Twenty Years and Radical Acceptance

The memorial at Yankee Stadium honoring the victims of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

Reading the inscription on the 9/11 memorial at Yankee Stadium’s Monument Park always gets me misty-eyed, especially this week, with the 20th anniversary coming.

There’s a lot I’ve said about that day, there’s a lot I’ve experienced, there’s a lot I’ve felt, there’s a lot I wish I could forget, too.

But that’s the thing: it unfortunately happened and the images are seared into our memories forever.

We cannot change the past. But we can change our future.

We cannot control what has already happened. But we can control how we live with what happened, what is happening, and what hasn’t happened.

Radical acceptance is more or less understanding things have happened, and there’s nothing that can undo them. It’s how you handle yourself afterwards that matters.

Note that I didn’t distinguish between good and bad, as these are relative terms.

Be kind to yourselves, be kind to each other. If you can, you’re lucky—because not everyone is.

We’ve already been dealt our cards. It’s all in your hands now.

Sensitivity and Empathy

Throughout 2021 I finally took steps to begin figuring out what makes me uniquely me.

For the longest time I have always marched to a different beat, viewed things through a different lens, zigged when everyone else zagged—I think these are enough metaphors to convey my point. I struggled with wondering if something was wrong with me, if something was wrong with other people, or if there was just something else I could not figure out.

And that’s when I realized there wasn’t anything wrong with me, per sé. Rather, I was just a lot more sensitive to pretty much everything. Words, actions—the presence and absence of them—would find ways to affect me a lot more than others would expect. And a lot more than I would expect sometimes too.

I’d sometimes harbor negative feelings as a result of what someone may do or say, or not do and say. But I was reading something about avoidant behavior, how some avoidant behavior has no real malicious intent behind it, that it’s just how that person responds to something, based on childhood experiences with a caregiver. Sometimes these caregivers may not have given the child enough attention or care, and it’s said this manifests itself into certain behaviors, either avoidant, secure or anxious, depending on what took place.

So I realized that some people are wired to act in certain ways because that’s all they know, and it’s how they are able to cope with overwhelming feelings. This knowledge, along with my sensitive nature, made me realize that this is really how people can act sometimes, and that I should forgive them for that. Never before had I experienced so much empathy, and I was amazed at how good I actually felt mentally.

It’s not easy to forgive sometimes but I learned it’s also not easy to harbor negativity. Upon using empathy to feel sorry for certain people, it made me understand for just a moment how and why they act that way and that they’re not actively trying to undermine me in any way. Do they realize it? Maybe not. Will they learn more about themselves? That’s not for me to answer. But it just felt so unusually… freeing to know that this is how it is for some people, and that it’s perfectly fine.

I really want to be better at kindness, to myself and to others. We are ultimately accountable for ourselves and we have ourselves to look after.

Starting Over

It only took me four years to realize I should do something about this blog.

Without going into details, things have happened. Good and bad. The past entries went into detail about all this but these have all been hidden as I want to give this a reboot.

How much I will write will depend on my mood.

Welcome back.