“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade” is an old platitude used to increase or inspire optimism, which is probably from the mindset that optimism is the only way to look at something in a beneficial way…which results in a divide caused by people who think optimism is the only way.
Unfortunately, you cannot make lemonade out of the tiny bit of lemon juice one lemon will give you, and even if you receive multiple lemons, you may not have enough sugar to keep it from getting sour.
Even more realistically, not everyone loves lemonade. The most lemonade will do for me personally is make me cough up blood or have nosebleeds, because lemons are too acidic for me to handle.
If you even so much as accept those lemons into your personal life, they can begin to affect you in a detrimental way. Society encourages to say yes to everything—to feel ashamed of saying no—but if you continue to do nothing but attempt to “make the best” of a situation, you’ll eventually find yourself living in some horrendous sort of oblivion, and that cycle will continue.
Lemons fall, you try to make lemonade, stuff seems okay—lather, rinse, repeat. If you just make lemonade—or try to—you’re essentially ignoring the problem and not facing what is actually happening. By ignoring the problem, you’re opening doors for it to happen again.
Thus, when life gives you lemons, move out from beneath the tree and break the cycle.
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Christine
Preach! When I was reading this, I was thinking…hmmm, how is she going to end this? I love the idea of breaking the cycle. You simply can’t keep doing the same things and expecting the same things to occur. That’s called insanity, I think!
Liz
Heh, yeah…I was wondering, too, as I was writing it. I knew what I wanted to say, and I knew how I wanted to end it, but there is an underlying event happening I can’t write about right now, and I needed to sort of get things off my chest about it in some way, because it was driving me bonkers. 🙁 So this is like an indirect post about a particular event/thing I’m experiencing, and I just needed a release.
But I figured this platitude was a great one, because a lot of people in my life who don’t seem to understand avoidance doesn’t work have always told me to just “make lemonade” and “deal with it”, and…well…if you just keep accepting and dealing with things, something horrendous could happen.