Acceptance is Growth

Oof. OOF. 

What a year. 

There’s so much swirling around in my brain and my heart and I’m not sure where to start. I always say that, don’t I (and hey look, I’m a poet and I don’t even know it). 

I’ve had many ideas for the ‘perfect hook’ for this piece: the neat wrapping and the bow to tie it all up in. 

But whenever I land on one and try it out, it doesn’t feel right. And it’s stopped me from posting because it’s not quite right, not quite what I want it to be. 

And that, I believe, is the point. 

I reach the end of 2025 not where I expected to be at all. By many of the measures of success I’d set up for my year, I have failed. Here are some of the things I had written that I wanted to achieve: 

• Consistently earn and start saving again…… the less said about this one the better. It turns out that freelancing in work that is trying to move us beyond the neoliberal capitalist system isn’t something that system particularly wants to fund. 
• Read 50 books. I’ll be honest, this one was really an attempt to compete with my brother who somehow manages to do this every year despite running his own business and being a wonderful father to two small children. I managed about 30 which I still think is pretty good going. 
• Make dance a regular part of my life again.  I ADORE dancing, it’s my happy place and yet I barely ever do it. I seem to find plenty of time for those Buzzfeed quizzes (no, I still haven’t managed to kick the habit, and yes, apparently I would be a juniper berry if I were a special Christmas greenery)
• Overcome chronic pain - That’d be a no. I’m still in pain every day, it still stops me from exercising but I’m learning to get less frustrated with it.
• Live life with joy and without fear. This one is a hard no. Severe anxiety, a lot of therapy and some medication later, I can safely say that however strongly I wished for this one, it was one of my biggest struggles of the year. 

I remember sitting down in January of this year thinking about all the ways I wanted to grow and how different I would feel in twelve months' time. But when I look back at my list, I barely achieved any of the things I set out to.

The biggest thing that I have achieved this year is realising that that’s okay. 

I can still want all of those things and aim for them while accepting that maybe I just wasn’t ready for them yet. There were some things to learn first. 

I had intended for this final piece of the year to be about writing a love letter to yourself. How often do we receive love letters? Unless you’re part of a very lucky minority, I’m guessing almost never. So what a glorious thing to spend some time reflecting on the things we love about ourselves and also to encourage love for our whole selves: the good, the bad and the ugly bits that we secretly think are totally and utterly unloveable. 

I was going to write my own and then run a workshop to get other people to write theirs together. It was going to be a whole new avenue for Learning to Love Where We Live. I was pumped. 

Well, it turned out someone else had had a very similar idea and had pipped me to the post. 

I recently finished a 10 week ‘Unlearning Circle’. Every two weeks, I would log on to a Zoom call with 6-8 folks from around the world and we would be together for an hour and a half, walking through various facets of our unlearning journey: from emotional suppression to people pleasing to conflict avoidance. 

As you may have gathered, my life has been a little hectic over that 10 week period. From coping with mould to rats and then on to flies (from the rat. Don’t, honestly it’s been a Herculean effort of zen … punctuated by the occasional SPLAT when I just couldn’t take it anymore); from relationships ending to starting two new jobs in the same week (not 100% sure I’d recommend that choice to a friend); the unlearning journey coincided with a period of profound transformation for me. I can’t say I’m totally sure there was direct causation but the correlation cannot be denied. 

For one, I’m really proud of myself that I kept going to the Zoom sessions. Normally, this would be the first thing I would have dropped when things got busy but I made a commitment (yes, me, I know!) and I stuck to it and I’m so glad that I did. 

I’d actually gone into the Unlearning Circle wanting to unlearn my beliefs about my chronic pain: that it was indeed chronic, would be there for the rest of my life and nothing I could ever do would change that. During the course of the 10 weeks with everything else going on I kind of parked thinking that I would get to the root of that particular belief and went to the sessions to just see what would emerge.

And what finally emerged was that love letter. 

Our very final exercise was to write a love letter to ourselves. The timer went on, the music played and for me, the tears flowed almost instantly (those who know me or indeed my father will know that that’s not saying a huge amount - it runs in the family). 

Here is what I wrote:

Dear Olivia,

I want you to remember what you are capable of achieving. I want you to remember what happens when you trust yourself. I love how much you care. I love how endlessly willing you are to try to grow and to be the best person you can be in this lifetime. I also want you to remember what you have learned in this latest, most transformative and powerful transition: that you can accept exactly where you are in each moment and still want to grow. 

Surrender to the river. You don’t know what’s around the bend, it could be beautiful, it could be challenging but it’s coming regardless and all you can do is take each moment as it comes and be grateful for all the things you have seen and been during the journey so far. 

I love you.

And that, ultimately, is the key to everything. 

When things get hard, and they will, remember that I accept you fully as you are and as you have been at every stage of this weird and wonderful experience of being alive. At every single stage I trust that you have always been doing what you could with what you had available to you. You are full of courage and love and light and remember that you can be your truest self with the world. You are deeply loved by many and all anyone wants for you is to show yourself the love and kindness you show to others.

You were given a guide to show you all the dark corners where you did not love yourself. And they loved you. So please, accept yourself in your entirety. That is where the growth lies.

Love you,

You xxxxxx

There’s one key line that I want to draw attention to:

You can accept exactly where you are in each moment and still want to grow. 

This understanding has been a very long time coming for me. Months if not years in the making. And I think it’s absolutely essential for learning to love where we live on all levels. In order to move forward we must accept the truest reality of where we are right now. 

Through my experiences with anxiety and pain I have always found this notion impossible and frustrating. How dare someone tell me to accept being in this level of distress and discomfort? How could anyone not want to get away from it as quickly as humanly possible? 

“Feel the feelings”, they said. 

No, you feel YOUR feelings, I want different ones. 

“Anxiety is like a chinese finger trap, the harder you pull the tighter it gets”.

You’re WRONG, if I can just twist in the right way then I’ll be free. 

“Happiness can only exist in acceptance”.

Shut up George Orwell, you don’t know me. 

I used to believe that accepting a situation meant resignation. It meant that you weren’t actively trying to change it and that meant you weren’t trying to grow and isn’t the whole point of life to be constantly changing and evolving and growing? I have spent years thinking that accepting an uncomfortable feeling or an uncomfortable situation was going to do me irreparable harm. 

And yet. 

Through this topsy turvy end to 2025 that I’ve had, I feel like I finally understand what they all meant. The pain I have caused myself by fighting against pain, both real and imagined, has caused so much more harm than if I had learned to sit with discomfort and let it pass. 

If I’d learned to be honest with myself about when I was angry, upset or jealous or hurt and actually felt those feelings and let them pass through, rather than clouding myself in shame for feeling that way and doing everything I could to run from the feelings, I’d have realised so much sooner that that’s all they are: feelings, sensations. And feelings pass. 

It’s the gripping and the twisting and the writhing, contorting yourself every which way to try to outrun the ‘bad’ feeling that leaves us in knots, feeling much worse in the long term.

In recent weeks I have noticed the pattern of wanting to suppress or run from an uncomfortable feeling. I panic: oh no, not this feeling again, and I reach for the phone to numb myself out with scrolling or I feel guilty and embarrassed for not being able to handle myself and stay calm and positive. 

And you know what I’ve started doing? I’ve started screaming and stamping my feet when I’m annoyed. 30 seconds later I feel okay again. 

Or I’ve started moving my body in whatever way it wants to move, whether that’s curled up into a little ball on the floor sobbing my heart out or doing high kicks round the kitchen to Angie MacMahon’s Letting Go (“I’ve been learning ‘bout letting go, how to do it without my CLAWS scratching the surfaces”). 

I have started to accept how I feel in the moment and not panic that it means I’ll feel that way forever. And it turns out it works! Who knew!? (Other than the many people in my life who have been telling me this for over a year). 

What does this mean for those of us learning to love where we live?

For starters, it has helped me no end in learning to love myself and all of my dark corners. By accepting exactly how I am, where I am and who I am at this moment in time, I am not saying to myself I do not want change. I am saying that I am worthy of love just as I am. I am saying that I am much more likely to reach the new destinations I seek if I approach each new step with love, curiosity and acceptance than if I approach each new step with fear and trepidation. 

This, I believe, applies to all of us.  

We all spend so much of our time contorting ourselves away from facing our deepest truths, both personal and collective. We scroll and we shop and we constantly try to run away from our present reality. 

Don’t get me wrong. I know acceptance is hard. I’m only at the very beginning of my journey with it. But I do genuinely finally understand why people have been banging on about it this whole time.

It is only if we can truly see and accept where we are that we can begin to move something new. When we close our eyes or look away or we will things to be other than they are, we are not actually changing anything. If I refuse to accept that I am hurt, the hurt will just manifest itself in other ways (hello, chronic pain with no structural cause that any doctor can find 👋🏼). 

I can choose to accept that there are four rat-drunk blowflies flying around my head as I write this or I can choose not to accept it, but my lack of acceptance only causes me pain (well, and the flies if they happen to be on the end of one of my splats). 

If we refuse to accept the extent of the damage we have done to the planet, to our democracies, to our communities and to ourselves, it does not make the damage any less severe. In fact, all it does is make us much less likely to do anything about it. 

Whereas if we can face the brutal and honest reality of where we are in any given moment, we can make peace and then we can make change from a very different place. A place of truth and connection. 

So what was the real lesson that 2025 had to teach me? 

I thought it was about always choosing love over fear and building the life I want with patience and persistence (both of which were in fact the mantras in my journal). But all of that was about change and growth, change and growth. 

What I’ve come to realise is that acceptance is growth. So I’m going to stop fighting myself. 

Here's my challenge to you as we head into 2026:

Write yourself a love letter. Not the Instagram version where everything is sunshine and gratitude. The real one where you accept the parts of yourself you've been fighting.

Accept where you are right now: your body as it actually is, not as you wish it were. Your life as it actually is, not as you planned it would be. Your feelings as they actually are, not as you think they should be.

And then, from that place of radical acceptance, see what wants to grow.

Because that's where the real transformation happens. Not in the fighting, not in the fleeing, not in the endless optimisation and self-improvement but in the acceptance.

That's where learning to love where you live begins. With accepting exactly where, and who, you are.

Even if that is someone who has lost all her zen and is about to go and swat another fly.