2022: My Year of Learning Self-Acceptance
Created with Midjourney AI
2022 was a big turning point for me.
It looked like I could have accomplished more from a physical achievement standpoint. In late 2021, I started working toward turning writing into a business by being more active on social media. I knew the best practices—post daily, make videos, and just show up.
I tried to keep up, but being on Instagram frequently triggered a lot of painful comparisons, where other people's work always seemed better than mine. It also didn't feel good to things into the "void" of the social media feed. Even when people liked my posts, I never understood what I was creating and who it was for. When I tried to produce content I could sell or use as a freebie, I kept getting anxious and stuck rather than enjoying my work.
In the middle of the year, a friend introduced me to the work of Tosha Silver, which was about letting go of trying so hard and allowing your intuition and higher self to guide you. I knew this was what I needed because my habitual use of pressure and fear to motivate myself wasn't working anymore.
So I pulled back from social media and regular blogging to listen to myself better. Rather than following what worked for others, I needed to find out what worked for me.
From there, I started to recognize specific patterns that had always been invisible to me:
How I valued other people's words, processes, and methods more than my own.
How I tried to do precisely what the authors and teachers I follow tell me and feel stressed and anxious if I didn't get it "right."
How I diminished my tendency to write from personal experience and feel that writing from a general perspective is more valued.
How I sometimes put down my thoughts and insights to the point where I stopped having them.
How I needed to prove myself in others' eyes to feel okay.
All of these patterns were pointing to one thing: a lack of self-acceptance.
Realizing this would make fundamental changes for me, I intentionally practiced self-acceptance for a couple of months. Most importantly, I had to accept the idea that I may never "make something of myself"—that vague goal meaning that I'm financially successful on my terms.
That may yet happen, but my self-worth cannot hinge on it. When I believe it does, I measure everything I do in writing and business against the potential for acceptance or rejection, which leads to anxiety that makes me avoid writing.
I also had to realize that my life was already pretty good. I'm financially stable. While I don't love my accounting work, I have a lot of freedom and enjoy my clients. In addition, I have a loving life partner and a rich community of friends and family.
I tend to miss the beautiful parts of my life just as I overlook my strengths and talents, thinking that something else "out there" would finally make me happy and satisfied. I have spent a lot of my adulthood figuring out how to create a life I love, and I've done that. While I still want more—because we always do—if I don't recognize the value of what I have now, I wouldn't see it either when I have more later.
That magical moment of success and validation will never come—unless I choose it.
While the work is not over, I'm better at noticing when I'm stressed and using it as a signal rather than getting lost in it. Stress usually tells me that I'm worried about other people's approval or fear not getting things just right when it's not that big of a deal. I remind myself to take a breath and let it go.
Overall, I'd call that a good year.
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what thoughts it might have provoked for you. Let me know down below!
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