Radical acceptance as a topic is something almost everyone has heard of in some form. It is, in essence, stoicism. The proper variety, not the “emotionless robot” variety some misled individuals carry with them. No, it is the idea that you ought to sit with what happens and what has happened. The good, the bad, the feelings that your gut tells you not to like, the ones that it does, all of them. But I wish to propose another idea: sitting with that which has to happen as well.
You know who you are and you know where you want to be, assuming you are not 13, and to spend much more time deliberating that than living in it is futile. You have had an image of who you want to be in your head forever. Note that I did not say where, I said who. Where is not what you control. Who is. You do not control the effectiveness of your actions, and often a bad plan can have a good outcome and a good plan a bad one. But it is in your direct control how you show up every day to what you need to do. To the kinds of things you want to be doing.
I am not, however, proposing that you simply tolerate these kinds of things. I am proposing you enjoy them. Type 2 fun if you must. That you take it upon yourself as a challenge to do each and every thing you must do and enjoy it the same way someone might enjoy competing in a sport they are good at. You are a human being. Where you put in effort, you will fundamentally become good eventually. So you are good at the sport. I am proposing that you sit down to your meals hungry and you go to bed tired each night for the work you have done. Be that at your career, with your spouse building memories, with your friends doing the same, on that run you have wanted to go on, or wherever you find yourself. That you do these things, even if you are shy, unmotivated, tired, hungry, or all else. That you do them with the lust for life of a child on a playground the first day of summer break. Forcefully, if necessary.
This will, before long, become habit.
And when it does?
Then you will be who you really are.
“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it” ~Friedrich Nietzsche