Friday reflection

Radical acceptance

I wish I could strip away the pain of the world right now, for all of you. For myself.

From my vantage point, talking to so many different women in so many different fields, in so many different geographies, what I notice right now is how hard people are working to be ok. I myself am working pretty damn hard at it.

And this is part of life, of course, and meanwhile we all, or most of us, at least, continue to experience joy and laughter alongside the stress, the exhaustion, the heartbreak, the despair. And yet I don’t know that we give ourselves enough space or enough permission to not be okay.

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What does it even mean, really, to be “okay”?

To feel happy more often than we feel sad?

To feel optimism more often than pessimism?

To get our steps in?

To make “enough” money?

To have a roof over our heads, even if under that roof, we spend our days in spirals of anxiety about money, about our kids, about war and injustice and elections and, and, and…

For those who are parents, does being okay mean having happy, healthy kids? What if they’re only healthy, but not happy? Or happy, but not completely healthy?

Such a slippery scale, okay-ness is.

…Just to take stock, because I feel like we are already forgetting: We just recently lived through a global pandemic, one that’s technically still underway. And we logged in from home the whole time. Sure, some people considered the pandemic a "chance to pause,” to binge watch their favorite TV shows and take up macrame, but truth be told, I don’t know anyone who fits this mold; I only hear about them on celebrity podcasts or read about them in think pieces in esteemed publications. Meanwhile, I imagine the passengers on the Titanic joining Zoom calls as the ship sank, making sure to respond to emails in a timely fashion as the icy water began covering their toes.

Must not fall behind.

In the last decade, so much we took for granted suddenly feels slippery, uncertain: The strength of our democracy, for example. This weighs on me, and on the women I know, even when we think we’re putting it in a little compartment in our minds where it won’t bother us. You know the game, “I Never,” that college students drunkenly play? Since 2016 we’ve been in one, big round of “I Never,” only instead of waking up the next morning and shaking off our hangover, it stays with us; we live in it. It gets worse.

But still we expect ourselves to keep a clean house, lose the baby weight, buy thoughtful gifts. Still we expect ourselves to advance social justice, to meet every deadline at work, to care for those younger and older than us with grace and presence and good cheer. And so on and so forth.

I wonder how things might shift if we radically accepted ourselves, just as we were —and if we radically accepted each other. If we didn’t measure our worth by the cleanliness of our kitchens, or cling to a certain pants size as proof we had things under control. If we didn’t treat the times we fall short of our own, or other people’s, expectations as evidence that we are not enough.

A lot of things wouldn’t get done. But then what? What’s on the other side of that?

And what’s the cost of the status quo?

I’ve written before about the work of Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry and her mission to get more women, especially women of color, to rest as an act of resistance — resistance to a capitalist culture built on the bodies of enslaved Black people. A culture that needs us striving and feeling less-than so we buy more things to salve the places where it hurts, so we sacrifice our health and wellbeing in order to remain in good standing with our employers (so that we can make “enough” money, so that we can feel “good” and “responsible” and like we have things under control… and so that we can buy more things to salve the places where it hurts).

Noticing the absurdity and cruelty of the systems around us is a mixed bag: On the one hand, it’s liberating, to realize life is not inherently this way — we created this way of living. On the other hand, it’s depressing, because… we created this way of living. And, for now, we are living in it.

I don’t have easy answers, but I hope that in reading this, you feel less alone. Because that is something — no, that is a LOT. I hope you give yourself a little extra grace, out there working so hard, including in ways that other people never see. I hope you remember to stop, and breathe, and savor any bit of love or beauty that’s available to you. Because you are made, not just of skin and bone and blood, but also of stardust and spirit, and your worth is innate; you don’t need to prove yourself — not to me, not to yourself….not to anyone.

You are a mighty force.

Amanda