Acceptance

It's been a bit. I've been thinking about this particular post for a while, and I've been avoiding writing it. 

The last couple of months have been excruciating. I feel like I'm being torn exactly in half by my ambitions and depressions, equivalent forces repelled by mutual disdain - a poetically toxic mix not unlike a family that should not be. I don't unanimously want to live. I don't unanimously want to die. I don't unanimously want to write. I don't unanimously want a more mundane profession. The closer I get to where I want to be, the less cohesive I feel.

This is all made more painful because I already have the answer I seek. I know what needs to be done to find some measure of peace, or semblance of happiness. I know what needs to be done to unify my mind, if not in goal, then at least in allegiance. I know it, and I hate it, as it's the one thing I don't want to do.

Acceptance, as a concept, is a strange thing. It's more complicated than the simple definition of the word. It's simultaneously a noun and verb - a journey and destination - and it's so context-dependent that it can't really be adequately described in conceptual terms. That, I think, is one of the things I hate about it, because now, to talk about it, I can't abstract it to the point of obscurity. I have to talk about the specific things that I must accept, and that forces me to consider my person-hood, and that's anathema to certain internal demographics.

Fuck 'em, let's do it anyway.

I must accept that I am a good person. I must accept that the things about me I do like aren't purely a result of circumstance, but of choice. I chose to not be like my father. I chose to stop lashing out at the people around me, to not be violent in the demonstration of my anguish, because I recognized that I was going down that path and I knew I wanted something different. That is a choice I made, that is an action I took, and I must accept what that says about me: that I am a compassionate, empathetic human being who just wants people to feel safe and secure.

I must accept that this goodness, these traits that I'm legitimately proud to have, are born from the agonies that plague my daily life. I must accept that the scars of cyclical abuse, of societal violence, are the soil from which my virtues grow. All that is good in me, all the things I'm so afraid to admit are good, that fuel my persistence and passion, are derived from confronting that pain, and staring into that abyss, and speaking my will to be something other that what I saw in myself. I must accept that display of power, of psychiatric might, for what it is, and what it says about me.

I must accept that this means I can never be without this pain. I will never be free from this specific hurt, this void in my heart. I will never not have these stretches of time where all I feel are sadness and self-loathing, where I ask myself if I want to live and can't immediately answer in the affirmative, because this pain is intrinsic to the parts of me that do want it. I must accept this paradox, and I must accept that it's not something that can be resolved - it simply, necessarily, is.

I must accept that the question of whether I want to live - of whether I want to 'jump back into the river of life,' as I said to my therapist a couple weeks ago because sometimes I'm a hack with metaphor - is moot. I am alive. I am living now, and all this fretting about how to live is exactly the problem it's trying to solve. Life is not a passive option to choose so much as the active state of being, and at this point my picking the 'right' answer isn't nearly as important as just fuckin' picking one already. Take out a load of trash tonight. Clean literally one thing. Cook one meal. The ball is already rolling, but I haven't recognized it because I had this fallacy in my head about what it wold look like.

I accept that sometimes the narratives I tell myself about myself are bullshit. Sometimes I construct these elaborate constructs as a way to interpret my feelings and then forget that they're constructs. Sometimes I use that shit to delude myself so I don't have to confront the reality that 'happiness,' as classically defined, is not going to be a thing for me, for all the reasons outlined above. 

I choose to accept that this, in a way, is a good thing. It will keep me humble. It will keep me open to the possibility of being wrong. It will remind me of the importance of love, and empathy. It will encourage me to change if I need to, and hold fast when I must.

I could actually write these paragraphs forever, but hopefully you're getting the gist at this point, so I'll skip ahead to the conclusion:

Just because a life is paradoxical doesn't mean it's non-functional. I've been waiting for some switch to flip, some big inspiration to come along and tell me when to live when I'm already livin'. I can start today. I can start right now. And when I need to take a break, I can take a break, and when I need to hurt, I can hurt, and I will derive goodness from it. The only thing holding me back is the meta shit, the fretting about fretting, and the obsession of internal narratives.

I live. I am alive. All I need to do is accept it.