How to Accept your life And find a grey balance
My Journey of learning how to accept my life
Basically, I went through a seemingly long depressed-dark-emo-teen phase. one of my all-time favorite quotes:
“we’re all in the same game, just different levels, dealing with the same hell, just different devils”
Goodreads.
I had various replicas of the image stored in my phone to toughen my mind I guess.
Darkness sort of had an appeal to me, it felt safer. It seemed to be so much more comfortable. I basked in the glory of what the internet and my mind had to offer me. Of course to encourage my love for darkness.
I listened to music that made me feel so intoxicated. Fueled loneliness, depression, nothingness, suicidal thoughts, heartache, and traumatic stress. I stayed reminiscent of the things that clouded my mind with hate for life and love for darkness.
Obviously, the darkness “appeared” to feel good. Listening to talented singers bare out their hearts in lyrics describing broken hearts, souls, minds, and spirits. Destroyed to shreds by life and love.
Notably, today’s music glamorizes immorality. It also glamorizes rejection, sadness, promiscuity, etc. It can appear very alluring. Darkness seduces you into a false blanket of comfort and emptiness. Promises you comfort in your mind, strength, and numbness. It’s all dishonesty.
But it’s just false marketing. Because you can’t live in the dark forever without becoming the thing you’re scared of confronting.
Evil is comfortable in the dark. When you’re in it, you will eventually do the things you hate. Subsequently becoming a person you don’t like. Living in constant hate and regret or fear of everything and nothing at once.
Generally, one of my biggest challenges as a growing human was managing my temper. Funny thing is, it just happened overnight in a way. I never knew I had so much anger in my heart till it erupted in my teenage years.
As long as I could remember I was a very numb child. Very introverted, lonely, quiet. My parents were very religious and seemingly unhappy with each other. They were always crazy fighting and shouting at each other.
As a result of my childhood, I barely had any form of relationship with them. Except for the occasional beatings I’d receive for literally anything. Never one to say my thoughts and feelings. Was never even asked, and lived in fear of my parents who were all I knew.
Then one day when I was 12 and shipped to a very Christian boarding school. I was excited initially at the chance to finally leave my parents. Boarding school certainly turned out to be the worst thing to happen to me. Subsequently, my teenage years were riddled with lots of bad decisions and unhappy experiences, with effects that trickled down to my young adult life.
My lack of control over my temper created an irrational fear of the “monster” I’d become. Overall helplessness in the whole situation, lack of navigation…everything was a mess.
I spiraled out of control so many times. Made decisions that left me in utter cringe and embarrassment to this day. Eventually, my school informed my parents of my horrible behavior. I got the beatings of my life and got demonized by the school. I was crazy out of control.
In truth, I was never able to make friends or socialize. Mostly made wrong friendships. I thought myself to be a hateful monster who just lashed out uncontrollably.
Gradually, I slipped into depression with very heavy bouts of anger. My self-consciousness was there to remind me of what I am. I knew I had a problem. I hated myself for it and I desperately wanted to help myself. Find light, find God.
How to accept Your life and step out of darkness
What does accepting life mean: it’s realizing that darkness is a deception. As a result, it makes you not actually love yourself. Instead, it morphs you slowly into someone you are honestly not proud of. As a human, it’s very important to love yourself.
Loving yourself makes you make better decisions for the betterment of your well-being. You need to desperately want out of that falsehood darkness has created in your mind.
You can begin to love yourself by having a personal conversation with yourself.
What does it mean to accept Life?
Honesty is the first step to acceptance. Accepting the truth about your reality, life. You’re not a monster because you made bad decisions.
You’re not a failure because what you’re working on isn’t successful. It is openness and honesty to yourself.
You’re not unintelligent. Just because you’re failing in school after putting in hard work to read and understand.
You made a bad decision, you failed your exams. Or your business ran down, maybe you’re from a poor background. It’s very much normal for every one of these things to happen. You shouldn’t judge yourself so hard right now.
Every decision you make in life is a result of several factors including;
- Your background and upbringing.
- Your primary environment
- Information you have
- Other accumulated decisions you’ve made.
Your emotions are a result of what information you have from your environment. Past and present. Your upbringing determines a lot about your early stages in life. Even down to your entire life. After all, charity begins at home.
Your environment affects your decisions. This is because the people you surround yourself with are likely to influence your outlook on life and your outlook on yourself.
You can not go back in time and change the mistake you made, you may never stop cringing about that mistake. But you can choose to never make that mistake again. That is accepting life.
Resolve conflicts within yourself, or seek professional help if you need to. Talk to a trusted friend or family. Let there be a medium of listening. Be honest about your feelings and want to make changes.
The importance of identifying your true self
What is a Grey Balance?
There may be no perfect achievement of ultimate light and control over one’s self. But there is always a silver lining, a grey balance.
A grey balance embraces that life can be neither black nor white, but a compromise can be found in grey. A combination of both light and dark.
You are human. As such, emotions will always be felt. Anger, jealousy, and other negative emotions as well.
Life will naturally bring lows and highs. Just as the way financial markets are controlled by the invisible hand of demand and supply. Similarly, life is controlled by the invisible hands of fate.
At every point where you find yourself in a junction. Make that strong decision to choose grey. When in doubt, think twice.
Chose the action which will serve your purpose of self-development, and accepting life.
On this journey of checking myself, I spent a great deal of time judging my parents. For passing down their anger to me. Equally transferring their aggression to me. Also for not working on solving their problems enough to spare me from all this damage. I held them responsible for my action.
There was so much self-hatred every time I lost my temper and did something reckless. I was screaming at myself inside. Regardless of what I did, I wasn’t making any progress. Fighting a losing battle.
Eventually, I came to a point where I sat back and took stock of all I lost, was losing, and would lose.
Overall, realized I was making a huge mistake. Making the same mistakes they made and I’d hate to grow up and be them. I might have been unable to control how their actions affected me. But I definitely want to be responsible for how I react and feel. Most importantly, how I’ll be when I have children.
I was hurting the few people who actually cared and loved me. This especially made me deeply sad. I didn’t want that, I didn’t want to hurt myself or my future. That was my point of acceptance and honesty.
I’m in my early 20s now and still finding my grey balance. I have moments of absolute weakness. Nonetheless, I’ve become better at managing my shortcomings. I know my triggers and encourage myself relentlessly to choose the decision which favors my journey.
Notwithstanding, my temper still exists but it’s a work in progress. I realized after so many losses, that the only person who stands to lose here is me. I want so much more out of life than just being cooped up in a cycle of hate and anger.
How to accept Your life And be happy
These are a few pointers that can help you accept your life and be happy, from my personal experience;
Be intentional about your company
Accepting life means you especially don’t have to tolerate negative actions from others. You’re a person with flaws. Everyone has flaws and no matter what yours are, there’s help when you seek it.
And just because you have flaws doesn’t mean you should accept everyone’s flaws. You set boundaries for yourself based on how much you know yourself.
Going into personal relations with people means you receive what they’re giving. If they’re giving you things that constantly push you to the dark, then leave.
You should stay where you’re valued. Relationships can be challenging but when two people agree to grow together, they may try.
Whether it’s from platonic or other kinds of relationships. Never stay where you’re not thriving, where you’re not the best version of yourself. If you feel out of place with a certain group and place, then you probably are.
accept your life with honest personal communication
I can not emphasize enough the need to communicate with yourself or with someone you trust. No one should know you more than you know yourself. Communicate your feelings to yourself or to your trustee.
Make peace with yourself. It’s you and your trustee so you can be 100% honest. The only person judging you is yourself and or your trustee. Accepting life means being kind to yourself.
Fight and live Consciously
If you feel the need to slip back into the dark, consciously fight that battle. Look the other way. You can look the other way by doing something productive that you love. (which is obviously not something dark!).
Take a walk down the street, visit a museum, enjoying companionship with your loved ones. Enjoy the sky, nature, something that makes you love life. I wish I spent more time enjoying flowers. But they didn’t appeal to me so much then as it does now. Speak positively to your self especially now.
Accept your life by knowing who you are
The only opinion that matters about you is your opinion of yourself. How you behave or react is based on how you see yourself. If you see yourself as an angry person you will be perceived as an angry person.
Communication helps to sort out your emotions better and respond to yourself on how you truly feel about a situation. Whenever you’re in doubt or in a trigger spot, take your time to ask yourself questions, and think twice and far into the future. Ask yourself if the action you’re about to take will make you feel better or not, about yourself in the next few hours.
Write in a journal if you must and again, importantly, be honest with yourself.
Build Confidence
Confidence is built from acceptance of imperfection. Also from the strength of reliable knowledge. Acquire knowledge on something you’re passionate about. The world is your oyster egg today because of the internet.
You can learn about anything from your phone. Have actual degrees from the comfort of your phone and at your own phasing. You can learn to make something you’ve always dreamt of making. Enhance your knowledge and skills.
Knowledge offers a different spectrum to observe life from. It’s something you work to gain so it could be a form of therapy.
Build your confidence to step out of the dark to the grey scale. Do things that make you feel better about yourself including your looks. Express love to yourself. You don’t have to conform to society’s standards of beauty or confidence. Keep yourself good-looking in a way that appeals to you. This is what accepting life is about.
Getting a steady source of income active or passive is very satisfying. Making your own money is a soothing balm on your ego and mind and finances too. Learning about streams of money, investments, and businesses. Making money from your knowledge and passion is often very rewarding.
Practice discipline.
Life is all about molding yourself to become your version of your ideal self. Notwithstanding an ideal self is not one without flaws. Practice self-control and chastity. Speak less, listen more, and be mindful and attentive. Practice and contentment.
Furthermore, education in an area of specialization. These two things have outlined philosophies and guidelines towards discipline.
Finding peace with yourself doesn’t automatically make you extroverted or otherwise introverted. Live consciously and keep tabs on your actions.
Be active and watchful. Say positive things, good things, and pleasing things, to yourself.
Enjoy words of affirmation and always be kind to yourself. Enjoy life as you’re doing embarking on this journey.
The best time to do a good thing for yourself is when it’s the hardest to do so.
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