It Is What It Is: Practicing Radical Acceptance as a Black Woman Who's Been Through It

There’s a phrase we’ve all heard. Maybe we heard it from our auntie, maybe from our own lips when something felt too heavy to name: “It is what it is.” At first glance, it may sound dismissive. But for those of us who have survived the chaos, instability, and heartbreak that come with Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), that phrase can be a lifeline. A signal that we’re no longer fighting reality, we’re reclaiming our peace.

Radical acceptance isn’t about giving up. It’s not about rolling over, staying silent, or pretending what happened didn’t hurt. It’s about acknowledging, without resistance, that some things are out of our control. And for Black women raised in households marked by trauma, instability, or emotional absence, that act of acknowledgment is often the first real breath we take.

What Radical Acceptance Isn’t

Let’s get this clear: radical acceptance is not excusing people’s harmful behavior. It’s not saying, “Well, that’s just how they are,” and sweeping our pain under the rug. It’s not spiritual bypassing or toxic positivity. It’s a practice rooted in truth. In clarity. In saying: This happened. This hurt. And I’m not going to waste any more of my energy trying to rewrite it.

We were often taught to muscle through, to push past our pain, to take care of everyone else even as our own wounds bled beneath the surface. But what happens when we stop resisting the truth and start being with it?

Naming What Was

Many of us weren’t given the space to name our childhood experiences as trauma. Maybe a parent’s addiction wasn’t discussed. Maybe emotional neglect was normalized. Perhaps the instability was disguised as “tough love” or “just how it is in our family.” Radical acceptance asks us to sit with those truths, not to wallow in them, but to see them clearly.

Because once you name what was, you can stop twisting yourself into knots trying to make it something it wasn’t.

The Freedom in Letting Go of the “Why”

We sometimes spend a lot of energy trying to understand why. Why did my mother choose the drugs over me? Why didn’t anyone protect me? Why did I have to grow up so fast?

Sometimes, we’ll never get a satisfying answer. Radical acceptance is about loosening our grip on the need for an answer. Not because we don’t deserve answers, but because waiting on them can keep us stuck in the very pain we’re trying to heal.

Instead, we shift our energy from the unchangeable past to the empowered present.

Moving from Survival to Sovereignty

Radical acceptance moves us out of survival mode and into something softer, fuller…sovereignty. When we practice it, we stop trying to control outcomes, fix people, or explain our worth. We simply own our story and move with it, not against it.

That means no longer internalizing the shame that didn’t start with us. It means allowing grief and joy to coexist. It means saying, “Yes, that happened. And I still get to choose how I live now.”

A Practice, Not a One-Time Thing

Radical acceptance is not a single moment; it is a continuous process. It’s a practice. Some days it feels like peace; other days it feels like surrender. And both are sacred.

For the Black woman who grew up in chaos but craves calm…
For the one who still feels like she has to prove her worth…
For the one whose childhood was stolen, but whose future is hers to shape…

Let “It is what it is” be more than a shrug. Let it be your freedom song.

Because when we stop fighting the truth, we can finally start living in it.

You are not what happened to you. But you do get to choose what happens next.