One hidden but critical ingredient is self-acceptance.

At the beginning of 2018, I had another intention for the year beyond my health: I was going to accept myself, exactly as I was. It didn’t matter where I was or what was going on or what goals I had set. My task was to accept myself exactly where I was in that moment. 

This may sound completely unrelated to the storytelling craft, but this exercise was inspired by my experience in an online writing course in Fall 2017. The course included a community forum for the hundreds of attendees. This was the first time I’d been in a writing class that big and the first time I’d been in a writing class with full-on grownups. When you finished your weekly assignment, you could upload it to the forum, and your classmates could read and comment on your work. 

It’s always a stretch for me to share what I’ve written so quickly after I’ve drafted it, but I did. The feedback from my peers was unanimously positive, because this was a very positive feedback-focused course.

The last assignment, however, was a true struggle. Looking back, I can see why it was so hard to finish that piece: I was coming up on a big work deadline. I had a sinus infection (again), and I was running fever (again). My energy was required to decompress and to heal, not to create, but I was convinced that the assignment was more important. 

My mind was filled with thoughts, such as: I really need to write something good. This is the last one! I’m letting people down by writing something terrible. I’m letting myself down because I keep getting sick and don’t have energy for what I really want to do. Why can’t I get my act together? Am I just lazy?

In other words, my mind was treating me terribly. A voice in my head told me that I was a screw-up unless I made something magnificent, and it continued berating me until I completed the assignment and posted it. 

This was one of those times that I mentioned in the middle story, where I went to my journal and wrote long, angsty passages about my health. So, after the assignment was complete, I had a clear and undeniable record of where my thoughts had been taking me. 

And seeing those words, I started to see how unfair I was being to myself:

I was sick. I was stressed. I was exhausted. I was doing my best, and since I’d published four books before turning twenty-nine (and knew exactly how much work that was), I knew objectively that I wasn’t lazy or unmotivated. 

But somehow, for almost a whole day, my mind had convinced me otherwise. My mind had been incredibly cruel to me, by offering me awful things to believe about myself, and I’d believed them. 

Not only that, because of some of the discussions in the group forum, among my hundreds of classmates, I knew that I wasn’t the only one having thoughts like these. Plenty of other writers had a similar experience, and they were recording and posting all these terrible thoughts about themselves. We were all acting like this was normal.

The assignment—even the entire course—wasn’t nearly as important as that realization: my mind was a terrible place to live, and so were a lot of other people’s.

This struck me as a terrible waste of energy, and I could think of better uses for that energy than beating up on myself, especially since I was incredibly exhausted. 

By the beginning of the following year, I’d decided to do something about it. I’d heard about self-compassion, which is treating yourself with the same compassion as you would treat a suffering friend, but that felt like too much of a stretch for me. 

So, instead, I started with self-acceptance. In a moment like the one at the end of that writing course, where I caught my mind beating me up, I had to stop the pummeling thoughts and remind myself: This is where I am right now, and it’s okay to be right here. 

So, if I had cruel thoughts about my weight, like How did you let yourself get so fat? or What’s with all those late-night cheese and crackers, Shelby? You know better, then I had to accept it and replace the thought: You know, I’m heavier now than I’ve ever been, and I don’t like it. But for right now, it’s okay. Then I would consider some ways I might improve my overall health. 

If I started pummeling myself for not finishing my novel yet, telling myself, You started this over two years ago! You should have at least gotten done with the first draft! then I had to stop that too. I told myself: It’s okay—you have had a hard couple of years. 

Then I would grab the notebook for that novel, and I’d open it. Sometimes, I would write for eleven whole minutes. Sometimes, I would write a sentence. Sometimes, I would just look at the page where I left off, and I would contemplate how to pick that thread back up again. Then I told myself, That’s enough for now.

You have to accept where you are before you can effectively change where you are. 

This is as true for your characters as it is for you. Lena, for example, had to accept the loss of her hands and her own role in it before she could announce that she made the rules around her own inventions and before she could tell General Searcaster that she was the weapon. The difference is that Lena had help: she told her best friend what was really going on, and because her friend accepted her in that moment, that made it easier for Lena to accept the real situation herself. 

Telling a friend or someone you trust can definitely help, but the only person who lives in your head all the time is you. Eventually, you’ll be given an opportunity to practice this acceptance when you are entirely on your own. 

It may be a challenge in the beginning, but that is what practice is for.

As you practice to pause, accept, and reroute your energy from beating yourself up to making a positive change, you grow faster at this skill.

By the time I was in that barre class, I had been practicing for a few months. So, when I caught myself getting frustrated first at the contorting, then at my teacher and myself, I was able to reroute my thoughts almost instantaneously. Instead of berating myself further, I changed my actions instead, and we’ll talk about why in the next section.