Acceptance is many things if not a double sided coin. We accept a lot of things in life: Our best friends’ quirks, our parents’ tendencies to excessively care or our partners’ habits of always being late.
In life, acceptance becomes second nature, so much so that we don’t realize when it’s gone. The quirk of our best friend becomes an annoyance instead of a joy, our parents’ tendency to over care feels overbearing, we lose our patience waiting around and our partners’ late clock becomes the time bomb for a breakup.
The two parallels of acceptance are stark and each side feels just as real as the other; it feels best to laugh, appreciate or trust, but jeez, sometimes we simply deserve something different, something better.
Where should we draw the line between getting swept away in the anger of deserving more and ignoring that anger for the peace of simply accepting what we have? How can we learn acceptance and does acceptance come at the cost of getting what we deserve?
What is acceptance?
To accept is to make peace with what’s in front of you. We accept people instead of judging them, make peace with our class schedule even though you didn’t get all the classes you wanted, the shoes you got ended up being a weird shade, but hey, you’ll learn to like it. Nobody enjoys focusing on life as a pessimist, we all strive to be content.
Acceptance is replacement. We play both sides of the acceptance coin and it is impossible to play both sides at once.
To set aside broken expectations, hurt, disdain and replace them with appreciation, “bon” mood or even sometimes just toleration, is to flip your acceptance coin. You cannot accept a situation as both discontentment and contentment.
You’re annoyed that your best friend went back to her ex again, but you can accept that it’s just how she is and she’ll learn on her own time eventually.
To swap emotions or flip your coin, is to feel in control, at peace and stoic while remaining in power of how you feel. In this sense, acceptance is a super power of the self, like casting a spell to see the world in a better light and feeling lighter because of it.
I accept a lot of things in order to remain unbothered, unchallenged or in other words, stoic. To meet life as it is, without being bogged down with the weight of the ability to constantly nitpick. For me, the pressure to face life and fight it has always been a more obvious urge than the ability to make peace with life as it persists.
Acceptance has helped me shift this mindset a lot, but being the natural questioner I am, I still see flaws with the whole mechanism. Sure, a lot of the things we ‘accept’ boil down to a pot of stuff we really shouldn’t care too much about anyways.
But what about when we do really care—when we can’t flip our coin and ignore the anger we feel for the good that’s there, or perhaps when there isn’t any good to focus on?
Choosing Not to Accept
In many cases, acceptance is not as easy as a choice or a simple replacement of how we feel. Emotions too strong to brush aside, broken expectations too important to be indifferent about. Sometimes the cost of acceptance is too much, as it kills our wants, needs and desires.
You have felt this in many ways before. Maybe you’re a push over and let people have their ways at your expense or maybe you refuse to accept things that don’t meet your original expectations. Both choices feel like a challenge and each leads to the question: Where do we go from here?
The double sided coin only works when there are two versions of you to flip between. In our brains, we physically, can’t accept when we can’t mentally swap to a different version of ourselves, meaning there is no version of us that is willing to accept the situation. When it feels too challenging to accept something, it’s because you don’t see yourself — who you are — reflected back in the choice to make peace.
Like speaking words you don’t agree with, you physically feel wrong as they resist rolling off your tongue. If we accept the wrong thing and try to become these words, that wrong feeling will take over your entire body, including your mind.
Attempting to accept what is not meant for us leads to head spaces full of anxiety, confusion and not feeling like yourself. The best you can do is recognize, “this is wrong, I will not agree.” Don’t force it.
At best, we learn to accept in some facet of ourselves eventually, even if that looks like detaching yourself from the realm of caring entirely. At worst, we detach ourselves under the reasoning of anger, upset and discontent. My best advice is to be stoic and choose the first route; remain in yourself and know that unmet expectations need not affect who you are.
Cost is effect
When acceptance feels like we are giving up a piece of ourselves, what makes it worth it? The answer to this question is that we are never giving up a piece of ourselves when we accept correctly. And there is a simple equation to do so.
Broken expectations means the side of the coin we wanted to accept no longer exists. It’s out of our hands and we’ve lost control.
In losing this control, we feel angry and frenzied. In acceptance, we gain back this control not only of the situation, but of ourselves and our ability to manage our own emotions. This makes acceptance sweet.
So long as acceptance is sweet, it’s worth it. Acceptance is the cost of existence, compromise lies within every waking thought whether you know it or not. This compromise is often intrinsic, but sometimes — like when our expectations aren’t met — it poses an obvious challenge and choice. The ability to choose to ignore that challenge for acceptance produces the feeling of control and sweetness that makes life a little bit easier.
The cost of having to accept is losing the control or outcome of what we wanted in the first place, but the effect of acceptance is gaining back this control in making peace with what you now have. The effect of the cost is the control and vice versa. Accepting correctly becomes an endless feedback loop of cost and effect, the feedback only benefitting you.
If this logic reigns true and if acceptance is to choose sweetness, then why do some of us have such a hard time with it?
The plain answer is, we believe we deserve better and acceptance of others is not enough. It’s not always easy, sometimes there is no balance, no coin to flip, no reason to accept what we’re given. In scenarios like these, attempting to accept what surrounds you will only drive you further mad, out of control and into a frenzy.
When we can’t flip the coin to be at peace with what we’re given, we must flip the coin to accept ourselves and the fact that we are not at peace, that we don’t want to compromise. In this, a new sweetness of self-assurance is born, acceptance of self. It’s pertinent that we accept when we need more, as making peace with yourself is one in the same as making peace with the world surrounding you.