Accepting Yourself As You Are

Last week the question we talked about was How do you see yourself? The wording on that question is important. We were not writing down who we ARE but rather how we perceive ourselves. Oftentimes our perspectives can be very far from the truth.

This week we’re going to talk about accepting ourselves as we are. Ask yourself and others who and what you really are. Choose close friends who will be honest with you and not sugarcoat their answer. If they see you as a vivacious, loving person and not as a depressed mope, you need to hear that. If you are depressed and that’s what they see as well, that’s what you need to hear. You need to hear the truth.

Compare other’s answers with your own perspective of yourself. Do they differ? Which do you feel is more accurate? Your view or their view? A combination of both?

Here’s an example to illustrate this step: I was very depressed for a long time, then I met my boyfriend Jorge (pronounced George). He could see I had many problems, and yet he saw a side of me that I did not. He saw me smiling and joking. He saw I had a sharp mind. When he described me to myself, it was hard to accept anything good about myself. The truth is I had good qualities and bad qualities.

Yay for the good qualities, but what would I do with the bad qualities that seemed to outweigh anything good in me? I decided to accept that I was a depressed, complaining person who had wasted many years of her life. Then I told myself “That is who you used to be. You’re not that person anymore. You may still feel like a scared loser who doesn’t get anything done, but that’s not who you are now. That is all in the past.”

This process took much longer than the thirty seconds it took to put into words and type up, but the important thing is not how long the process takes for each person. The important thing is that you come to those realizations, you don’t give up until it sinks in for you, and you reach that place where you can accept who you are, good and bad. Then you proclaim that you are no longer those bad parts of yourself. The feelings and perspective you have of yourself is ALL based off of past events and decisions you’ve made.

If your entire life was erased from this second backward, you would not have anything negative to say about yourself because you’d have no memory of it. The only moment that would matter would be this one and what you would decide to do with it. You can make it anything you want it to be. You can create a new you by focusing on just this present moment. Even though the memories of your past failures will not be literally erased, it is still true that the moment that matters most is the one you’re living in right this second. After you have found a way to accept that truth, you can move on to the next part, the decisions you choose to make in this present moment.

Next week we’ll talk about looking into our futures and accepting who we WANT to be.

Next week: “Accepting Who You Want to Be”

Also, stay tuned for updates on the release of my current fictional work in progress, Mint Julep Adventures!