Acceptance is not a word I have previously associated with me. I am one of those who has always battled against the machine. The machine being anything and anyone I believe is not helping alleviate whatever situation I think needs to be alleviated. I battle. For decades, I have belonged to many groups who also battle against the machine. For short periods of time, I have felt that I have finally found a group of people with whom I have lots in common.

Then realisation rears its head. Not necessarily ugly, just its head; and I see through my rose-tinted spectacles that no, these people are not like me. They say they are raging against the machine, but actually they are concerned mostly about their position in the group; Chair, Treasurer, Secretary. They are actually part of the machine I am raging against.

So I leave, disillusioned once again. They accept my resignation. Not interested in hearing why I am leaving; knowing they are Right and by leaving, I prove my lack of commitment. They will continue to rage without me. Good luck to them, then. I stalk away, feeling righteous indignation at them; knowing I am right to do so.

What I was not prepared for, were the petty squabbles - over tea money, subs, the washing up – that dog all groups, regardless of their size and importance.

I wanted more. I wanted bright lights and shining truths. I wanted change with a capital C and I wanted to know that I had been part of it. I wanted to be proud.

I always left feeling utterly disillusioned. And this is where acceptance comes into its own.

You see, after more than six and a half decades on this planet, living this life, I have finally realised that this is what it amounts to. Acceptance. Change what you can, accept what you can’t.

In these very strange days of 2020/21, there is not a lot of anything I can change anyway. Maybe re-arrange the mugs or the cutlery drawer, but not a lot else. Instead, I am learning to accept this is my life; small, unimportant and all mine.

It is up to me what I do with it. And I accept that. I can change nothing other than the way I look at me, and how I look at the world. We are all looking for that state of being, it seems to me, where what we do and, in these days of pandemic, what we don’t do, is as important as anything the world leaders say.

The folk I abandoned; the ones I felt such disdain about; they too were aiming to make changes. What they knew, what I am only now understanding, is that they, like me, are only human. Doing people things in people ways.

And all we really want is to feel at home in our bodies and in our lives.

I am accepting that. Do you? Can you?

Christine

A Moodscope member.