When Life Gives You Lemons

The other day, I saw a reel where someone gave their dog a slice of lemon, and the face that poor pup made… It was obvious he wasn’t expecting something so tart. 

Lemons haven’t had the best connotations. When someone buys something defective or worthless, we say that they bought a lemon. When an experience is sour, it can leave a bad taste in our mouth. Or, when we take an already painful situation and make it worse, we might say that it’s like pouring lemon juice on a paper cut. 

We also tend to compare our problems to lemons, which we see in the phrase, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” Then, there are those who take it up a notch and say, “When life gives you lemons, make a margarita.”  

I got to thinking about life and the piles of lemons it can throw at us. I realized that there are different choices we can make with the lemons we are dealt. We can let them sour our lives, or we can sweeten them up a bit and put them to use. It’s all about mindset and perspective. The following four options come from a personal growth perspective. These apply to how we deal with the problems that come into our lives. 

Become a sourpuss

This is when we feel resentful, are trapped in victimhood, have a negative outlook on life, or are really grouchy or angry due to our lemons. Since we essentially refuse to deal with the lemons, a.k.a. problems, we focus on feeling upset that they even showed up. That tartness never quite leaves our mouths, even years later.

Make a margarita

Another option is to take those lemons and make a margarita. We acknowledge we have the lemons, but we’re drowning out their taste with alcohol. This is where we’re finding ways to numb ourselves to the situation. It’s where we distract ourselves, whether through binge-watching tv, gaming, doomscrolling, or using substances. We ignore our problems and put our attention into something else. 

Make some lemonade

Then, there’s making lemonade - taking in the sweet with the sour. This is where we can see that even in the crappiest of situations, there is some benefit, something that can be learned that will make us stronger, wiser, or more resilient. This is where we look for and find the benefits, the silver lining. As sour as lemons are, they are also full of vitamin C and antioxidants, which are wonderful for our health.

Share the recipe

Lastly, sharing our recipe. After trial and error, we perfect our recipe. We take what we’ve learned and share it with others. Maybe life has taught us how to make an excellent frozen lemonade or watermelon lemonade or a lovely lavender lemonade. We’ve figured out a way to squeeze the lemons and put that juice to work for us. It’s our how-to. It’s an easy-to-follow recipe with our own unique twist that we share with others so they too can handle life’s challenges with more ease.

When life is anything but easy-peasy lemon squeezy, what do you tend to do with your lemons? How do you face your challenges? If you find it challenging to make lemonade, there are scores of recipes online from people who have made it through the same type of “lemon” you might find yourself up against. 

It’s important to understand that if we chuck our lemons into the fridge to deal with at another time, they will just fill up that space. They’ll still be there, ready to topple out at any moment - just like how our problems don’t go away when we push them to the side. 

Life will inevitably give us lemons. Maybe it’s a few, maybe it’s a cartful. We may look like a sourpuss for a little while, and we might need a margarita - that’s okay. The goal is to get to where we’re making our own lemonade. It’s finding the gold in the lessons and growing through the challenges. 

Heart Hugs, Adrienne :)