NOVEMBER 2022 SELF-ACCEPTANCE
Throughout our lives, we may experience social pressure to see ourselves as somehow incomplete or unworthy. We’re not thin enough, or not young enough. We don’t exercise enough, or contribute to the right causes, or make the right social moves. Accepting who we are and what we have may be seen not as a virtue, but as a character flaw.
Of course, sometimes it makes sense to pursue improvement; while at other times, we’d live happier and more productive lives if we accepted who and what we are. Whether we live in happiness or regret depends to a large extent on what we tell ourselves about our circumstances — the narrative we run in our heads.
In today’s workshop, we watched a TEDx talk, “How the Story Transforms the Teller,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgeh4xhSA2Q in which storyteller Don Davis shows how changing the narrative in our own minds can change our experience of life.
Writing exercise: Using the video as a starting point, consider aspects of your own life that might seem to be limitations. On reflection, is this something that you should continue to struggle against? Or would it be better to think about shaping the narrative in order to live with it in peace?
Here are a few quotations that can also be used as writing prompts:
“The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.” — Mark Twain
“You have peace,” the old woman said, “when you make it with yourself.” — Mitch Albom
“Friendship with oneself is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
“The hardest challenge is to be yourself in a world where everyone is trying to make you be somebody else.” e. e. cummings
“She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.” — Anais Nin
“Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.” — Malcolm S. Forbes
