Battles Men Face: Accepting Who You Are

It's difficult to accept who we are, how life has shaped us, and what we've done in response. We wish we could be better than we are, but if we're honest, we know we're not. So we give up on being honest. We spend a great deal of time pretending we're someone we're not, looking anywhere other than at the man in the mirror. When we look in the mirror and see imperfection and weakness and failure, we cringe. We prefer our diversions, our compulsions, our masks, to the awful truth that we're less than we should be.

There are a lot of reasons why we're less than we should be. Some of those reasons are on us. Some of them are on others. There are things in our past that mess us up. There are relationships that drive us crazy. There are mistakes and habits we just can't seem to get over. Somewhere along the line we were taught that putting on the Fine Mask and hiding out in a man cave was the way to get beyond that knot in the pit of our stomachs when we fail to measure up and know it.

So we work and we play, we act and we move, trying to outrun the gut check. Some of us are pretty successful at running; it takes years for bone-deep fear to catch up to us. In the interim, we often damage our relationships and screw up our health. We spend so much time running from truth, we're not really sure what it is anymore.

Acceptance is the point at which you stop running. Acceptance is taking that long, hard look in the mirror and ruthlessly cataloging who you are. There's a funny thing about acceptance, though. Only you can do it for yourself. It doesn't really count if other people accept you -- that's nice, of course -- but acceptance only really works when you accept yourself.

The goal of acceptance is not to stand still, to stay stuck in your compulsions, happy behind your masks. The goal of acceptance is to designate your true starting point so you can begin to move away from being stuck and toward positive change. 

Weakness happens; failure happens; life happens. You are not immune, no matter what you were led to believe growing up or what you've been telling yourself ever since. It's time to accept the starting point of your battle and begin to figure out what you're going to do, besides pretending the battle doesn't exist or using it as an excuse to stay hidden behind your masks. Admitting weakness means accepting not only the starting point of your weakness but what you've done in your life to protect that weakness. As a man, as someone who's supposed to be protecting others, it can be a challenge to admit that shielding your weakness has meant exposing others to harm.

The above is an excerpt from Battles Men Face: Strategies To Win the War Within by Dr. Gregory Jantz.