Acceptance

The only person I can change, and should change, is myself.

I am coming to a place of acceptance in that. I have been preaching that mantra as a child-rearing and teaching strategy for a long time, trying to adhere to it as an adult, and failing for some of the most important people in my life.

I need to be accepting. I don't have to love it, like it, or lump it; I can walk away; I can say no. I don't have to be part of something that  don't agree with, but I am going to make the really difficult and important effort to just accept people as they are. Dane did that. It was an important lesson that I missed.

I will fail, probably more often than not, for awhile. I have failed to do this for myself frequently, and I certainly deserve my own acceptance just as much as the other people in my life.

So there's that. My self-help of the day. It sounds really cheesy, I know, but (to use a vocabulary word I gave to my students this week), it really was an epiphany in the past 24 hours that changed my mind.  This blog feels kind of like a twelve-step program in that the first step is recognizing I have a problem. I am Judgey McJudgerson so loudly in my head sometimes I can't even hear myself think. I am too aware of myself to let it all out, but it's a burden I am ready to put down.

We'll see what happens.