When Life Gives You Lemons

When Life Gives You Lemons

As many of you know, I work at a grocery store. I have been working there for almost a year and a half now, and I have had many adventures. For example, sometime during my first month, a customer asked me where an item was. I went to go get it, and when I did my key clip (which is attached to my belt loop at almost all times), got caught to a cart heading in the opposite direction that I was. Another time an older customer asked me to help her put her bags in her car- only to realize afterwards that we had put the bags in the wrong car! I mean even last week, I was working on Saturday and one of my bosses asked if I wanted to be the Easter Bunny. Most of the stories are funny, but one recently happened that was really deep and meaningful (at least I think it was).

My official job description is “courtesy clerk”. Basically what that means is, I am a bagger, a cart attendant, and a makeshift janitor. I work the morning shift on Tuesdays so I can have the rest of the day for homework and stuff. Last Tuesday,  I got to work as usual and I didn't think anything was really going to happen. Towards the end of my shift, I was bagging when a woman came to check out. I was still working on the last order as she started to unload her stuff from cart on to the conveyor belt. About midway through, she got to the mesh bag of lemons.

I saw it Immediately, some of the lemons looked green and squishy. I pointed it out to the customer, and she asked me if I could get her a new bag. They were organic lemons - I'm not going to lie, I didn't even know we sold organic lemons, let alone where they are in the store. So I took the damaged lemons as a reference for what the bag looked like. “Put that in damaged when you find the new ones.” said the cashier I was working with.

I went to the produce department knowing they would probably be there. I was right, but it still took me about three minutes to actually find them. I knew that the customer was probably almost done bagging, and I didn't have time to put the damaged lemons away. I decided to return with both bags and put the damaged back later. On my way back to the registers, I passed one of my bosses. He looked me up and down, saw both bags, and said sarcastically, “When life gives you lemons!” I chuckled and responded, “You make lemonade!”

I had never actually thought about that phrase before. I know what it means, but I never actually thought about it for a long period of time. Because I thought the situation was funny, I was thinking about the phrase. Eventually a thought popped into my head, A single question- Why? Why when life gives us lemons must we make lemonade? I mean there's so many cool things you can do with lemons. You can juggle them, because you know it's a bad idea to juggle eggs, or you could make your house smell really nice, or my personal favorite- give a lemon slice to a baby and watch them freak out.

See my point? Back in the day that phrase had meaning: Take the situation you are in and make something good out of it. And while that can be applied to any situation today, I do think it's a little outdated. Think about it, you can do anything you want but in most cases, You have to follow a path or a formula. Point A to point B- Lemons to Lemonade. But it's not a straight path, at least it shouldn't be. Do what you want to do  of course, but do it your way. When life gives you lemons, don't just make lemonade, plant a lemon seed.

Have a Greattastic day!

J. Mitchell Ulibarri

Running Away

Running Away

Life is full of ups and downs, I think we can all agree on that. One of my highest highs, lead to one of my lowest lows (though I didn't know it at the time). Sixth grade was the worst year of my life. One of the big reasons for this was because as I have alluded to before, sixth grade was when the bullying got really bad.

As a result, my parents started looking for a new school. They found out about HLC, and learned that they were having an ice cream social. When the day came, mom told me that we were going to check out a new school. I was a bit worried about the change at first, but I was able to connect with the other students a lot faster than I had ever connected with anyone. When we got in the car after the ice cream social, I told my parents I had never met anyone like me...until that day. I knew that I wanted to go to school at HLC.

The only real requirement for enrollment was, to be on the spectrum. At this point however, I had not been diagnosed, but my parents strongly suspected. So I was evaluated by a psychiatrist who works for the school, and she said that we would find out the results soon. About a week later I slept over at my cousins house. In the morning, my Aunt Melissa got a call from my mom telling her that I indeed had autism. I started running around, screaming like a banshee. Little did I know what had actually happened.

Getting diagnosed did help. I went to HLC, made some new friends, my self-esteem skyrocketed, and my grades went up. But something changed about me almost immediately. HLC, as I think I have mentioned before, was mostly for kids lower on the spectrum than I am. Unfortunately, I didn’t really understand what the word spectrum meant for most of my time at HLC. I just thought everyone with autism had to act the same way- so I became more stereotypically autistic.

Despite that however, I still managed to stay true to myself. When everything with the HLC talent show and Ryan went down (see Weird is a side affect) , I started to "run away" from the school. At least that’s what I thought I was running away from. What was actually happening was I was distancing myself from autism itself (the stereotypes, and more importantly the parts that were actually part of me).

I wasn’t ready to open up about my autism throughout high school. I felt like people would think of me as stupid, or inadequate. That’s not what it’s supposed to be like. You’re not supposed to look at your peers and think that they are better than you. The unfortunate thing about this is I had a really good reason to think I had to do that. For my whole life before HLC I was bullied, and that was before I was even diagnosed. What kind of torture could people inflict now that what was “wrong with me” had a name? People, we need to stop treating people with autism, like they are the stupid. If not, they are going to start running away from autism, and by extension, themselves. Because let's be real, even when you are running away from something, you're also running to something. Give your friends and loved ones something to run to.

Have a greattastic day

J. Mitchell Ulibarri

Rekindle (Story Blog 1.2)

Rekindle (Story Blog 1.2)

In my previous installment of this story blog, I said I was going to master small talk by reading the book- How to Start A Conversation and Make Friends, by Don Gabor. While I'm still planning on doing that, upon looking deeper into the book I realized it has more to offer than just that. I’m going to read the whole book, and while I'm not going to write about all the things I learned in my blog, I will write about the important parts. Without further ado, this week’s story is about time:
As I have explained before, my high school had an internship program. During senior year, the second semester students become full-time interns. The first semester is all about planning, for the internship(s). It's just a bunch of labs, and group bonding stuff- boring, but necessary. One day in one of the labs, the teacher dropped the bomb on us. “Students, while you are on your internships, you will have to read a book of your choice. I have suggestions in a pile that you can look at.”  As I looked through the pile, I stumbled upon a of copy How to Start A Conversation and Make Friends and choose to read it. I bought my own copy online, and I started read it. However, the teachers didn't enforce the “read a book” requirement because everyone was at different places and reading different books. So I forgot about it, until recent circumstances reminded me that could useful.
When I recently picked this book back up, I started flipping through the chapters and I landed on chapter 14 “making new friends and rekindling old friendships. I read it and a specific story stuck out to me.  The author describes a phone call he got from an old friend. He then describes all the fun times they've had since then, and gives credit to the friend for reaching out. He goes on to say you (the reader) can be the “blast from the past” and that's okay.
My first question after reading was, “Who should I reach out to?” I was struggling with this question for about a week, then my mom did something. I was scrolling through Facebook (out of sheer boredom), and I got a notification. I saw my mom had tagged me in a comment,  so I went to check it out.
The comment was on a post from a kid who was in my childhood playgroup. This friend and I were not too close, but we were friends at the time nonetheless. The link was to a podcast which promoted Never Walk Alone, a Mental Health Organization that he started which has been officially recognized by the Ohio State University. I listened to the podcast and I realized that he experienced a similar situation to me and S.M. (in that, he had a friend who passed away).
Immediately, I wanted to support him and what he is doing through my blog. Then I realized, if I reach out and ask him if I can support him though the blog, maybe, just maybe, it will rekindle a friendship. I reached out to him on Facebook and we met up this last Tuesday (4/2/19).  We talked for a while, and I asked him if he would consider writing a blog for me. He agreed and he will be writing as a guest blogger this upcoming summer (more on that later). I hope this partnership helps Ronnie, Never Walk Alone, and leads to an awesome friendship.

Have a greattastic day

J. Mitchell Ulibarri