The bittersweet life of Lemonade

I love the phrase, "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade."

What exactly is it that makes lemonade so delicious? Is it the tartness and tang of the lemons, the sugar component, or perhaps the memories that go a long with it? To me, the perfect lemonade is one that has an equal amount of tartness and sweetness. Without the equilibrium, either the tartness is overwhelming or the sugar is overpowering. To me, this adds additional meaning to the quote; perhaps in life, in order to make delicious and fruitful lemonade, one must have an equal amount of tribulations and sweet memories to mix in. Although the tribulations might be immediately sour, once mixed with life lessons and growth, they produce something that tastes amazing.

Speaking of the sour aspect in life, sometimes its hard for me to back up big life decisions. There are so many pros and cons, and its so difficult to weigh them and figure out which choice is the best one right now. I have always been an indecisive person, because I can always see the rationality in doing things one way or another. I have a lot of trouble in making that "jump" in concluding which choice is the right one for me at the time.

I am not going to go into details, but this past week I had to make a very big decision regarding a friendship and believe me, it wasn't easy. I consulted my mom, boyfriend, and a few close friends. They all gave me relatively good advice, but ultimately they all said the same thing; "you do what you feel is right." How am I really supposed to know?

I know we all have the innate intuition to figure out what we are supposed to do in life, yet for some reason, I feel like my "consciousness" is often clouded over by doubt and instability. Although I may know the right choice for myself, I always strive to be the better person and put others before my well-being. This can be a blessing, and a torture. I almost felt like I made my decision a few days ago based on pure anger, frustration, and stress. Perhaps if I only waited a few more days before my head "cleared," but this was a decision that needed to be made promptly, which is often the case...

One thing that I hate is the feeling of guilt. Knowing you hurt someone, and the task to reconcile is daunting. With me being stubborn, I feel like this person is mostly in the wrong for how she treated me. I have sat here and tried to justify my actions of hurtful words and actions based on how she has treated me throughout our friendship, but when it comes down to it, we were both selfish and mean to each other. No one deserves to be treated unkindly, even when it originates by one person being rude or inconsiderate. The golden rule, "treat others how you would like to be treated," has been constantly ringing in my ear as I am left feeling empty after making my decision.

One thing I pride myself on is the ability to see other people's perspectives in many situations. I am a great listener, and over the years I have improved one of my negative qualities of being overly defensive. However, if I find that the person I am trying to meet half way is being unreasonable and unaccommodating to my feelings, it becomes harder and harder to be nice and understanding. I felt that I tried to do everything I could with this person, but with our lack of patience and stubbornness collectively, things quickly began to spiral out of control, and suddenly we are no longer speaking again. How do I stop attracting so much drama into my life?

Consequently, because I have improved on becoming less defensive, lately people have often told me that I do not stick up for myself enough, and that I tend to let my friends and others walk all over me. This is not who I want to be, yet it is hard to set a fine line between sharing my viewpoint, and getting the friend or other person from becoming upset with me. I like to share how I feel, but a lot of times people take it the wrong way. For this reason, lately I have hid my true feelings and emotions to prevent arguments or disagreements. This sometimes works for me until it slowly bottles up inside and I burst...

I felt so empowered immediately after I ended the friendship with this one individual, but now I just feel lonely, empty, and guilty . We are all human beings with feelings and sometimes it's hard to see past our own. Perhaps friendship is not meant to be on our agenda, but kindness and sincerity should always prevail.

My task from here is going to be dealing with finding a balance between mending the tension and learning from the choices I have made... essentially making Lemonade. Although friendship may not be in our horizon, I hope at least a friendly attitude will.