Making Lemonades with Unripe Lemons
Have you ever thought about the cliché making lemonades out of lemons? It’s like a known demon trying to teach us how we must drive our lives into ramps & let our mind war against us in complex dimensions until we barely recognize that we are humans & need not play the god role in every condition, no matter how things turn out.
For me, the reality of my speech impairment has caused me to do & undo so many foolish things I shouldn’t have done. It has wasted a big part of who I am if not probably who I wasn’t meant to be. I remember being a child & secretly telling myself that I was no good for anybody or anything all because everybody around me treated me as a disabled person.
People talked & watered down my grit for trying to be who I didn’t accept myself as. I was too unease being an impaired child, I wanted to be normal. I wanted to sit with friends to have simple, funny, & serious conversations. I wanted to play football, I want to run to the gaming centre & feel the joy of controlling the pads amidst a company of friends & unknown faces. I wanted to roll car tyres down the potholes streets of Lagos & watch dirty water splash on me like the children in the Nigerian documentaries. I wanted to be selected to take bible lessons in church & even be among the finalists in a major quiz competition in school. I wanted to be the best student in the class & have my peers chat me up on how we could study together to improve our games. I wanted to do everything that made me feel accepted within the definition of everyone & everything around me.
The pressure was overbearing. I didn’t know that no matter how hard I tried, I never would be able to please or be who people wanted me to be. Yes, it was a downing experience for me. I mean for years I fit into roles that made people happy. Many of which made me withdrawn from my very self. I hated being me & never trusted that being me was good enough. It was a big innate war wherein I lost out on reading for grades, wanting to socialize with friends & comprehending the simplicity of doing things. I hated playing games; I hated talking no matter the subject. All I did was to keep quiet as I let my life work pass me.
Some years later, I found my spark while watching American Got Talent YouTube videos. It was life-changing for me as I saw different people walk up the stage with different stories & talents. I remember one particular video where I watched Kodi Lee, 22 years blind autistic guy, in the company of his mum climb the big stage with his lead stick. He was so full of life & something I knew I didn’t have. His love for who he was was so attractive that when he began to sing everyone in the hall forgot about his disabilities. For once, everything became perfect about him.
I replayed the video three times & searched for more disabled contestants. It was as though there was something I had in common with these persons, I felt it the very moment they walked on the stage & shared their innermost self with me on the screen. Their challenges didn’t make them live outside their happiness, no, they all pursued their dreams — every bit of it. I felt so guilty blaming everyone for all I had lost. But the truth was I was the inventor of my reality. I never accepted myself. I thought living outside me would make me better & accepted which I never was. So I took the step of living my life in full & daily accepting my reality as a speech impaired.
For the first few days, it felt odds & beautiful. I was beginning to love who I was, everything was taking shape. I began to see my inner self; it was a miracle, my very own miracle. I loved it & readily owned it before I finally made up my mind to share it with others. In sharing my accepted version of me, I learnt I needed not to be a god. I just had to be human, I needed to home my impairment & the many flaws that came with it; I needed to also own the joy of being special & normal in the same body. This was great; the beginning of my forever loved self. I no longer wanted to try to make lemonades out of my unripe frustration of being speech impaired; it is a waste of energy. All I want to do is make lemonades out of the abundance of ripe lemons already existing in my speech impairment.
You too can, no matter your type of impairment — physical, emotional, mental, cognitive, etc. Hop in, let make lemonades enough to make the world a better place.
