I believe I am a fairly easy person to deal with. I’m reserved, generally laid back and easy going. It takes quite a bit to ruffle my feathers as some would say. I don’t get road rage, I don’t throw a fit if someone sneaks in ahead of me in a line (irritating and rude…sure, but not worth my energy to cause a scene), and I do my best to try and never judge an others choices, I attempt to understand other perspectives, and I try to accept that things happen for a reason and I have no control. I have the ability to accept others faults, views, beliefs, and lifestyles while keeping kind and loving relationships alive. I’m very accepting of people and things around me, however the hardest thing I’ve ever had to accept was myself.

Quite honestly, somedays I’m still not sure I fully have.

I envy the ease a child has to set everything aside and give their acceptance to someone as well as to themselves. I wish I could have a little bit of that innocence and love like Covert Novelist describes in his newest poem.

I don’t remember when I stopped liking myself. I don’t remember what age I was at when I started believing I wasn’t good enough, when I started beating myself up. It’s a haunting feeling, not being able to pin point that exact moment. Perhaps it was many moments that just kept piling and piling until there was an overwhelming amount of weight, and maybe I cracked. And with that crack I lost my sense of trust, and confidence in myself.

As I’ve mentioned in other posts I have spent thus year so far working on the Simple Abundance Journey, and not surprisingly, one of the main things that the author wants you to focus on is the relationship you have with yourself. She’s a firm believer in being best friends with yourself, always being kind and loving to yourself. She says it will get your further in life. I don’t doubt it either, yet the concept for me to love myself seems absolutely foreign. Almost to the point of self centeredness. Which I realize is quite dramatic.

The great thing about going through this daily book is that I can see where I left off

and even though I might miss 11 days of reading, in my real life I’m going through those struggles or feelings the author is discussing, I realize this when I binge read to catch up on my days. Like I just had to.

But I have a difficult time with letting go sometimes. Especially of things that have happened in the past. Sometimes it’s very hard for me to just move on and accept what and how things are now. But even without accepting this change, time is still moving on and I’m still struggling. So maybe it is best to just let it go.

Sarah, the author, talks about how you if you want to get better and be happier with your life, then you first need to accept yourself as who you are today. Right in this very moment. Not who you will be in a week, or a year, or in X amount of time. Loving yourself can’t truly begin until you’ve 100% accepted yourself and said “I am what I am, and what I am is wonderful.”

Whether it be my hesitance towards change, or my reluctance to trust that causes me to stop myself from fully accepting who I am. It’s like I’m scared to. However, I need to let go of what’s causing me grief. I have to accept the fact that my back, with it’s 9 screws and rods, will never be the back of the former athlete I once was. I’m in a new chapter of my life now and things and life are completely different from how life was not even a year ago. I have grown from the person I was since my injury, and yet I still feel stuck in the same place.

I have made choices and decisions that I’m not proud of or rather shameful of. Things I would not really like to focus on again. Things I’m happy to leave in the past. Where I get hung up is forgiving myself for the things I’ve done that may have hurt people along the way. As good as I try to be, we all have bad days where we throw up the middle finger while driving, or get irritated with a customer service representative, sometimes we do serious things to people like lie, cheat, and steal.

All these choices result in consequences that we have to live with for the rest of our lives. I just tend to be less forgiving of the mistakes I make myself.

I’ve forgotten to be kind to myself, to celebrate my own victories for fear that I would appear conceited to others. I let the worry of others outside opinions start to tear down my wall of security. I lost that battle and shelled up into a hole. Not trusting myself, not believing I was pretty, or smart, or worth anything. I’ve been that low. I’ve downright hated myself and treated myself and my body horribly. Now, at the age of 29, nearing 30, I feel sorry I did that. I don’t want to keep acting like that. I know that even with how different my life may vary from my past, the most important this is that I take care of me first.

There is a sense of freedom that I feel when I think about acceptance. A liberation of worry, a release of stress over spending too much brainpower and effort concerned about others and their thoughts, when in the end, you are the one person you have to spend your entire life with. So it does only make sense to accept yourself for who you are, today, and then work on making her or him a better you. And if you try and slip or fail, be kind to yourself and simply keep stepping forward.

Acceptance is letting go.

Acceptance is to find love in oneself.

❤ LGR