Self-Acceptance

Those who know me well or have been friends for a while at any point know this pretty well. I am a constant complainer of the fact that I do not have may friends. I make friends often but am not able to keep the relationship going for too long. I have been aware of the problem for a long. It was only yesterday that an incident brought my attention back to it.

I have this friend, lets call him 'X'. X is one of my best friends at this moment. I have shared almost everything about my life, however embarrassing it may be, with X. Until yesterday, everything was going great. I could talk to X for hours at a time. But, yesterday, for the first time in months, I almost cried after our conversation. I decided never to talk to X again and let go of another friend. Getting into stupid details of the incident will be a highly complicated and time-consuming job. So, instead of narrating the whole incident, I will talk about my lessons, inferences and conclusions from the incident.

When people become friends, they tend to share. And they tend to share really delicate information which should be kept a "secret" and should not be divulged to anyone. There is also stuff which should never be talked about again because thinking or talking about the stuff hurts. This stuff may also be embarrassing for a person. I tend to do the same. But then, after a while, when the friend mentions the stuff to me, it sounds totally weird to me. And in such a circumstances I run away from that person and promise myself never to talk to or see that person ever again.

The reason why I run away from my friends is not that they are bad. It is because I cannot accept that I can do bad and embarrassing things too. I am not able to accept the bad side of myself and when the other person talks about, it feels like he/she does not care about my feelings, which is not true at all.

It is important that we accept ourselves for who we are, however good or bad we may be. This acceptance is the perfection of life and so is the desire to improve ourselves.

I am certainly not going to talk to X for a while now. But, now that I have realized that its not in X that the problem lies, but in me, I am going to make sure that I do not lose a friend. And as I will learn to accept my own faults, I will also learn to accept other people for who they are.

A friend once told me that, "If you can sit with yourself for 10 minutes without any agitation and at peace, you can sit with any man in the world". I did not understand it then, but I am sure I understand what it means now.