Self Acceptance is one of the keys to life and a long life

It's basically like this:

"IF you don't accept yourself and like yourself and possibly even love being who you are then it is much harder to stay alive in a human body here on earth."

When people try to fit in "Socially acceptable boxes" they move towards a suicidal type of reality.

Why?

Because none of us perfectly fits in any box.

When I gave up trying to fit into any box and just allowed myself to love the out of doors and wilderness and realized that for me, "Wilderness was my church and my road to ongoing sanity" I was free.

This was my form of self acceptance. Yes. I could temporarily fit into cultural or work boxes. But this was never going to be me. This was something I did only to physically survive by putting money in my pocket to support me and my family and my friends.

Then there was who I really was that was nothing about cities and nothing about boxes.

None of us really fit into any boxes we only pretend to to make our lives work.

When we see ourselves as those boxes it really might not be to our advantage at all.

I never have actually seen myself as any career except as a father and as a husband.

Those two roles along with Priest or minister seemed natural ones to my mind. And yet,

I found out in my 20s that I keep growing as to my understanding of God and the Universe every day.

So, at least for me, joining any church isn't going to work because I might believe what that church represents a week or two before I discovered something I didn't believe in through my direct experiences.

So, for me, a church is not a social club or a country club. Instead it would be something I would take very seriously. If I couldn't support every single tenent in that church I can't support any of it.

The same for me with political parties. Fudging ideas just doesn't work for me. I have to believe all of it or none of it.

That's why I see myself as an Independent. Because all political parties are hypocritical in the end.

They are not what they say they are ever.

The same is true of churches. None of them are actually what they say they are.

So, for me, ideas are important. If you can't honor all of something then something is wrong with that something.

This doesn't mean you can't generally support things that are mostly right.

It just means that you have the integrity to only accept things that are completely right in all ways.

So, self acceptance is about having perfect integrity with yourself.

You are able to respect yourself because you are not compromising in any way.

However, then you have to survive and do whatever it takes to survive.

This might seem like a paradox but it isn't.

In the end if you don't do whatever it takes for you and your family to survive, none of you will survive.

This is realistic.

So, self acceptance is important.

But, then you also have to find a way to survive for yourselves and your families too, no matter what!