When life gives you lemons let them drop

Life will give you lemons. There’s things in life that are unfair. The things I am referring to in this post are our perceived injustices, not experiences of trauma.

No life will escape injustice to some degree. People will lie to us, choose others over us, be unkind, exclude and do things we disagree with. These things are out of our control. What is more within our control is whether we hold on to the taste of bitterness, or whether we can let it go.

The way we narrate the past makes a difference. We might tell a story of a previous partner, boss or family member and the hurt, anger or shame you felt at the time is still there for you. The stories we tell often reveal what we are holding on to. Tuning into these stories is a great first step in overcoming bitterness.

We might notice that we tell the same story over and over again. Or we might avoid telling the story altogether. We might also notice emotions bubbling up like tightness in our chest, rapid breathing and our face scowling as we tell the story.

This first step of tuning into the feeling of bitterness is a crucial step. Sometimes we are not aware of how something is still affecting us, even years after things played out.

The second step is taking some time to make sense of what happened. Some might say, coming to peace with it.

We might spend some time acknowledging the negative effects something has had. And then turn to the possible positive impacts, for example, what we learned, how it changed our perspective. We might reevaluate the perceived injustice and look to understand an event from multiple perspectives.

The third step involves letting go. Sometimes this can involve minimal effort on our behalf, as we just tell ourselves to let it go. Other times we might need to really build ourselves up to this momentpp. And this moment may benefit from symbolism, for example, burning a candle and blowing it out to represent letting go.

Sometimes we just need time, like how a lemon tree goes in and out of season. We wait until the lemon drops naturally.

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