Lemons

My default has always been to find the silver lining in any situation, regardless of how dire it may feel at the time. This optimism permeates every facet of my life to the point I started a podcast called Lemonade, which as the title suggests, features the stories of people who’ve turned the hardest times in their life, their lemons, into lemonade. My pursuit of gleaning the meaning of why things happen, rather than getting bogged down in why they happened in the first place, has always been my strong suit, a source of inspiration for those around me facing their own hardship. It’s my thing. Have you heard what she’s done? She made the impossible possible and birthed a new benchmark of aspiration in the process. If she can do it, so can I! Finally, a purpose, a reason for this saga. The validation is intoxicating, potent enough to numb the reality of the situation. But this disposition is equally my downfall, a safety net I construct to save myself from truly hitting rock bottom and therefore prevent processing and feeling the feelings that need to be felt to truly wade my way through once and for all. Which is why old pain… always resurfaces. Old stories… keep being retold. Focusing my attention on what I’m learning rather than what I’m feeling is a double edged sword that’s helped many and catapulted me through, but simultaneously prolonged my personal pain as it’s taken years to acknowledge that sometimes a lemon is a lemon, regardless of how much you douse it in sugar or try to counteract the bitterness with tequila and triple sec and call it a margarita, it’s still a god damn lemon. The pain that comes with acknowledging my signature brand of alchemy is not always applicable is profound. It is what it is, my therapist tells me. But I’ve always been able to make it what it isn’t, I respond. Then why are we having this conversation? She finishes. The merry go round of the last three years keeps going round and round and round and round and I can’t seem to get off once and for all, because the pain is what gives me the lemons which gives me the stories which gives me the lemonade which gives me the purpose which gives me the saccharine high to go on like all is okay, bury it deep and dress it up because the truth is too painful to sit with. Now the truth is laid bare and the sugar high has worn off and I’m left with the lingering aftertaste that sometimes life’s lessons are sour and they’ll always be that way and that’s ok, and that perhaps this lemonade is gleaned only from accepting some lemons aren’t meant to evolve to anything greater than their original purpose on this earth, no matter how many additives I try. See? I did it again. Old habits die hard.