Posts tagged "acceptance"

Excerpts / April 12, 2025

Oath, Final

I am because I am! means I exist because I exist and need no justification whatsoever for my existence. The fact of my being is enough. I require no terms, conditions or permits from myself or anyone else. I live, and in living I am fully entitled to go on living. My life, my existence, my being is not predicated on standards, values, achievements or accomplishments. I am, not because of books I write, money I earn, degrees conferred, children I have—I am with or without these accouterments. These things and people are not me! I do not exist because of them. Relative to my life, they exist because of me.

— Compassion and Self Hate, Theodore Isaac Rubin

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Excerpts / March 24, 2025

Oath, Defended

I am I is the essence of self-acceptance. But it is not passive or selective self-acceptance. It is active, loud, strong, and, if necessary, heroically aggressive. It applies to all aspects of self …

Judgment value, moral equivocation, cultural and conventional values, the ideas of others do not cause me to deaden, repress or attempt to cut off parts of myself. I includes all that the culture may see as assets, liabilities, limitations, resources, insensitivities, cruelties, neurotic, good, bad, sensitive, wise or stupid in me.

— Compassion and Self Hate, Theodore Isaac Rubin

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Excerpts / March 7, 2025

Oath, Reaffirmed

I am because I am! means I exist because I exist and need no justification whatsoever for my existence. The fact of my being is enough. I require no terms, conditions or permits from myself or anyone else. I live, and in living I am fully entitled to go on living. My life, my existence, my being is not predicated on standards, values, achievements or accomplishments …

“How do I feel?” is a very important question as applied to people, issues, myself and especially as to my state of well-being. If I feel good, that’s good. If I feel bad, then is there anything I can do to make myself feel better? Am I involved in any way in a self-hating enterprise? Most important, do I feel bad because I haven’t accomplished enough? Achieved enough? Conformed enough? This is blackmail and antithetical to my philosophy. I must fight to give myself the right to feel good about myself and to feel good mood-wise, regardless of any accomplishment or nonaccomplishment whatsoever.

— Compassion and Self-Hate, Theodore Issac Rubin

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Excerpts / February 2, 2025

The Dust of the Ground

Before they’re plumbers or writers or taxi drivers or unemployed or journalists, before everything else, men are men. Whether heterosexual or homosexual. The only difference is that some of them remind you of it as you meet them, and others wait for a little while. You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond.  You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they’re simply unbearable.

—Practicalities, Marguerite Duras

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Excerpts / January 3, 2025

2025

Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn’t possess,
acts but doesn’t expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

—Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

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