Acceptance and Choices

This essay has reached the finals of Growlife Medical's 2023 Annual Essay Competition, with this year's theme being "Strong Family Bonds.

Family is important to survive. Sometimes the family you have you don’t want and you’ll be ungrateful. But when they’re gone, that’s when you truly need them, the time that you’re truly grateful for the existence. No matter how hard it is, at some point in your life, you have to accept your family for who they are, for all their flaws and imperfections. Even right now as I’m writing this, I’m a young person who is quite enlightened I’d say, and I still haven’t found how to accept them for who they are. We fight, we love, and we support. It’s hard but acceptance is probably one of the most important things to learn in life in my opinion. It’s okay to disagree with that but hear me out. Learning to accept, no matter what it is, is important. Whether it’s learning to accept yourself for who you are, accept that your favourite show got cancelled, accept that you broke up or accept that you can’t change the way they are. No matter who it be, your lover, your friend, your boss or your family, you can’t change them. You can try, but it will only destroy your relationship with that individual or group. Trying to change someone isn’t healthy. People change as time comes and they grow and learn by themselves. If you try and force it like a jigsaw puzzle, the piece with fit and it could break it you force too hard. As George Orwell the famous author of Animal Farm and 1984 said; “happiness can only exist in acceptance”. So, you can’t truly be happy until you learn to accept, to let go. So, I guess what I’m saying is that family will always be there, and no, obviously this does not apply for every family in the world. Yes, some families absolutely despise each other, some families would rather kill each other or themselves than have a conversation with each other. But a lot families, despite the differences will always be there for each other, supporting one another through everything, including life, death and growth. 



Look, acceptance isn’t the only answer. I don’t believe that acceptance equals tolerance. Tolerance is something I’ve always hated. You shouldn’t tolerate someone’s bad behaviour. If say your mother is treating you like absolute garbage, then communication is the answer, not acceptance. So, if she’s abusing you verbally and emotionally, then you should communicate by how she’s making you feel. It’s hard, I know that, but it does take strength to talk about your feelings with people who don’t seem to care. But if you try communicating and it’s not working then don’t tolerate it, but accept the fact that they aren’t going to change and make your choice from there. You could cut off contact with them if you choose to or you could stay and continue to be treated unfairly. That’s always up to you and you always have a choice, no matter what guilt you feel is binding you in that environment. As I said before, you can’t force change, if you try and change someone, it’s not going to work. However, if you communicate about what’s wrong, then the ball’s in their court so to speak. It’s their choice now if they change because you’ve made them aware of how you feel. So, I guess what I’m saying is that acceptance comes in different forms and it’s not always tolerance. Tolerance can be negative compared to acceptance which can be positive. You always have a choice, no matter the situation you’re in. 

Through all that I’ve said so far, I’ve been referring to family in which is bound by blood. But that’s not always the case. Even when you have blood ‘family’, they aren’t your family, you know? They just exist, either somewhere else or forcibly co-existing with you in your surrounds. Dave Willis had said “Family isn’t defined only by last names or by blood; it’s defined by commitment and by love. It means showing up when they need it most. It means having each other’s backs. It means choosing to love each other even on those days when you struggle to like each other. It means never giving up on each other”. So, basically what he’s saying is that blood and last names doesn’t make a family. It’s love and support that does. It can change as you grow as a person and psychically age and grow. Right now, my family, is my blood. My mother, my father and my sister. But I also have my partner and a couple of friends. That’s my family. 

Now, I’ve been through a lot, I watched my great-grandfather die and I unknowingly held my great-grandmothers hand while she had already been dead for a few hours. I didn’t know that at the time, I only found out when my mum was on the phone to my dad and had said she passed. I cried in the car because I had lost a close relative and a young age, I was around seven or eight at the time and just found out I touched my family’s corpse. That was terrifying. I was a bit older when my great-grandfather died but even because I was older and more mature, it was scary. I was in the room, I watched him die. It was devastating. I had a great relationship with my great-grandparents and to lose them both, two family members at a young age, it does have an effect on who I am today. Spending time with them was different from spending time with my parents and my sister when she was born. I consider myself to have a bit of a broken family, because my parents are separated and we don’t talk to any of our other relatives. So, my family is quite isolated from our other blood relatives. I’ve never met any aunts, uncles, cousins or anything. But, that’s okay. I’ve always been okay with that. I mean yes, when I was younger, I wished that I could meet them, but, back to acceptance, I accepted that I wouldn’t meet any of them. And now, at the age I am now, I honestly couldn’t care less about meeting my ‘family’. 

When I started writing this, I wasn’t going to write something like this, at all. It was going to be about “strong family relationships decrease chances of teens using drugs and alcohol” and I mean yes, that is true in some circumstances but I think that this approach is more creative and engaging. This, to me, maybe not to you, seems more enlightening and relatable. You may not agree with some or any of the things I’ve said here but that’s alright. Everyone has opinions. And to me, personally, I’m happy with this because it’s honestly just raw writing. There was no brainstorming, no planning and no editing, apart from grammar and simple stuff like that. I’m not going to read over this at all. To me I’m writing a masterpiece, and I’m going to share it with you and my partner because he supports me. He’s, my family. 

Basically, what I’m trying to say overall, is that you should accept the family that you have. This doesn’t mean tolerate nasty behaviour, but it means that you learn to accept that your mum has bad style or your dad chews loud. Family according to google is; “a group of one or more parents and their children living together as a unit”. That’s not what family is. Family is the group and community you’re apart of, it’s who is around you that loves you for who you are and who supports you. Whether that be your cat, your co-workers, your lover or your blood family. I’m sure everyone has heard of the saying “blood is thicker than water”. That means absolutely nothing. You choose who your family is and how you define that. You always have a choice is probably what I’d say my main point of this is. You have a choice to accept, you have a choice to move on, you have a choice to stay and you have a choice to tolerate. You have a choice on how you interact with your family and you have the choice to choose your non-blood family. 

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