I was talking with my mother today and we began discussing an interesting topic: what does it mean to actually accept something? It's not nearly as simple as it appears on the surface, there is a strong abstract component to the idea. You can say that you accept something but words are more or less meaningless unless there's a behaviour and thought process attached to them. Therein lies the problem: what kind of thoughts and behaviours do a person who has accepted something exhibit? That is something that I have struggled with my entire life. People say that you must accept something and let go in order to move forward in life. I haven't the slightest idea what that actually entails! It's not like I can just force myself to stop thinking about something that bothers me. The thoughts race through my head, growing in intensity until they're all I can think about. Even the words "acceptance" and "letting go" make absolutely no sense to me, they're gibberish. I find it so difficult to even express in what ways I cannot comprehend the meaning of acceptance. It's just a word to me. I know that it means that you no longer care about whatever it is you accept. But I don't understand that concept as I always care and give mind to everything that has happened to me. There are a lot of things that happened to me during my childhood that I don't really remember. Is forgetting the same as acceptance? That can't be true because acceptance requires a conscious awareness of the thing you are accepting. I think there's a sort of realization that nothing you can do can change the circumstances in question and that you stop fighting against it. That makes no sense to me, either. In my experience, that just leads to depression and hopelessness. Life is awful and it doesn't get better. I know this to be true, I have the experience to back it up. But it doesn't make me feel any better. And letting go, I have no idea what that is. It's synonymous with forgetting as far as I'm concerned. I think there is an element of giving up control on a situation that you cannot change. Again, this leads to despair as the negative emotions overwhelm you and flood your system. It brings to mind questions such as, "What's the point of it all?" Giving up control means to stop fighting the negative emotions inside. When you stop fighting them, they overtake you and permeate your entire being. You stop caring about what happens, accept that you're destined to feel this way forever, and contemplate the meaning of your life. That's what acceptance means to me. Acceptance is death.
Who is to say what the true thing to accept is, anyway? They say to accept who you are. What about the chronically depressed? If I accept that I'm depressed and always will be, the I'll logically continue to be depressed. But what if I accept that I'm depressed but that things will get better? How do I know which situation is the true one to accept? If I say that things will get better, isn't that denying the chronic nature of depression or dysthymia? It's a lack of acceptance. In fact, it's more likely to make you more depressed because you're giving yourself false hope. People, as a general rule, don't change. Personality is broken down into temperament and character. Temperament is genetic and is more or less inherited from your parents. Character is the result of learning behaviour and responses from environmental stimuli. Temperament determines how our character will develop in response to any given stimulus. Personality and mood disorders have strong genetic components and are based on one's temperament. Therefore, change in temperament and full recovery from something like major depressive disorder or borderline personality disorder is unlikely at best. They are resistant to therapy and in the absence of continued upkeep, an individual will always return to that disordered baseline. That gives pretty solid evidence to the notion that accepting that you will get better and move past your inborn disorder is akin to lying to oneself, to accepting a false truth as reality. Acceptance and change are mutually exclusive concepts. If you accept who you are, then you also acknowledge that change is not necessary. They are incompatible and paradoxical.
What about those who have identity disturbances, such as myself? How can one accept oneself if one does not know who one is? I was told that you need to start by defining your core values and interests and move out from there. But what about the person who has no values or interests to call their own, whose values change and drift over time depending on circumstances and people? What do they accept as true? How can they accept truth when nothing about them is true? These people have no truth, no depth, no self. There is nothing to accept in the first place other than nothingness. Is it even possible to accept nothingness? It seems incompatible with the human experience. A huge component of our stress and anxiety is that lack of identity. Accepting the emptiness inside is unthinkable, it would lead to more stress, mental breakdowns, and suicide. To be empty with no identity is not human. If we aren't human, then what are we? Monsters? Empty husks? Ghosts? We know in our minds that we are biologically human beings, homo sapiens. Yet a part of us knows that we're different from the others. We lack a certain something that makes us the same as them. We fight it, trying our damnedest to fit in and pretend to be human. But that vital spark we lack, it's unavoidable. If we accept that emptiness, we throw away whatever little shred of humanity we thought we had and indeed, we become ghosts. The emptiness wins, takes over, and the incongruence between emptiness and humanity reaches a climax and we are presented with a dilemma: do we shut ourselves out from the real people or do we cease to exist entirely by ending it all? Our bodies tell us we're human but our minds know we're not. The only logical thing to conclude is that our lives are wasted and meaningless. We're fake humans. We hate the real ones simply for being what we're not: human on both the inside and outside. We become jealous and filled with rage. When we accept the emptiness, we accept that we aren't human. That stress destroys us. Such is the nature of our existence.
One last subject I'd like to touch on tonight is the notion of happiness. Happy people are the absolute worst, they're delusional and ignorant. An old friend of mine, who suffers from schizophrenia, once said that happiness is nothing more than a distraction. This really made a lot of sense to me. Consider the chaotic nature of life. Evolutionarily speaking, life has and always will be centred around danger and the avoidance of it. Stress, fear, and anxiety all exist to keep us alive long enough to reproduce and raise a family for the express purpose of proliferating. That's what life does, that's the point. To continue existing for as long as possible. But life must constantly fight against the forces of nature in order to do so. Evolution occurs as a result of environmental stress. So the circumstances surrounding life are clearly stress and danger, that much we've established thus far. Everything life does is in response to that. Therefore, wouldn't it make sense to conclude that happiness and it's associated neurotransmitters exist simple as a distraction from the stress? Stress comes first, happiness comes second. If a person is anxious and fearful all the time, the body begins to break down from constant sympathetic nervous system arousal and stress hormones coarsing through our veins. Organs will fail due to poor nutrient extraction from the digestive system being in standby mode and muscles and tissue will break down from constant arousal with no rest period. Happiness would seem to be a sort of temporary solution so that our bodies can rest and gather resources for the next period of stress.
I probably made little sense tonight and indeed, I was all over the place. Barely coherent and full of logical fallacies. I don't really care.
Until next time.
- K
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