Sometimes, life gives you lemons, and you have to take those lemons, put them in your basket of eggs, and then get on a horse.

I think.

Basically, my last post was all horrible and was about the trials of life and social anxiety and feminism and how some people are a bit awful. I’ve been struggling since then to think of a post to follow up with (I took a picture of my desk, which I’ll talk about sometime), and then today some stuff happened which made me think about the principle of “getting back on the horse”, and since it’s totally applicable to this blog situation, here we go.

Firstly, let’s think about the metaphor, because I’ve never really been on a horse, but I feel like if you fall off then getting back on is HARD. Maybe I’m biased because I’m 5’3″ and most horses are waaaay taller than that and I just think I’d struggle, and horses smell, and it’d probably be a bit distressed and let’s not even go into how I wouldn’t have wanted to be riding it anyway because I can just drive a car.

Metaphor aside then, picking yourself up after a negative experience is one of the most horrible things. It’s the total antithesis to what I ever want to do, because it’d be so much easier to curl up with gin and ice-cream and consign everything in the outside world to “rubbish” and just wallow in general self-pity. BUT, I’m a grown-up now, and that is not how grown-ups behave (except for the part about gin. Very grown-up). So instead, I pick myself up, try and look at the experience and say ‘right, I hated that. What have I learnt?’.

After the Rogue incident I learnt that I am not quite comfortable enough with my body yet to wear things that let people see very much of it. That’s not the most brilliant perspective, but what I’m going to do is not put myself in that position again, while learning to feel more confident. That is my legitimate, adult reaction to the situation. It hasn’t changed how I feel about the whole thing, but at least now I’ve got something I’m aiming for which is positive, and so whenever something recalls the experience I bring the positive to mind rather than dwelling on the thing that went wrong.

So I suppose the moral of the story is, stuff happens, but you have to take your basket of lemon eggs, dust yourself off, get on your horse, and race. Or something.

P.S. – I forgot to mention in all this why you have to get back on the horse. It’s because when you do then you get the wind in your hair and all the awesomeness of knowing you got yourself there.