Acceptance often feels like loss before it feels like peace. This video explores the myth that acceptance is gentle, and reframes it as the courageous act of telling the truth about your life.
Rachel Havocost: Acceptance does not equal approval. She says we can accept things and still feel like we are angry or don't approve. Acceptance is not peaceful. It is brutal and it is difficult and it takes time.
Acceptance does not equal approval. My name is Rachel Havocost. I'm a writer, a mental health advocate, and today I want to talk to you about how we can accept things and still feel like we are angry or don't approve and why that's okay. Oftentimes I feel like people talk about acceptance like it's this very, like, peaceful, enlightened thing, like once you accept it, you're gonna be free. But every time I've ever had to accept something, like really, really accept it, it feels like a small death.
And it doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen all at once. Sometimes it's when we realize a person isn't coming back or that our bodies aren't going to look the way we thought they were going to look, or how they used to, or that we might have to always manage our mental health and that there's not just one fix or solution. Acceptance is not peaceful. It is brutal and it is difficult and it takes time. A lot of it is about giving up the fantasy that life could have gone differently and learning to love this one anyway.
Sometimes I think we confuse acceptance with approval. Like, if I accept something, then I have to like it. But that, that is not the case. Acceptance is just telling ourselves the truth about what is. It is looking our lives in the face, looking at what's messy, looking at what's unfair, looking at what's human and allowing ourselves to say, okay, this is what's real. Now what? So acceptance does not equal approval. We do not have to like the things we accept. This is how we start to see what is real and what is in front of us and stop pushing away the things that are happening.
This is how we get out of a victim mindset, and this is how we start to make choices and move forward when we're feeling stuck or when life isn't going the way we want it to. So if acceptance feels hard, if it feels like loss, if it feels like grief, if it makes you angry, that's okay. That's really normal, and you're probably doing it right.
