In the whole journey of a life, the most difficult part is understanding and accepting ourselves. Not other people, though that is difficult enough. Not circumstances, though those can be brutal. Ourselves, who are with us continuously, whom we have unlimited access to at any hour, and about whom we know remarkably little.
Within ourselves we are full of conflicts and contradictions and we are aware of hardly any of them. We hold two positions at once and never notice the tension. We want a thing and simultaneously arrange for it not to happen. We are generous in one direction and completely closed in another, and see no inconsistency at all.
Acceptance is not resignation, and the two should be separated immediately, because they are constantly confused and the confusion does real harm. Resignation says nothing can be done and settles in. Acceptance says this is what is actually here, and the arguing with the fact of it can stop, which is a different sentence entirely.
Why it is harder than anything external
An external difficulty can be approached in an orderly way. Information can be gathered, advice taken, a plan made, action followed by assessment. It has edges and it stays still while it is worked on, and other people can help with it.
Ourselves have none of that. There is no place outside ourselves from which to look, and this is not a poetic difficulty, it is a practical one. The thing doing the examining is the thing being examined, and it has a strong interest in the outcome. Every conclusion anybody reaches about themselves was reached by somebody who would prefer certain conclusions to others.
And there is nobody to defer to. Every other subject in the world has people who know more and can be consulted. On this one there is no authority, no consensus, and nobody who has already worked out this particular case. Whatever is going to be understood has to be understood alone, without confirmation, and frequently against one's own preference.
What we do instead
Mostly we improve. It is much more comfortable than accepting and it looks identical from outside. Take the parts that are disliked and work on them. Set targets, measure, make progress. This is admired everywhere, encouraged by everybody, and can go on happily for a lifetime.
But improvement without acceptance is a strategy for never having to look at what is actually there. The work is always on a future version, and the current one, which is the only one that exists anywhere, is never met. It is the one thing the whole project is designed to avoid.
And underneath the improvement there is usually one simple sentence, which is that as we are, we are not acceptable, and this entire project exists in order to make that stop being true. It never stops being true, because the project is the evidence for it. The person doing all this improving has not once been in a room with themselves as they actually are, and cannot be, because the project would end.
What it opens
Here is the part that surprises everybody and that nobody goes looking for. In learning to accept ourselves, we learn to accept other people. It is not a coincidence and it is not a sequence that can be reversed, however much anybody would prefer to start at the easier end.
Everything that irritates us about other people is something we have not accepted in ourselves. The impatience felt towards somebody's weakness is precisely the impatience directed inward about the same weakness. That is why it is so sharp and so entirely out of proportion to the offence. It is not actually a response to them at all.
Which means the reverse is available too, and this is the useful part. Every part of ourselves that has been genuinely accepted quietly stops being a thing that needs correcting in anybody else. Nobody sets out to become more tolerant and nobody would know how to try. It arrives on its own, from a completely different direction, as a side effect of work being done for entirely selfish reasons.
