LEMONADE

I make messy lemonade, maybe its the lemons that are the wrong, or the sugar. Or maybe its the fact that I do not have a fridge yet to serve it with ice cubes.No, I know, something must be wrong with the recipe I use....It just never seems to come out right....

On to other matters;

I am having a less busy afternoon at work, so I have decided to pop in and post. It has been quite a while since I posted last. No, it has been many days since I published. To be honest, I have thought about this blog every single day since the 11th November 2018, when I published my last article. I have asked myself questions like, why did I start something I was not gonna go through with to the end. But hey! here I am, back to continue from where we stopped.

I cannot say that I stopped writing for those many days. As a matter of fact, I have been writing, a lot more than you would imagine. The last time I posted, I was exactly a month into my very first job post campus. I had began the rest of my life, literally. I was away from mummy and daddy, taking care of my own expenses, while being hosted by a great friend because I was not exactly ready to be on my own financially speaking. So when i say that I have been writing, I really have. Only that I have not been publishing.

Things began getting a little bit thicker than I had anticipated. Living with Chronic pain and fatigue and having a full time demanding job is not the easiest combo. I begun to feel stretched, but I had to hang in there. No I was not going to quit, in fact I loved my job. As much as it was hectic, it felt in line with what I want to do in my career line. That partly explains why I did not publish during that season.

Almost every article I wrote was depressed, and in my judgement not fit for human consumption 😂😂. They were raw, and I was too exhausted to edit into more palatable vocabulary. So I resorted to storing lots of drafts of articles. They all do not have titles, so I should probably call them journal entries. Today's article does feel like a journal entry actually, so maybe I will call it that: '' Journal entry'' sounds cool, right? Maybe some day I will publish them, or at least one of them.

In that season, I came to learn a few realities of this life. See, in every season of my life, I have always looked forward to the next. I thought Primary school was boring so I wanted high school to come fast. In high school, I could not wait to get to campus and stop wearing uniform. By year 3 of campus, I was fed up with the lecturers' strikes and I wanted to graduate already. Now that I have graduated, I think I want to get married, then I'll probably want children, and then I'll want them to grow up. Maybe I will even start demanding to get grandchildren, and then I will want to retire and travel to The Bahamas with my old husband by then and I could go on and on.........

I do this mostly because I have not yet mastered the art of making some refreshing lemonade out of the lemons that life is giving me. I see them and I want to run, I want to move on to the next challenge hoping I will get the right lemons this time. I tell myself that by then the ice cubes will be ready and the quality of sugar and honey will be at the top. Oh, and better still, the recipe this time, I will even do a trial, just to be sure that I will get it all right.

So why now? You could be wondering. Why I'm I publishing this particular one? Has my life changed? Did I stop dealing with pain and fatigue, and having to work as well? Have the demands on my life gone down, and now I am having space and time to write? Are the ice cubes ready? Do I have just the best sugar, made specifically for lemonade purposes?

You got that right, no, not even close. As a matter of fact, the lemons...... the lemons I got this time, don't even get me started on those. I have learnt that the lemons will not stop coming, and they are never going to be perfect, at least not on this earth. I am learning that they are not going to ever find me fully ready in my apron and chef cap, knife in hand and squeezer on set. 

At this point I am actually thinking of changing the title of this piece to 'Lemonade'. I think it sounds better than 'journal entry' .... But we'll see about that by the end of it. I wonder if every writer has such chronicles; because this happens to me almost all the time when I write. 

So, I hang in there when its all I can do. When there is more that I can do, then I try to do just that. I look to Jesus who gives me the strength for each day. Then I look forward to His coming, which will put an end to all the troubles of this earth. This sounds all neat and clean when said. However, for me sometimes it means crying myself to sleep when I'm broken, running to God and sometimes away from Him, talking to people and other times to myself, and everything in between. 

So yes, my lemons come in many ways; chronic illness being one of them. This means that there are days that I have no energy to do anything. There are days when my body works in reverse; I wake up feeling exhausted, and go to bed at night completely alert with my brain refusing to shut and sleep. Other time my moods will shift unexpectedly, and my body will fail to control temperatures well. I sometimes have allergies that I cannot explain, and other times I cannot finish simple chores/tasks because I did not remember to allocate my energy well so it can last through my day.

These are just but a few of the daily struggles of a chronic illness fighter. I hardly talk about these in detail, mostly because I do not like to be pitied, and because I cry every time I talk about it. It is a hard battle, I will admit. And I am not a strong warrior. I have made many wrong turns with this one. I will probably make more in the future. But for now, I have chosen to try and constantly make good of it. I hope to share this hope as consistently as I possibly can. Not because it is easy, but because Jesus. 

These are my lemons, what are yours? And what do you choose to do with them?

Adios!