............................BAKE LASAGNE INSTEAD.
What now! I hear you cry in consternation - has she been overdoing her meds? - that's not how the adage goes.
Well no, that adage is all about making the best out of what life brings you.
So if life brings you lemons; make lemonade, limoncello*, lemon curd, lemon drizzle cake or just add a couple of slices to your G & T.
However, we are lucky enough to live in an era when, if life gives you lemons, you can just nip out to the shops and buy a pack of strawberries instead. Because our lives are full of choices, and we don't have to put up with lemons.
We are no longer constrained to accept what we have. From the big life stuff : if you don't like your job, you can retrain and change it, if you don't like where you live, you can move; to the small stuff : go blonde, choose contacts over glasses, shave your beard off. We don't have to just put up with stuff, we have the freedom to move on, to make changes. Because we have choices.
Choices that have come to us from generations of hard fought for change, from suffragettes, to world wars - to whom we remain truly thankful. Change hasn't stopped, we are still fighting for one sort or another, black lives matter, rights to legal abortions, gender identity. But we all benefit from those historic changes that led us to this time and place in the world when we are able to make a whole load of personal choices each day.
So choose. Choose to be happy, choose to lay that guilt down, choose to move on from a negative situation, choose to make life better for yourself.
“Choose a life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers... Choose DSY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit crushing game shows, stucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away in the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself, choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that?”
But what if making those choices seems too hard, too complicated, what if you don't want to make waves, upset people, what if you can't work out what choice to make, what about the consequences, what if the choice you make is worse than where you are now, what if people mock you, criticise you, alienate you, what if ...... what if ...... what if .....?
And that's why we end up sticking to lemons. Sometimes those choices are just too difficult to make alone, why rock the boat, keep putting up with something in the hope that something will change can seem the easiest option. Better the devil you know, right? But if deep inside you, you know that you are just putting up - how can you be happy? How is that getting the best of the life that you have? Why should you just put up with something?
This is where therapy can help, it is not a question of someone else telling you what to do, but a process of drawing out what it is that you actually want, and helping you to see how you can affect those choices and implement the changes that will allow you to live the life that you actually want.
* Ok, so I don't normally advocate drinking, but if you haven't tried Limoncello, you are really missing out - so easy to make at home, store it in the freezer and drink it very very very cold!
**. always drink in moderation