edification of a wildflower

On my worst days, I have to work hard to remind myself that life isn’t always bad. I know they say to make lemonade when life gives you lemons, but it’s hard to make lemonade when the lemons are being thrown full speed into your face.

People use the lemon analogy as a way to preach, “make something sweet when things get sour.” Let’s be real, it’s not all that easy. When I find myself getting hit by life over, and over, and over (and over!) again, getting angry is the easiest thing to do.

Lately I’ve been reflecting on how my emotions affect my mood and well-being. After being on a sort of “high” from a week or two of productivity, my mood suddenly changed. I quickly went from feeling proud, hopeful, and happy to feeling ashamed, lost, and sad. When I first started experiencing these emotions, I tried to counteract my negative thoughts by telling myself that everything will be okay tomorrow. News flash, things were not okay tomorrow. I continued to feel like shit about my appearance, my finances, where I’m at in my life, and my progress with my goals.

Telling myself I just needed wait until I felt better gave me a bit of hope for maybe three days. After that, my emotions started to consume me. All of the goals I had been working towards temporarily lost their meaning to me and I said “fuck it.” I started giving into my cravings for unhealthy food. I stopped going to the gym because I wasn’t seeing the progress I wanted. My negative mindset seemed to follow me everywhere I went – I started making less money at work, hanging out with my closest friends became emotionally taxing, and I found myself irritated ALL THE TIME. I tried the being positive thing, and it just wasn’t working for me no matter how hard I tried.

Did things eventually get better? Yes. Was it easy to remember that when I felt like all hope was lost? No.

I say all of this as a reminder that life. is. cyclical.

Let me explain what this means for me. I’m a visual learner, so I like to think of this concept like a line graph with peaks and troughs:

Think of the peaks as your best moments and the troughs as the rough patches. The line will inevitably fall down after reaching a peak, but every time it goes back up it reaches a greater height than before. Without falling, the line wouldn’t be able to reach the next peak. Life is going to get hard, but when it does you learn lessons that make you better in one way or another. This happens over and over again until you’ve learned all of the lessons you need to learn.

The fact is, the hard times will come and it’s not always easy to power through them. We can only do our very best, every single day. Try not to be so hard on yourself, because life will continue its cycles until you’re ready for the next. The journey is beautiful, and we can appreciate that fact no matter how difficult things get.