Sarah Bates I waffle, therefore I am

I suck… BUT that’s about to change!

Acceptance isn't the end. It's part of the process.

I used to think "I want to accept myself as I am." Then I realised I wasn't changing. Why? I thought, Why wasn't I changing? Was accepting myself really that bad? I even half wrote a blog post about it (without publishing, thankfully), a shit whiny thing about the war between self acceptance and self improvement.

Half way through writing the post, I went off to think about it and read a bunch of blogs in the process. One of which was Mars Dorians post "The Bitter Truth You Have to Embrace (IF You Want to be Remarkable)". I love reading Mars because he always gives a fresh perspective on things, and usually a huge kick up the arse, too. This time I read it and it hit something in what I was writing about. Acceptance, I figured, was idiotic! If you accept yourself, you'll never change, and so the idea then is to not accept yourself and be happy with yourself because you're improving yourself. Acceptance is bull shit! I raved about how accepting yourself was an idiotic thing to do. Accepting things was a cop out! I said.

Deluded?

But you know what? This still felt wrong. It felt like I was missing something, like half of the equation wasn't there.

Eventually I realised that, you know what? I've been looking at it wrong. Acceptance wasn't the be all and end all, it was a stepping stone in a three-part process. Unless you accept something as the way it is, you can't change it. I'd always heard that, but something hadn't fit with me because I hadn't been looking at acceptance in the right way.

Here's what happens when something goes on in your life. Let's use a  bull as an example;

A bull is in front of you and it's storming towards you extremely fast!

The first thing you do is have some sort of instant feeling: Fear, for example.

Then comes acceptance. We accept that, oh shit, there's a fucking bull storming towards me.

That's when most people stop. Most people at this point stick around in "oh shit, there's a fucking bull storming towards me" and get hit by the bull. They accept that there's a bull there and we accept that we're wetting our pants but they don't do the next, life saving step:

Decide to do something about it! For example: Get out of the way of the bull! Or grab the thing, or you know, do something that means you won't be in the way of the bull any more.

But you can't do something about the bull until you accept that the bull is there. Maybe you think "Oh, there's no bull, it's just my imagination," and pretend it's not there to make yourself feel all warm and cosy. (This was my favourite tactic. 'What problem? There's no problem.') Maybe you think you can't do anything about it. "Well, there's a bull coming. Guess I'm about to get hit by it.") ACCEPT it. There's a bull coming. Now you know that you can do something. You're overweight? ACCEPT it. Now you've accepted that instead of pretending you're perfect and there's nothing wrong with you, you can change it. Or you can get all whiny about it like I used to. Your choice.