God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
~Reinhold Niebuhr
In my early adolescence I remember coming to an understanding that the world I had been born into was deeply not okay, and asking myself how I could be okay living that world: How could I be okay living in a world where innocent children were killed by the police because of the color of their skin? How could I be okay living in a world where wars were fought for control over natural resources or animals were factory farmed for mass consumption? How could I be okay living in a world whose entire system was designed to benefit a very few while exploiting so many?
I struggled for a long time with how I could accept living in such a world and concluded that I could not. I could not accept this world as it was. I could not just go about my life and pay attention in school. I could not pretend that the little bubble of safety that surrounded me was real, permanent, or in any way deserved. But when I looked around at my peers and my teachers, it seemed to me like they had all accepted it, like they were okay with it. They all seemed to just be going along with the program, unperturbed by these larger questions, and certainly uninterested in my discontent at the state of things.
It was this version of acceptance that I saw around me that made me bump up against the serenity prayer the first time I came across it. Accept the things I cannot change… But that was all I saw around me: an acceptance of things as they are; a deep belief - almost to the point of an ideology -in throwing one's hands up at the larger problems of the world; an almost rabid commitment to the maintenance of the status quo. So, accept the things I cannot change… Thank you, but no. I will continue spending my energy fighting against all the things… whether I have the ability to change them or not.
I was living in a paradigm where acceptance was synonymous with defeat, with weakness, with appeasement, with rolling over and letting the powers that be march across your chest while they spit on your face. I didn’t want to accept, I wanted to fight, I wanted to win, and if I wasn’t going to win, I wanted to die trying. Either way, I was certainly not going to embrace defeat, and I had no interest in meeting acceptance with any modicum of serenity. If I knew anything, I knew that I was not okay with things as they were and the very notion of acceptance felt like a betrayal of that knowing, felt like it required condoning all of those things that I knew were wrong.
But this was before my first experience of burnout. This was before I did nearly die trying. I was not, to my knowledge, near a physical death but I was certainly on the brink of a spiritual one. My refusal to accept the limits of my own capacity, or the things in the world that were beyond my scope of influence had me entrenched in a fight, not with the powers that be, not with any oppressive force, but with reality itself. My refusal to accept things as they are brought the fight I was so poised to have to the only place it could exist… myself. Because reality cannot be different than it is, my refusal to accept it could only manifest in anxiety or depression, physical and existential pain I would exert upon my own body and being. It was this internal wear and tear as much as any external over exertion that led directly to my burnout. Eventually, in order to come out of it, to begin my healing and recovery, I would have to accept the reality I was living in, I would have to accept the limitations of my own capacity, and I would have to accept that failing to achieve something that I so badly wanted did not, in fact, have to be the end of my life.
This experience of burnout would not be the last time I caught myself fighting reality, nor was it the first. In my early twenties, during the summer between my first and second year teaching, my father was diagnosed with cancer. It was so unexpected that it took a few times hearing the news before it registered, and even then I didn’t get anywhere near understanding, let alone accepting it. Over the course of the 13 months between his diagnosis and his death I mostly lived inside of a delusion. It was a delusion comprised mainly of denial, rationalization, and a good amount of disassociation. I knew he was sick, I knew he could die, I just didn’t think he would.
And then he did. And the delusion broke. Reality set it very quickly: the reality that I would never see him again, the reality that there was nothing I could do, and nothing I could have done. The choice for me then became: to fight this reality or to accept it, to live inside the delusion that no longer had any legs to stand on or to face the hard truth that my life would never be the same - that my world would never be the same. I was tempted to keep fighting: to stay in bed, to live in the world of my dreams where he was still alive, where this whole experience with cancer never happened. In my dreams I could rewrite the story of the previous year. And I did many times. But I kept on waking up, and with each return to consciousness came the agony of my grief. Reality is not kind, but it is undefeated. So I chose acceptance.
This, however, is where I still disagree with Niebuhr. I do not think acceptance comes through serenity, but through struggle. In my experience there is nothing peaceful in the process of coming to accept a reality that I do not like, rather it is an internally violent process of facing my pain, of learning to sit with my grief, of letting the emotions manifest in physical form and move out of my body - through crying, and shaking, and wailing, and punching my pillow while screaming into it until I collapse.
But through this painful process to look reality straight in the eyes, face to face and come to acceptance, I have found a kind of serenity, an ability to walk in the world with a modicum of peace, with an ability to breath and to be, in the face of just how fucked everything is and has been for a very long time. Sitting with that reality, sitting in the discomfort of what truly is can be deeply unsettling, even disregulating. Staying in it, not slipping into delusion, not slipping into despair, takes a lot of practice, takes a lot of fortitude. I think it might take as much - if not more - courage to accept reality as it actually is than it does to change the things we can.
So in this or any moment when a reality we do not want and are not okay with starts settling in, the advice I would give my younger self, the advice I would hope that I could follow today would be: to look that reality directly in the eyes, face to face; to not slip into a delusion that it can be different than it is; to not become okay with it and to not fight it; to sit with the discomfort of it, with the grief, with the rage, with pain of that reality; to let those emotions manifest and release - to cry, and shake, and wail, and punch the pillow, and collapse. Then… to stand up; to breathe; to look at the beauty that is still here in the world and recognize that as reality as well; to call a friend; and find the courage to change something you can. Because once you’ve found the courage to see things as they actually are, the courage to change something that can be changed will not be hard to muster.