This post inspired by V.J.’s Weekly Challenge #50: Acceptance
“There’s release in knowing the truth no matter how anguishing it is. You come finally to the irreducible thing, and there’s nothing left to do but pick it up and hold it. Then, at last, you can enter the severe mercy of acceptance.”
The Mermaid Chair
Acceptance…may mean making peace with an overwhelming, ugly truth. Living with it in your head.
My head.
The new raw reality nudges me. Breaks my concentration on a bright sunny day. I take it out. Examine it. Until a familiar gnawing sickness in the pit of my stomach makes me look away. I put it back before it drops from my shaking hands and explodes.
I’m a member of a club I never asked to join. But was accepted into anyway. I don’t belong here. But it turns out I do. Surrounded by the nameless who also lost their pasts. Exposing ragged edges of grief. Struggling to reach a place of resignation in a stark new reality. Healing measured in tiny steps.
Get over it Move on Let it go…well meaning, but frantic pleas from those who care, but…they aren’t in my head with the unimaginable truth. How could they possibly get it?
So for those of us who struggle to accept what life has thrown up on us…for those of us with battle scar tread marks on our backs…we yearn to be accepted…frailties, brokenness and all. In order to be whole again.
Not easy for them to accept the changes.
Even more difficult for us to go it alone.
one letter UP ~ diary 2.0 
This is intense. Makes me think of the issues myself and family have had over the decades, some still not resolved…
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Familiar territory for many, I’m afraid.
Thank you.
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Such raw emotion, and yet you offer hope. “severe mercy of acceptance” from Sue Monk Kidd’s quotation really struck me, and certainly fits with the sentiment expressed here. I hope you are okay friend.
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Thank you, V.J.. That quote really got to me as well.
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The trick is to hold it long enough, stare it in the eyes, feel the pain, add a pinch of “this too shall pass” and let it go. It will come back, but less emotionally intense. Each time the healing will slowly dissipate the poison into ashes of the past. The quote is so full of truth.
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Thank you so much, Olga.
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Wow. This writing reaches inside my soul. I ache with sadness, feel the tender one terrorized so young, too young. I sense the older one making headway despite the odds, coming into adulthood to mother another with the softness and compassion she yearned for yet rarely received. I feel this writing inside my body, vibrations pulsating through, a myriad of emotions coming, twisting, turning, and leaving. Thank you for sharing this.
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Oh my. Thank you so very much for this response. Your reaction touches me as well.
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