On Acceptance, Resistance, and the Last Word

What does it mean for me to accept life, as is?

I often struggle with acceptance, which I’m sure would help solve many problems in my life. Accepting the things that I can’t change can feel like an insurmountable barrier at times.

It’s not only mass injustice in the world—it’s also the kind of things that may be “for a reason” but that piss me off to no end, like how others treat me as less than them, subtly or not.

There’s a famous passage in the book Alcoholics Anonymous where a recovering alcoholic writes,

And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation—some fact of my life—unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake. Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes.

For years, I listened to an elderly man read this passage in different contexts, and from him, it did sound like he was endorsing acceptance as passive complacency, rather than as requiring active work. He did exceptionally well in some areas of his life, but he was utterly stuck in others. In a way, my understanding of him reading those words colored my understanding of acceptance as a concept. It frankly didn’t sound like a good idea to me to accept anything.

His recent death was a milestone for many people in multiple communities. He was 83, and he was at my very first meeting, eight years ago, for my greatest community in Chicago. He will always be special to me.

As his memory faded with dementia, his contributions to different communities had a repetitive quality that a friend described as like the movie Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray’s character relives the same day over and over.

But for him, acceptance worked. And he had two decades away from something that had been a pervasive force in his life for decades.

So, especially since his death, I’ve started to think: how can acceptance work for me?

There’s a saying I’ve heard, “Take what you like and leave the rest,” and a mutual friend of ours pointed out that that story in the AA “Big Book” also says, “Acceptance is the key to my relationship with God today. I never just sit and do nothing while waiting for Him to tell me what to do. Rather, I do whatever is in front of me to be done, and I leave the results up to Him; however it turns out, that’s God will for me.”

That means that to the writer, acceptance is not passive, no matter how much our late friend treated it like it was, consistently putting off critical projects.

I, too, tend to avoid what I don’t feel like doing if I can. It’s immature and childish, yes, and yet procrastination is a very real part of my life. I’ve accomplished a lot, and I still struggle with performing simple tasks.

This passage, though, tells me that acceptance takes work through any kind of action that goes against my typical patterns. It also suggests being as still as possible, which is difficult with my ADHD, and taking in everything as part of life, whether it is worth accepting or changing.

Recently I was running to something and ran straight into the side of a moving firetruck. Gratefully, I wasn’t hurt, but I was shaken, of course. The next day I spoke with somebody about my anger over different circumstances in my life that I can’t change, and they told me that resistance is the opposite of acceptance.

I realized my running, literally and figuratively, and rushing everywhere is a sign of resistance to doing things in an evenly paced, manageable way.

My life can be a mess in any number of ways, but that accident and subsequent conversation got me thinking about what I can do differently.

One of the biggest patterns that I work through every day is needing to be right about everything. I’ve written about being a recovering music snob, using spiritual recovery to get used to the idea of not needing to be right all the time.

As a result, though, with my issues, I sometimes get internally annoyed with dates and others who have the same pattern but have never worked on it. A year ago, I went on a date with a guy who hadn’t been in a relationship in seventeen years and seemed intent on pushing me away because that’s what he was used to doing.

He was constantly correcting me and seemed intent on being right about everything, and I’ve worked to accept that that was a part of where he was in life. He has every right to feel the need to always be right, as obnoxious as it was to me.

Another related tendency that shows resistance and a lack of acceptance—and a strong desire for control—is when I’ve insisted on having the last word in every argument: the final, conclusive say in what’s true and what’s not. I used to hear when I was being rude, “You don’t get the last word!” I realize now that it wasn’t simply an issue of resisting authority. I wanted to be right about everything to ensure a sense of security that I didn’t feel like I had in many places in my life.

Today I’m working on accepting the people and situations in my life, however much they piss me off. I struggle with the expectation that things will go my way, as, of course, that hasn’t worked out well for me.

One of the hardest things for me to accept is grief and loss. I’ve had many people in my life die unexpectedly, and it hurts thinking about them. There are always conversations in my head that I wish I could have with them.

Sometimes, I’ve had the last word in friendships, and it was angry. I yelled at a friend in a chat message in 2014, only to find out about the next year that he had died from an overdose. I try to choose my words more carefully now, but while I also have compassion for where my friend was, I am learning compassion for myself as well. I was severely mentally and physically ill at the time, and I’m working to accept that nothing I could’ve said or done would have been able to save him from harming himself with drugs.

Grief, plainly put, can change everything in relationships: in theory, you’ll always want one more conversation with someone who’s died—and for them to have the last word. I’ll never forget my last conversation with my grandmother, when she said, “We’ll listen to music together across the skies.”

That was my last interaction with her alive, and still, I long for closure even though she did get the last word.

In situations with ghosting, too, grieving a relationship can involve a longed-for last word. I have at least one person who ghosted me who, I suspect, may come back someday, and part of me wants that to happen so that I can be petty like them and tell them off—I’d feel superior by telling it to their face than by ghosting them and abandoning a potential friendship.

But I realized that the way for me to approach such a situation is by setting an actual boundary and saying, “I’m not available for you anymore.”

That’s the only last word I’d need. I wouldn’t need to prove that I’m right or anything else.

So, I return to the first passage about acceptance in the AA “Big Book.” When I am disturbed, what do I find unacceptable? And is it something that I can do something about or is it something that I need to let go of?

I’ve heard others say that saying, “You may be right” and leaving it at that is a good way to diffuse an argument, but another solution, depending on the situation, is to simply walk away. 1990s country star Mary Chapin Carpenter has a great song about this idea. In “The Last Word,” from her album Stones in the Road, Carpenter sings, “Sometimes, we’re blinded by the very thing we need to see / I finally realized that you need it more than you need me!”

Carpenter seemed like an anomaly in the ‘90s: an Ivy League-educated musician who became a country sensation with brilliantly introspective, evocative, and witty songs that did well on the country charts. Her last word, in the country music scene, was to let the music speak for her—as she sang in “The Hard Way,” “Actions speak louder”—and prove that she was one of the best singer-songwriters of her generation.

Her music from then is still remembered by many fans, and in some ways, a song like “The Last Word” reminds me of how important acceptance of a situation can be.

And I’m better with acceptance than I used to be, so I’m taking that as a victory. I am working to let go of the illusion of control. The more I listen to a song like Carpenter’s and read about acceptance in a chapter like that in Alcoholics Anonymous, the more I realize that, like Carpenter sings, other people need the last word more than they need me.

And I am happy to give that up, as active acceptance may be the answer to all my problems today. I need to work on discerning what work I need to do to accept the things I cannot change, that to change the things I can, and that to know the difference between the two.

My life has changed a lot in the last decade with my efforts to accept life on life’s terms. It is still a struggle, but I am willing to keep trying, one day at a time.