Accept The Pain That Will Help You Grow

Breathe.

Just breathe.
Take a deep breath.

Exhale and let it go.

Accept it.

The hardest decisions are often the most painful. The hardest decisions are the ones where you know that no matter what you choose, there will be pain. Oftentimes, the more painful the option is, the better it is for you long term.

If your choice is between constant torture or the pain of loss, go with loss. What you don’t realize right now, and what you will someday realize, is that choosing the constant torture will eventually lead you to the pain of loss. So why increase your pain? Why stretch it out?

Let it go.

Accept it.

Control A + Shift + Delete. Get rid of it all. Go on, live your life, and pretend it never happened. This type of loss is really best addressed by a “fake it ’til you make it” attitude.

Your memory is the only thing you can’t delete. Push it away. Banish every last memory, every scrap, every reminder, anything that is left. Discard. Delete. This is just the last in a long line of failures. This is just one more thing to add to that folder within your mind that should never be viewed under any circumstances. It’s too bad human memory isn’t as editable as computerized memory.

The only thing worth remembering is that there is nothing special about this one. This one is the same as all the others. There have been so many over the years, that one more will not make a difference. The only difficulty, the only pain, is that this one is the most recent. Months from now, this will not matter, just like all the other ones don’t matter. But the agony of chronological proximity is the only thing that a delete option could help.

So let it go. 

Accept it.

This is the reason that a concept like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind resonates so deeply in our culture and society. If everything could be purged and reset, maybe things could be better. Perhaps they’d be worse. Perhaps it’s all a gigantic philosophically unanswerable question.

Once it is all done, you’ve learned something. You’ve changed, and probably for the better. You will learn to know what you can and cannot accept. You will learn to know how different your personal evaluation of self worth is from the worth and value others appraise you to be. Your pain… It’s going to be bad. It’s going to hurt like hell. Let it. Let it drive you. Let it push you to be a better version of yourself. Let it be a reminder that now, after the fact, you know better.

So breathe.

Let it go.

Accept it.

Accept the pain that will let you grow.

Acceptance.

This is the final step.
But acceptance is a cliff.

You have to jump.

You don’t have a choice.

You’re perched on the last piece of your sorrow, an island, all that’s left of an ever shrinking land mass called your pain. Your anger. Your denial. Your bargaining. Your last attempts, as futile as always.

As the land eroded around you ever so slowly, the cliffs of acceptance began to appear. The moment you saw them, you knew that the end of pain was getting closer.

The last thing you need to do, is let go.

No parachute is needed.

You will land on your feet.

Your fear of letting go is holding you back.

Let it go.

Accept it.

Jump.
THIS is freedom. Freedom no one else can give you.


That cold death in your chest that you’ve been carrying can finally leave. The thoughts that torment your mind are excused. You accepted those things, the things that scarred your heart beyond recognition. You accepted it because you thought it was what you deserved. So why can’t you accept this?

You deserve this. But you’re still holding on.

Let it go.
Accept it.
Jump.

You’ve reached it finally — the chapter’s end. This relief will be welcome, for the next chapter holds a beautiful unknown, a bright new opportunity, and it starts as soon as you jump. You try hard to recall when your last jump was. You remember the exhilaration, the beauty of a free fall into peace. It wasn’t easy. But nothing worthwhile ever is. With your toes on the ledge, you peer over. The distance is stunning, the sheer separation between who you are and what you’ve become. Normalcy is waiting for you and you are running out of time. 

The fall is weightless as you feel the fear release like a cartoon anvil. Your vacation in this special hell is done.

Welcome to Acceptance. Population: You.