Life Gave me Lemons, So I Baked a Lemon Pie.

I have been waging a semi-successful, fully frustrating battle with Chronic Lyme Disease for five years. I’ve had success. I’ve had failure. I’ve had everything in between. I’ve tried everything, done everything, been to doctors all over the country, yet I cannot seem to get the upper hand.

As a result, my life has changed in dramatically painful ways. I am a fragment of the person I used to be. Every day is a physical and emotional struggle.

I do my best to meet the struggle with grace.

But I am growing weary. Oh, so weary. And on a particularly low day I found myself lost in the following thoughts: “I’m so sick of this, I’ve been dealing with this for so long, will this ever end” and on and on and on.

Then an opposing thought literally shot through me. The thought was: “None of this is helping you. The situation is bad enough as it is. Don’t add to it with with negative thinking.”

So I decided to turn back to the positive side. But I felt horrible, which made optimism a challenge. In that light, I decided to take stock of what would be possible for me that day. No, I couldn’t do any of the things Lyme Disease stole from me: the ability to run, the ability to eat and digest normally, the ability to think clearly, the ability to do things that bring me joy like volunteering, the ability to not feel pain on a daily basis. No, that’s all gone.

And then for some reason, the idea of a lemon pie popped into my head. And I thought, I can’t spend this day the way I would choose, but I can make a lemon pie.

That notion brought me more joy than I can adequately express. It changed the entire trajectory of my day, and the pie turned out beautifully.

Of course, it wasn’t really about the pie, though.