When Life Gives You Lemons

 

When Life Give You Lemons, Make Lemonade

We live in times where only success is glorified. It scares us to even think about failure. We shy away from it and treat it only as something ‘personal’ feeling almost ashamed of our inadequacies and problems. With so much societal pressure to be successful in everything we do, it’s bound to create a negative and stressful energy in many of us. Resultant, we are now faced with a mental health pandemic. The reasons are any and many - from financial problems, chronic pain and illness, violence, abuse, marital conflict, loneliness, discrimination, a relationship break-up, poverty, unemployment to just lack of perspective on life or self-doubts, fears, apprehensions.  

Globally, close to 800,000 people die by suicide every year: that’s one person every 40 seconds. In India esp. post Covid 19 pandemic, the suicide statistics have been startling. In one of the capital city’s premier engineering colleges, there have been three suicides in three months. For each suicide, there are multiple suicide attempts. and many suicides happen impulsively in moments of crisis. The question is – are we having enough conversations on crisis and how to combat crisis.

Surely something is wrong in the way we are celebrating and glorifying only one side of life- we are only talking about Elon Musk’s next entrepreneurial venture or Mark Zukerberg’s accomplishments. Perhaps not having enough conversations about letdowns and lows, whereas the lows are as integral part of life as the highs. After all, why was Chandrayan 3 such a huge success? Simply because Chandrayan 2 was failure. But every failure of Chandrayaan-2 was addressed to and rectified.

As they say, failure never fails until you give up. The idea must be to confront your issues head on rather than shrug them below the carpet, seek help from friends, family, experts and come out of it.

We are now running a Survival Series titled ‘When Life Gives You Lemons.’ This is your space to express, read, absorb stories of real people dealing with real problems.