think of something you have not yet accepted

April of Acceptance Daily Idea: think of something you have not yet accepted. 

I've been thinking a lot about acceptance because I knew that in April, at the suggestion of the fantastic registrar at Sheena's place, that I wanted to write about acceptance this the month. 

***NOTE: "acceptance" in the context of my writing is about the belief that all living things are entitled to respect, regardless of their actions and beliefs. "Acceptance" in this context is NOT about being silent, ignoring injustices and self and others, or expecting that we can say something is okay when it isn't. In this context I am referring to the idea that we cannot control what happens around us, we can only control how to respond to those things. 

I have been thinking about how I started to learn about acceptance. 

Acceptance and tolerance are not the same thing. I know many people who tolerate things that they don't understand. Or tolerate things that are harmful to themselves or to others. That is about tolerating things that one disagrees with, without working on that understanding. 

I think that acceptance is far more important than tolerance. Acceptance means taking in all the ideas, taking in all the people, taking in all the things that matter to other people, taking in things that you disagree with, taking in things that you think are wrong; completely totally and utterly wrong! And accepting that those things exist. That they are not disappearing anytime soon. That we live in a world full of diversity and hate and love and violence and peace, and all we can do is learn to accept the things they are, and to do what we can to work towards the world that we want to see. 

Acceptance does NOT mean complicity. I accept that Donald Trump and his followers exist. That doesn't mean I will sit silently and not resist. I accept that Rodrigo Duterte is the president of The Philippines and that thousands of people being are being murdered without due process and without even a trial. That doesn't mean I will stand by and not join Amnesty International in fighting against him. I accept that there is so much racism, and hatred, and violence towards the indigenous people of Canada that is ignored and even perpetuated and tolerated by the government. And I accept that I will continually be an ally and work towards ENDING the violence, fighting the government to provide clean water to reserves, and to respond to the missing and murdered women. 

Acceptance means acknowledging deep down inside yourself that you are not, in fact, the Queen of the Universe (my life long goal), that you cannot change the world by yourself, that there are many things beyond your control, and that you can choose how to face those things. 

I learned a great deal about acceptance as a child, through my family, and through my school community. 

I also learned so much about acceptance through reading feminist theory. I started to read early feminist theorists when I was 14 years old and as I started I was in agreement with people like Germaine Greer and Betty Freidan. Over the next 10 years I read and read and read different feminist theorists. I began to explore what feminism means to me and what world I want to be part of and what world I want to create. I disagreed with many of the theorists that I read. Especially when I started to read some of the radical feminist theories. People like Camile Paglia and Andrea Dworkin and Katharine MacKinnon. Despite the fact that I could not bring myself to agree with what they were saying, I did accept that there are many different forms of feminism in the world. Learning to accept that there would be many disagreements, and that I could work towards fighting against what people were writing and saying and doing, I began to accept that there would always be people who disagreed with my politics. From grade 8 until I finished my Masters degree in 2001, I was influenced by so many incredible feminist theorists and their theories and ideas about women and men and gender and race and the world.

I will never forget being 17, when my mom took me to hear Gloria Steinem speak. And I had the opportunity to stand up at the microphone and thank her for making it possible for girls like me to stand up in front of a room full of people and say proudly "I am a feminist."

Accepting that people have beliefs that contradict mine, and accepting that I don't have to agree with them but that they can exist simultaneously with mine, has been a great gift in my life. 

If I had to choose something that I cannot accept, it would be my diagnosis of fibromyalgia.

Yesterday I had a wonderful birthday with a very low level of pain. We took our FANTASTIC class to the museum, and walked around for hours. There were moments where it was painful but it was pain that was manageable and bearable. 

I was able to go out for dinner, to have a dessert that was the most decadent thing you could ever imagine in your entire life. On the walk home my legs began to hurt. My neck and shoulders started to get sore. Within the next hour I was in agony. I cannot even begin to explain to you how much pain my legs were experiencing. It isn't muscle pain from the walking. The days I don't need my cane, I can walk quite far distances. It is a feeling of my legs being hollow, and achy, and that wiggling things are crawling around under my skin, biting my nerves, and trying to pull my legs right off of my body.

Accepting that this is a part of my life right now is a very difficult thing to do. Accepting that there is currently no cure is very depressing and defeating. And the less I accept the pain, the more pain I experience, because I am not just experiencing physical pain, I'm experiencing emotional suffering because of the pain. And because of the fact that I don't want to accept it. 

My goal for April is to work on acceptance of many things and to offer many ideas of ways to be acceptable my, of ways to accept the things in your life that just are, and suggest ideas to my readers. I hope that you will join me in this experimental adventure and that one small idea might spark something big in you that you can work on to change your own life.

Be kind, 

To yourself too

xo 

ps

I decided that it is important to me to list the writers that were influential on both learning about feminist theory, as well as accepting that I do not agree with many of the writers, that I do agree with some of the things that some people wrote, and that people inspired me in so many ways despite their contrary beliefs. 

Patricia Hill Collins

Andrea Dworkin

Angela Davis

Germaine Greer

Judith Butler

Ntozake Shange

Kate Millet

Dale Spender

BELL HOOKS WHO CONTINUES TO PUSH MY BRAIN!

Simone de Beauvoir

Zora Neale Hurston

Betty Friedan

Julia Kristeva 

Audre Lorde

Toni Morrison

Mary Wollstonecraft

GILL VALENTINE MY ACADEMIC CRUSH!!

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Teresa de Lauretis

Elizabeth Grosz

Annamarie Jagose

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Mary Daly

Françoise, d'Eaubonne

Barbara Ehrenreich

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Nancy Mandell, Lilian Faderman

Becki Ross

Alice Fulton

Emma Goldman

Lucy Parsons

Linda Alcoff

Camile Paglia

Yolanda Retter

Doreen Massey

Rosa Ainly

Gloria Steinem 

AND SO MANY MORE!! 

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