Love Helps Us to Accept the Unacceptable About Ourslves

“When I loved myself enough… I began to accept the unacceptable.”

Kim McMillen, When I Loved Myself Enough

It’s pretty hard to love yourself at all when you have felt so unlovable your entire life. My list of unacceptable things about me has been pretty long over the years. Trying to accept them seemed impossible at first. Then I realized that hating and fighting them was a winless and extremely exhausting battle.

I was tired of fighting an endless war inside myself. Then I came across Kim McMillen’s book “When I Loved Myself Enough” at a bookstore in Denver. I opened it and the first thing I saw was “When I loved myself enough… I began to accept the unacceptable.” I immediately added a few words of my own: “I began to accept the unacceptable” about myself and others.

How often are we unwilling to accept our looks, personality, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, quirks or other inner-demons? How often do we blame ourselves for being bad people simply because we were frazzled this morning and made a mistake? How often are we simply ashamed to be human? The answer to all of these questions is probably “Too often.” Certainly that was the case for me. I found almost everything about me that wasn’t “perfect” to be unacceptable. And since nothing about me—or anyone—is perfect, I was in a very bad mental and emotional state when I picked up McMillen’s book. I was far from acceptable and completely unable to love myself at all, much less “enough.”

Loving ourselves “enough” requires facing all of those parts of ourselves that we find unacceptable. It requires acknowledging them and the fact that most of them are simply the human condition—something we all share in common. No one is exempt from the human condition, so we might as well own up to the fact that we are all in this equally and we are all pretty much equally as imperfect. Once we can accept that our “kooties” aren’t really any worse than anyone else’s, we can start to embrace those parts of us we find hard to love. They are the parts of ourselves that need love and understanding from us the most. Learning to empathize with our least desirable “parts” helps us to have compassion toward them and ourselves in general. We are then able to be kinder to ourselves. And with that kindness we will find a sense of peacefulness. This peacefulness is acceptance.

Happiness in life requires acceptance of the many things we cannot change about ourselves, or about others. One we can come to accept the unacceptable about ourselves, we will find it much easier to accept the unacceptable about others as well. This doesn’t mean accepting unacceptable behavior. It means accepting all of the things about ourselves and others that we, or they cannot change about ourselves or themselves.

Practice loving yourself enough to accept the unacceptable and allow your soul to shine!