Radical Self-Acceptance

or making friends with the bits that hurt

I don’t mean radical self-acceptance as in listening to affirmations that tell you you’re confident and beautiful and you deserve your dreams to come true. Maybe I mean the opposite. Maybe I mean making a long awful list of everything you hate about yourself and then deciding to radically accept all of it, even love it. Is that even possible?

I love that I’m fun and obsessive about my writing and have many lovely friends who are arty and fun and funny and cool. That’s easy to love. It’s easy to love the part of me that is crazy about my kids and hungry for creativity. Who tries hard to believe in social justice and say intelligent, thoughtful things about it. I love that I get on with my students. I love that I work hard at my writing. Even when it doesn’t work, I still try to honor it and I get up, shake myself off, and try again.

Sure, I love all that.

I hate that I get fixated on things and people and ideas. I hate that I feel everything too intensely. I hate that everything hurts. I hate that I want too many contradictory things and that my longings far outpace my capacity to satisfy them. That my emotions are too big and that I feel like I’m too much. Actually, I especially hate that. I feel like I’m too much and I hate that. I’m afraid of being too much for other people. I have such a craving not for people to enjoy that I’m fun and interesting and reasonable and I have it all together and I can support them, but for them to love the emotional, vulnerable, needy, messy, cares too much side of me. I have a visceral fear that I’m too much and that those parts of me that are too much can’t be loved. I’ve tried everything I can all my life to hide those parts of myself, to be reasonable and rational and level and fun and sociable. Now those parts don’t want to hide any more. They want to come out. They want to be seen and not just tolerated but to be loved for who they are. I don’t want to be loved reluctantly, despite these qualities, but because of them.

I don’t mean radical self-acceptance like hurting people and being okay with it because hey, I’m radically accepting myself and I’m a dick, so oh well. I don’t mean that. Kindness and empathy are still important. Making amends with people we’ve hurt is still important. Trying things a new way is still important. And I’d rather be hurting all the time because I care too much than be numb. I mean radical self-acceptance as in looking at all the parts of yourself that were hated and punished where you were little and that often feel out of step with the world and loving them. Noticing how your feelings and longings and desires and ambitions are not in line with what the world and societal norms want you to want and loving them.

Notice what the world punishes you for (or what you punish you for.) People have a way of rejecting us. This may be big scary rejection or subtle cues. But when you’re too much, too emotional, too sensitive, you want too much, you make things uncomfortable, you are too much of a problem, you are never satisfied, the world will punish you for those things. When you call out injustice either in your world or the wider world, you may get punished for those things. When you say things that other people don’t say or feel things that other people don’t acknowledge, you may get rejected or punished for those things.

The easy thing is to punish yourself too. The easy thing is to hide those parts of yourself that the world doesn’t like. The uncomfortable parts, the too much parts. The other easy thing is to cut yourself off from people and become fearful of rejection and so not reach out. Reaching out is hard. Rejection stinks. Trying to connect, more meaningfully than what the world allows, is fucking hard. Emotional honesty, telling the world the truth about yourself and risking rejection is horrible.

It’s so, so, so, so horrible.

But. Here’s the thing. It hurts worse to not be yourself and mask who you are. To be comfortable. To be easy. To be cool and calm and reasonable. It hurts so much worse because then it leads to depression and anxiety and addiction and an even worse kind of loneliness because now you’re only surrounded by people who don’t wholly accept you.

So make that list. I am. Because I’m struggling right now to accept the needy cares too much does weird shit parts of myself. So make the list and then decide to be okay with all of it even if the world isn’t. Make a pact with yourself to accept all of it and only allow people into your life who also accept it. Decide to renew this commitment every single day because the world will challenge your right to love yourself every single day.

I made this in a workshop the other day. Not only to radically accept myself but also because the world hurls this at women, this word NEEDY, and I am so going to co-opt it and own it and love it.