When life gives you lemons, make lemonade…I hate making lemonade.

We’ve all heard it a million times before. “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”

What it really means is, when you encounter something that sucks or receive something you don’t want, figure out how to make the best of it. IMO it’s super dismissive of the struggle of having been given lemons! I’ll give you an example:

Life gave me lemons: My college roommate decided to move back to Texas a week after we renewed our lease. I had to pay $1400 as my portion of the cost to break the lease, I had to move in with my grandmother who lived three hours away from my school, and I had to quit my job on campus. Those are some SOUR lemons.

Like clockwork, people chimed in by saying “When life gives you lemons…make lemonade.” Nobody said, “Wow that sucks, I’m sorry that happened.” I wasn’t expecting sugar laden sympathy to try to make me feel better, but some compassion would have been nice.

Telling someone to make lemonade completely discounts the struggle; mentally, emotionally, and physically, of being handed lemons. It completely makes that situation seem small and irrelevant It puts that person in a position that they feel that they can’t complain about it.

There is nothing inherently wrong about encouraging someone to fine the good in any and every situation. But that doesn’t mean that the process of finding the good in everything isn’t super hard and emotionally backbreaking.

My point here is that we should be encouraging ourselves and others to make the best of everything and find a positive outlook…but recognize that the situation itself can still suck. Compassion is way more important and uplifting than this tired old saying that really doesn’t help much.