not as the same as having control. One of the main reasons we feel frustrated at not being able to be happy is because we think our happiness is something we can control.
The problem with trying to control our lives and how we feel is that we will rarely or never succeed, because we cannot control what happens to us, and to a great extent, we cannot control how we feel. Our emotions are tied to good news and bad news, likes and dislikes, love and pain. To say that we shouldn’t feel a certain way is to deny our humanity. Every emotion we feel is part of being human. To be human with grace, we need to accept that we are full of thoughts, ideas, and emotions that make us capable of extreme greatness as well as incredible sorrow.
Life takes us where it wants to take us, and the best thing we can do for ourselves is to make the choice to influence, to steer, to drive it—but we can only do that if we’re not fighting against our own thoughts and our emotions.
When people talk about the secret of happiness, they’re not talking about how we can constantly feel pleasure and elation, but how we can be in a state of contentment and peace. To be at peace is to look all the bad things fully in the face and say, “I’m not going to fight you.”
When we feel we need to protect ourselves, our instincts are always to resist. We feel that resisting means we are not giving up. But it’s in fact the opposite—resisting what we feel makes it even harder to be happy, because we are constantly feeling guilty for feeling bad. In a way, the unwillingness to accept how we feel means we are rejecting ourselves over and over again, making it very hard for us to see the value of our lives.
This is where all of us have to know that accepting our own negativity, sadness, or depression is not giving up. Giving acceptance to ourselves is giving kindness. It’s giving understanding. It’s not saying, “You ruined your own life because you can’t feel happy.”
Acceptance is saying, “It’s okay, breath by breath, you can try again tomorrow.”
All of us have experienced moments of deep sadness and negativity; we have days where we feel down without any real reason why. If we can be kind to ourselves during these moments instead of being frustrated at ourselves, it’s already a step forward.
What’s so crucial for us to understand is that moving forward in life isn’t about never taking steps backwards. Sometimes we move three steps forward and five steps back. It can be incredibly frustrating because we feel like we’ve tried so hard to climb up, only to slide back down again. But that’s not failing, that’s simply living.
We understand that no one is perfect, so why are we so hard on ourselves during the times when we are not perfect?
So often, we think that we must control our emotions. We must control our lives. But control is only an illusion—that’s why our efforts to control almost always backfire and we end up feeling worse. In life, we cannot control how we feel or how things happen, but we have absolute power over the way we respond to them.
Choosing happiness is not about controlling our emotions—it’s not suddenly going from feeling sad to feeling happy the next moment. When we choose happiness, it means we understand that the value of our lives is never defined by how we feel at that moment.
We don’t look at people who are unhappy and think that their lives are worth less. Don’t just practice kindness toward others, and don’t learn to only love others. When we practice accepting the entirety of what makes us…us—the good times and the not-so-good times—it means we are practicing loving kindness toward ourselves.
Depression Is Not Our Identity
<Acceptance>
My late maternal grandmother was extremely poor, and she had to work tirelessly to feed her family of ten children. I remember my mom telling me how she grew up in a rubber plantation where she and the elder siblings would wake a few hours before sunrise and take turns accompanying my grandmother out into the rubber plantation to tap rubber. Home was tiny quarters on the plantation provided by the plantation owner.
When my mom was in high school, my maternal grandparents moved and started running a coffee shop business in the small town of Malacca, Malaysia.
My grandmother would cook and sell Chicken Rice, Economy Rice (simple fare consisting of a variety of Chinese-style dishes, perhaps better known as “Chap Fan”), Fried Mee Hoon (rice vermicelli), and Nasi Lemak, a fragrant rice dish cooked in coconut milk accompanied by condiments. My grandfather would make ‘Bao’ from scratch, a Chinese steamed pastry delicacy. He would knead the dough by hand and patiently cook the different sweet and savory fillings nestled within the delicious buns. The buns are similar to what you would find in a Dim Sum restaurant, but my grandfather’s steaming “Baos” were sold to neighbors and friends, with the help of his children knocking door to door.
Home was then a small flat where all ten siblings slept on a makeshift bed made out of desks pushed together. “You slept on a desk?” I later asked my mom in disbelief.
It’s interesting how something so hard for me to imagine was so normal for my mom. I couldn’t stop thinking about how uncomfortable it must have been to use desks as beds, but it wasn’t even an issue for her. The family was poor all through my mom’s growing-up years, yet my mom remembers having had a really happy childhood.
Happy as they were, things were not easy, and in fact, were often extremely difficult. They were always trying to make ends meet. My late grandfather was asthmatic, and when he had an asthma attack, which was often, he couldn’t go to work. My grandmother was the backbone of the family and the business, and she never took any breaks. She worked through all ten pregnancies and was always right back on her feet right after giving birth. There was no luxurious time to take a proper rest as one should after childbirth.
All this took a huge toll on my grandmother’s health. She suffered from a constant stream of bodily aches and pains in her later years. She also suffered through a severe menopause, feeling listlessness and entering a deep depression.
Without knowing at the time it was menopause that was causing this discomfort, the family tried to cheer her up, taking turns to be with her so she wasn’t alone and helping her to think positively. It was only later that the family learned what menopause was—thinking positively didn’t really help because it wasn’t her mind that was causing her to feel depressed, it was her body. The moment they understood this, they sought professional help for my grandmother.
This was when I saw what acceptance means when it comes to depression. Nobody tried to “fix” my grandmother because they didn’t see her as anything that was broken. My grandmother herself didn’t fight against it once she understood what it was. I know my grandmother lived with pain almost daily, either physically or psychologically, but I never once heard her complain.
Whenever we would feel sad to see her in pain, she would say, “There’s nothing to be sad about, this is part of growing old.”
My grandmother was human, so she clearly must have felt every single emotion, but whenever she experienced pain, she had always accepted it as something she had to go through as part of her life. My grandmother never went to school; she never read books or lived beyond the life she created for her family, yet she has this infinite wisdom that always came from deep within.
I don’t think my grandmother actively practiced acceptance as an intentional way of doing things, it was just the kind of person she was—she didn’t complain, she didn’t pity herself, she wasn’t pretending to be happy or sitting around wishing things were different. To her, what was happening as simply what was happening, and she took joy in the smallest things in life.
