When Life Gives You Lemons

Everyone has heard the saying, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade”. It’s a sweet saying, it really is. However, sometimes the lemons straight up suck. So, what do we actually do when life hands us lemons?

            Truthfully, everyone has lemons. To some they may be smaller or fewer in number, but the sour juice stings just the same to the person eating them. I used to think my “lemon” was the fact that I am so emotional. I thought I was too sensitive and cried way too often for the average happy kid. This was my lemon in life. However, when I was 17, life threw me another lemon when my mom passed away from cancer. For a while, life felt a little bit like one of those ball pits you get stuck in as a kid but instead of fun, colored plastic balls, I was surrounded by lemons. It was a downer.

            A funny thing about me is that I actually love lemons. Ever since I was a kid, I would steal all of the lemons from everyone’s glasses at restaurants and eat them, something I still do as an adult. There was something about the tangy sourness that suited me. I took that ideology to heart. I challenged myself to find meaning in the events that had occurred in my life; to find the lesson in the lemons. What was the world trying to teach me? Is there something I can grow within myself from this?

            The things I learned and am continuing to learn were not necessarily lessons I wanted to go through. Often this is the case when managing the various lemons that life has thrown at us. Lemons are usually accompanied by bitterness and resentment. At times, we need to sink to the bottom of the yellow pit of citrus fruit before we are able to look for the possibility of growth. Perhaps the lessons are not so cheery and bright. The growth can come from setting boundaries with people we love, self-protection, building our own security, and creating a safe space for ourselves within ourselves. Sometimes the lessons are not things we need to learn, but things we need to do to heal from the experience. It can be grueling work squishing these lemons into something resembling lemonade.

            It is in this challenging emotional work that we can find our greatest strengths, cultivate those ideas, and integrate them into our personal identity. For me, my lemons led me to a career where connecting with others emotionally is one of my strongest assets. Through this work, something that I saw as a weakness was channeled into one of my greatest strengths. In remembering that we are not our experiences we open ourselves up to this possibility. By separating from our experience and eliminating self-blame, we can identify our strengths, highlight them and expand them. In doing this, we embrace our personal power against our external circumstance.

            What about the times where the lemons are too sour? There are times in life when we struggle to find the meaning in an event. In times like grief, tragedy, assault and trauma it is impossible to find the silver lining. Those wounds are deep and deserve the time to heal. And if we look at the event itself, I do not believe that there is good there. However, the good lies in the capacity for the human spirit to heal, grow and expand. As people, we are resilient.

            By giving ourselves the possibility to identify our own personal strengths in managing our lemons we create our identity. It is not the events of our lives that define us. By creating our own personal meaning, embracing self-growth and discovery, and cultivating our strengths, we aid in our resilience. The lemons will always remain just lemons, it is up to us to do the work to make something resembling lemonade.