The Acceptance Conundrum

“Acceptance”... on the face it... may seem like such a simple and ordinary word... but is a word that carry so much weightage. It’s something that we all crave for, something that we all want, but that’s difficult to come by. To love someone is to accept them for who they are, their flaws and their imperfections, their shortcomings, accepting them completely, loving the good and the not so good things about them.

But acceptance is such a difficult pill to swallow, something so difficult to do. So many struggle to find it, leaving them broken and damaged and fragile. Society doesn’t accept you when you fail to conform to societal norms. So you find yourself living at the fringe of society, an outcast, treated like a pariah, all because who we are is not what they want us to be, we don’t fit into their predefined conditions, we don’t follow their rules. So they box us and label us, treat us differently, call us names. And strangely, the boxes we find ourselves in, don’t really accept us if we don’t fit in their norms. So that leaves us hanging in limbo, in the twilight zone.

Parents find it difficult when their children don’t turn out to be what they want them to be, when their offspring chooses to walk down a different road and not the one they set for them. Often getting distraught, bordering the dramatic, wondering what wrong did they do, what sin did they commit to find themselves in such a predicament, effectively emotionally blackmailing their way, beating their children into submission, and in the end having it their way. Never realising they are a cause of many broken humans, many a broken homes, many a failed marriages, all because they thought they knew what’s best. Why can’t they act as guides, helping their children find their own way, pave their own path, be there to support them, to pick them when they fall, nudge them gently down the right path (and not pushing them down the path they perceive as right). Acceptance may not be an easy thing to do but then there’s always bonus points for making an effort.

But in the end, whether it’s society, or our parents, or even friends and the ones we love, the main culprit is us, the entire acceptance conundrum originates from us. So often we find it difficult to accept ourselves for who we are, hiding behind masks, a false pretence, letting others dictate our lives and who we become. We search for a normal never truly realising that we are normal, we have the strength and capability to work towards it. We shackle ourselves to an idea or normalcy, and hope for it, but then what is normal anyway in a world that’s so abnormally normal. We struggle to accept our needs, our wants, our desires, often being ashamed of our feelings, guilty of desires, taking us down a spiral of low self-esteem. We struggle to accept ourselves for who we are, who we are meant to be, what we feel, often leading to low self-esteem, a need to be accepted according to someone else’s norms. Often leading us to banish ourselves to the fringe of society, an outcast, but no rebel.

So in the end it all boils down to a self-acceptance, learning to accept ourselves for who we are. Learning to accept yourself is the first and the most important step, cause then the acceptance of anyone else wouldn’t really matter. Cause when you accept yourself, you learn to love yourself, and it’s only when you love yourself would you be able to love anyone else.