but any learning I have managed is more due to philosophical exploration than anything else, and the most recent part of my acceptance education I think may have been the original root of my problem: self acceptance.

The key for me was the realization that people not only have different experiences and experience the same things differently (more compactly perhaps or more differentiated), but people also symbolize and represent those experiences differently – and having different experiences or using different symbols doesn’t mean people have less learning, knowledge or wisdom, are less aware of the magnitude of their mind, the amazement of existence, or the splendor of their soul. Different is different and not necessarily better or worse, less or more, right or wrong, valid or invalid; to know anything more than people’s difference we must need sift their interior, sift their soul, and the only interior and soul we have access to sift is our own.

So I started seeing nearly every instance of what other people do and say, whether or not I liked it or agreed with it, as merely different or similar symbols of their merely different or similar experience, and I began worrying less about other people’s interior betterment and paid more attention to my own. And soon, by attentively analyzing my own interior symbols, I began seeing my previously unacceptable interior as merely different, not less, wrong, or invalid.

I am fortunate to have someone who loves and accepts me as I am, uxorious or not, who was unperturbed by my self discoveries, who is so anti-regimented in her assessment of self and others she refuses such establishing phrases ands labels like ‘female led‘; we just are who we are, have the relationship we have, have the symbols we have. Unsurprisingly, I find I increasingly agree with her. People just are as people are, and likely the most we will ever manage is a minimal mitigation of other people’s needless pain and hurtful actions, and though I no longer feel impassioned, angry or inflamed about other people’s actions, I definitely continue to feel painful sadness, sometimes acutely and unbearably so, at needless suffering.

I may no longer have religion, but I still believe; I believe in the power and transcending significance we individual humans experience while physically incorporated here on earth. I still have faith, just one less rigid and more accepting.