When life hands you lemons…

You clone them and make super lemons (Clone High anyone?)… Or you make lemonade?!? I’m not sure. It’s been a rough week fighting sickness, my inner demons and oh yeah… My car getting broken into. Talk about lemon juice straight to the eye.

I’m writing this post to show that you can turn any situation into something for the better. Even when things get hard, there are positive perspectives and we have a choice in how to react. While this is not musical, it’s still relevant to my journey as a human since we all have challenging times.

I woke up Monday morning after feeling very sick /down on Sunday for a number of reasons, which I will not bore you with. I thought ok, it’s a fresh start to my week, I can do this! As I headed to my car in the parking garage in my building, I saw glass on the ground and thought ‘oh…. That totally sucks’, and then realized it was MY car that had been smashed. Poor little Quinn, someone had smashed the driver side window and opened my dash, gym bag and compartments to look for anything of value. Crap. This was not what I was expecting and to be honest after the down day I had on Sunday, it made me feel awful and violated. But then some good things happened. 

Some very nice people saw me assessing the situation (read:struggling with tears) and offered me the phone number of the guy who maintains our garage, showing me that it is possible they caught the guy since a camera was directly pointed at my vehicle and there was a card with the Ottawa police report and a case number on my windshield. They gave me the garage owner’s number and wished me luck, which was sweet. I called him and he informed me that it had happened late Saturday night, they caught the culprit who was high and the police were already aware of everything that happened. Score, thank you parking guy! I then evaluated the scene (noting nothing had been taken but my stuff was thrown everywhere), I called the police to acknowledge the incident, called my insurance and sorted that out, and got some quotes for a new window… People were friendly and it was 21 degrees Celsius and sunny outside, so that made for a bit of relief on the weather front.

I began cleaning up the glass from the break in (it was everywhere, dusty and annoying) so I could at least drive the vehicle and not ruin my seat by sitting on all of the safety glass. As I was cleaning it up, all of the emotion flooded back from an accident I had years ago that cut my face with safety glass and left a lovely scar by my nose (but fortunately no other injuries)…. I shed a few tears and kept on trucking. Unfortunately my insurance deductible is too high to cover the costs of the fixes, but fortunately, people were pleasant to deal with. I was at work again before noon with repairs scheduled for Thurs and back in regular life…. Until that night when I had to race a thunder/rain storm home with no driver side window. I barely made it, and called it a day once I was parked. I then promptly had some drinks with a friend from Maryland who was visiting, so the day ended in a high note.

The whole thing was not an ideal situation, but the humans involved in helping me sort it all out made me realize that it could have been much worse. Nothing of value was taken, they caught the guy, my fellow Canadians were helpful and my colleagues made me laugh with ideas on how to tape up my window until I got it fixed. While the time to get things sorted and the money it will cost me to fix the damages are annoyances, they are small in comparison to the gigantic ordeal it could have been.

So… Here’s to say, you can choose how to respond to things out of your control. You can play a victim, which I certainly did for a little bit (this sucks… Why me… I wish I had someone to help me through this challenge… Let’s add to the crappy weekend I’m already having) OR, you can take charge, figure it out, look at it as an experience and realize that sometimes you just have to laugh at these situations that can happen to anyone.

I’ll be much happier on Thursday once the glass shards are out of my car, I have a window again and I can add some vodka to my lemonade…. 🙂 Here’s a pic!

Cheers to choosing how you respond to the events life throws at you,

Melly