Point of view and overall situation matter a lot in any given story — whether true or fiction.
If you live somewhere that you can even fathom life being “what you make it,” you are lucky.
There are multiple ways of looking at this, though, none more right or wrong than the others.
For those living in places of some type of oppression, there’s no choice to “make” life what you want.
However, for those living elsewhere, it may be living without something (or someone).
In any case, you may still have to trudge through the thorny bushes every day. You can’t act like they’re not there — and you’re still going to feel them if they cut you. To suggest that you can make deep cuts go away easily is to suggest that the cuts don’t matter.
If you’ve been cut deeply enough, you know that they do — and that being told “life is what you make it” is just a band-aid that doesn’t even to cover a gruesome wound.
And it certainly doesn’t help to heal it.
So yes: Let’s always try to make lemons into lemonade — but let’s also empathize and try to avoid rubbing lemons on someone else’s wounds.
