According to Webster-Merriam dictionary the definition of acceptance being approved and also agreeing with things. I have been mulling over this definition and also why the word ACCEPTANCE triggers me. Here is what I have come up with.
My entire life I have not been accepted by anyone, not even my birth family. My birth father left me with an abusive mother, who I know loved me. However, her mental illness, broken heart from her own rejections, and an illness she did not take care of caused her to be mentally unstable and physically unstable and therefore abusive in her treatment of me. She had small moments of being a good mom. I do have good memories and I choose to remember those moments. But the painful, abusive, and cruel ones do linger and are stuck in my mind. Not only this, but my sister and her family did not accept me into their family after she passed away. One because I was not into their toxic drug scene and I was deemed a risk because I refused to be quiet about the things they were doing or game the system or act like a mafia family. I did not want my life like that. I fought back, and although, they respect me for it, they also did not accept me for it. I was different and therefore, unacceptable. Then I moved into the family that became my family as a teenager. They were conservative Christian and had all these rules, regulations, and things that were not in the Bible but they follow it like it was or things that were abusive towards women and children and their cult like church had abusive men in power and even one of them cornered me in the bathroom and I was too afraid to say anything, but he did not touch me, but he tried. My history and knowledge saved me from that abuse. I knew that if I told someone in this church I would be the bad guy. That is the hypocrisy of the Church’s message that I had a hard time with. I stopped attending when I was 18 and I could make my own decision. I still love Jesus. I just don’t love the church dynamics and how it has been set up for the predators to be put in charge and not suffer the consequences of their actions. Not all of them have pure intentions. I have had to protect myself for years from people who did not accept me or approve of me or even agreed with me or who agreed with me and just felt powerless in doing anything. Fortunately, I have not allowed this to stop me from trudging forward in my own healing journey. It still affects me though. It affects the way I view myself and how I have chosen to take care of myself. In the church I grew up, heck, all Christian churches you bring up self-love and it triggers them to go into quoting all these scriptures that it is a sin or that it is of man thinking and all these things. I want to scream and I have screamed at them. They are not reading the scriptures or even quoting it correctly or thoroughly enough. The scriptures they are quoting are promoting self-love. Jesus himself says to love thy neighbor as yourself. So if you are not taking care of yourself and are abusing yourself then you are going to abuse others. Yet, they accept the narcissistic self-love and abusive behaviors of leaders who abuse others to gain control and manipulate and rape women and children for their own pleasures. That is the the self-love the Bible is against, that Jesus was against. That is why Jesus went into the synagogues and market places and called them out for being vipers. That is not the self-love and acceptance I am speaking on in this post. I am talking about following the fruits of the spirit, peace, love, joy, kindness, gentleness, patience, and self-control. This is self-love. This is self-acceptance. These are healthy.
For me, I am learning to accept my body and illness the way it is now and the inevitability of it getting worse overtime. Part of that acceptance is realizing that no matter how much I eat well, move my body, or make plans things are going to happen, good and bad things. That I will have to take harsh medications like Prednisone and chemo type drugs like Rituximab and Plaquinil in order to achieve some sort of a balance in my healing. And when I take these harsh drugs there are going to be side-effects that make me feel badly and even cause my physical looks to change. For example, the fat moon face from Prednisone and weight gain and even severe swelling.
Radical acceptance is a term that my counselor is using with me to help me with my current disability and accepting this part of myself. I am still navigating what this acceptance looks like for me. My life has changed a lot since August, actually longer than that. I have been feeling blocked in my writing and therefore, I am going to start writing about how my life is changing with my disability, along with all my book reviews. It is time to open up my heart and soul wider as I focus on my recovery. That is the plan. I will continue to write about it as I add things and reinvest in my life. This is the first of many posts I hope to be writing on my continuing journey. Stay tune!