Emi Nietfeld was fourteen when she entered the Children’s Residential Treatment Center (CRTC) for psychiatric treatment. In a place she could not willingly leave, she was taught to accept that the only person to blame for her feelings and behaviors was herself. Regardless of the abuse children and teens endured before entering the facility, the staff repeated their mantra daily: “Events don’t cause feelings. Thoughts cause feelings.” Now that Nietfeld is an adult, these words seem to echo in her memoir, Acceptance, in which she explores the conflict between the personal and the institutional and the control that they each have over an individual.

Acceptance chronicles a journey that takes place primarily from Nietfeld’s adolescence through young adulthood in which she obtains a college degree while suffering from homelessness, economic instability, sexual abuse, and mental illness. A dominant thread in Nietfeld’s narrative is her complex feelings of love and frustration toward her neglectful but encouraging mother, who refuses to accept that her hoarding behaviors are what keep her teenage daughter homeless. At the heart of this memoir are the promises education holds, the search for human connection, and—perhaps you guessed it—acceptance.

Nietfeld’s path is marked by hardship as well as brief sparks of joy, sometimes found in unlikely places. An example of this is found in a scene from her high school photography class:

Ms. J flipped to the next slide. She asked, “What is photography about?”
My hand shot up.
“It’s about light,” I said. Heads turned to look at me, the new girl. I repeated one of my mom’s favorite mantras: “Photography means writing with light.”

Nietfeld demonstrates writing with light, carrying a narrative through darkness by filling in shadows with the glowing embers of soft moments and the fires of victory—the unfettered breath in her lungs when she breathes the clean air in a psych ward, a smile from a friend, Ms. J’s mentorship, an excellent ACT score.

To young Nietfeld, college isn’t just about bettering oneself. College means money. Stability. Safety. However, in order to obtain financial assistance, she’s confronted with the highly competitive nature of scholarship and college applications. She learns that overcoming some adversity—like excellence despite poverty—is praised, while discussing other adversities is taboo. She finds that it’s better to nix the details about her time spent in psych wards and highlight the parts about growing up with little money and being in foster care. I was deeply troubled by the necessity of students undergoing certain kinds of trauma in order to be recognized by college acceptance boards and the necessity to already have overcome them. Nietfeld writes:

Every successful applicant to the top schools had a shtick: legacy, recruited athlete, lone student from an unrepresented state, organ player. Mine was my past, the tremendous things I’d overcome. But I hadn’t exactly “overcome” those circumstances: I was still in the middle of them. Providing context required distance that I lacked. No one besides my mom had ever narrativized my life for me, but her cheerful glossing over of my darkest days and instructions to “overcome victimhood” haunted me.

While Nietfeld’s narrative resembles a bootstraps narrative, and is even applauded at a conservative scholarship awards ceremony—homeless teen turned Harvard grad and computer engineer by sheer force of will and “true grit”—she confronts bootstraps ideology in the United States, arguing that her living circumstances created a near-impossible maze for her to navigate safely—a maze that would be made even more difficult if she were black or visibly queer. In a 2022 interview for Freedom.to with Rosalie MacMillan, Nietfeld explained:

I see “grit” as a final throwing up of hands. When we’ve communally decided that issues can’t be fixed, we leave it up to individuals to handle the consequences. This kind of logic is seen on both sides of the political aisle. On the right, it comes in the rhetoric around “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.” The fixation on “resilience” can serve a similar function for those on the left.

We all want our kids to be happy, our families to be healthy, our communities to be strong. I hope that […] the effort we’ve put into urging resilience can instead go to providing the support struggling people need to move forward.

While reading Nietfeld’s memoir, I felt a sense of frustration with the adults who exert control over her child- and teenage-self, their platitudes masquerading as mentorship. The urgency of her basic needs and her ambitions for obtaining a stable future career held my attention and kept me turning the pages even as I grimaced when situations looked dire and the details of her terror made me feel as though I was standing in the same room. I devoured this memoir in only a few days, carrying it with me everywhere. In the author’s capable hands, I read fervently as she combed through the details of each memory and juxtaposed them with her mother’s own versions of the “truth.” Like Nietfeld, what I deeply wanted to experience was closure about everything that had occurred, a catharsis. I also craved a kinder world.

Nietfeld will not accept, as the psychiatric staff would have had her do, that the circumstances of her life have nothing to do with who she is, or how she feels. “Acceptance” is often equated plainly with “surrender,” “yielding,” or believing something is an inevitability. Her own brand of acceptance is looking back and understanding that the past cannot be rewritten, but that she is profoundly changed by her experiences. Nietfeld does not seek to inspire others with her story, but instead asks all of us to take responsibility for causing resilience narratives such as these to exist.