Courage To Accept
After writing this post 4 times and rejecting it every time, I decided to be straight enough about what I was trying to say.
In one of my posts, ‘The unreal identity’. (Those who have not read it read it here) I have mentioned about my childhood insecurities of being thin and how I chose not to give myself the labels that the society had given me. I decided to create my own identity. Coming back to the same topic, I still get frustrated and somehow end up getting into the same loop of being upset about my weight. It’s no longer about how the society see’s me; it’s now about how I see myself and my wish to work on my body. One night, when I was writing my diary I was expressing the very same frustration.
I have to put in way too many efforts for being perfect, all my life I have faced a lot of health issues because somewhere my body was too ‘weak’ to handle everything. I am a person who wants to do a lot of things together and fail to do everything because of my body.
Then as the society has instructed us, we start looking for solutions and start making efforts for the challenges we face. Then came the time when I started to focus on my body. Exercising, eating right, and ignoring what my mind had to tell me, ignoring what people had to say! Being a human being has many costs, one of which is that we tend to make many mistakes. I made them too. The results? All my efforts of being perfectly alright were simply nothing after a mistake. I was on the same level again. I lost discipline, I lost consistency because of some situation, the strong Manasvi from the outside lost that strength, and she was labelled ‘weak’ again. This time the label was not from the society but from her. I entered into the same loop of frustration all over again. I failed here again. Now what? All my efforts, trials, positivity, determination, hard work was in vain.
Then, I was hospitalized in september 2015 where my father had to carry me to the hospital because I had no energy left. When I was in the hospital and the nurse was giving me an injection, dad asked me ‘how are you?’ I, with a framework saying ‘be positive’ at the back of my mind said, “I am completely okay and normal” when I was not even able to speak properly. Dad laughed and just said, “fighting is good Manasvi but accepting that you have lost against yourself and lost in this particular moment by what life threw at you, is okay. When you surrender, accept the failure and be okay with it, that is when you can start fresh with the state you are in. Otherwise you will treat yourself as completely okay even if you are not.”
I got it then. All this while, I was just fighting with a situation where I was meant to lose just because I had not yet accepted myself the way I was. A mistake made by me, made me believe in the fact that ‘I am weak’. It made me hate myself a bit more. It proved the reality I had created, that ‘I can not manage everything together’ my health, relationships, commitments etc.
When you accept the reality, you create a space for making a new reality from that situation. But when you do not operate from your reality, you are just creating fantasies which will result in frustration. I was not accepting the fact that I am thin, that I need to nurture myself more than a normal person has to. I have to take extra care, mistakes are okay, and not handling everything every time is okay. Not being perfect is okay.
But now, I have accepted all those mistakes, my body, myself. I have learnt to do that! Observed and nurtured myself all this time. I do not know what the next phase is, next possibility, and the next failures. I am still having those low days where I still criticize, but then so what? It’s okay to not have good days all the time. I know now that failures give us more power and a greater perspective in life, they make us see the possibilities which were once faded. Just like I got one.
It’s not that I do not care how I am, it’s more like I care for myself even more after knowing and accepting how I am.
Maybe that’s what is lacking in us, the acceptance of oneself and situations around.
What is that you feel you cannot accept? Do you have the courage to accept it?
Keep thinking
Manasvi shah.
#health #society #courage #conflicts #care #love #acceptance