Acceptance Comes Before Breakthroughs

There's a girl in a little Facebook Fibromyalgia group that reminds me a lot of me where I was a few years ago. She's having a really tough time working and she's desperately trying everything to help her pain and fatigue. She's always reading up on things and trying new supplements or medications.

She talks about feeling envious of people on television and in movies who do fun activities and seem to have energy to do things. She also talks about the emotional pain of people not believing that her pain is real. Thinking she is lazy or doesn't push herself.

I've been there. I'm not exactly there now and it's tricky for me to talk to her without sounding like a reformed alcoholic or smoker who knows it all. I don't know it all, that's for sure. She talked tonight about acceptance.

I remember that during the time I went through the process of being told that retiring was my best option and actually dealing with all the paperwork and appointments and then selling my house and being retired, I had to do a lot of accepting.

I had to accept my condition, which included lots of saying its name out loud. I had to accept my new financial situation. I had to accept my body and all of its physical limitations including its look and asking for help. I think that I had to fully accept everything before I was able to open up and break through any denial.

In the most confusing of ways I had to accept who I was and that I was enough just the way I was, including the pain, the fat, the hurts, the feeling sorry for myself, and everything else in order to stop looking for quick fixes.

If I was enough, I didn't need a quick fix. If I had a thyroid problem, that could explain my difficulty losing weight, but it didn't help me lose weight, so who cares? If my feet hurt because I had bone spurs, they still hurt. All those things were about proving to other people or to myself that I wasn't faking my difficulties.

I knew I wasn't faking. If I really just believed I was enough, any self-development I embarked on was based on my own desires and not on the belief that I needed to do something to make me acceptable to others.

So, now that I have gone through a big breakthrough during the last several months, I think that I'm in need of that lesson again. Maybe this girl is asking these questions not for me to help her, but for her to help me.

I am at a great point, but I still have many things that I need to accept again in order to move to the next breakthrough. New things. I still get jealous of people who get to do fun things.  Even though I have more energy than I did before and I do way more things than I used to, there are still things I'd like to do and don't have anyone to do them with. It's tricky when you are at ease being by yourself, but you'd like to do things with people sometimes.

I love the holiday season, but I still get up and down happy and sad depending on what I'm doing. I can't keep the holiday high going. I try to do Christmasy things, and they make me happy, but it doesn't last.

Every year I have to remember that holidays aren't the same as an adult. I don't get to see my family anymore the way we did as kids and even now the nephews and niece are older and don't come to stay with me for days and do things anymore.

So this December, I shall enjoy the Christmas season and not place too many expectations on myself or on the season. And I shall consider what else needs accepting before I crash through the next set of walls into 2018.