making lemonade out of lemons, and no that isn't a beyonce reference

it's actually about cake.

let's say you make a six layer rainbow cake for a fancy dessert auction.

this time, you had your crap together and you made sure the levels were all completely even, and you froze the cake layers before frosting so it would be all ready to make the journey from your house to the fancy restaurant with its' white tablecloths and candles.

it looks so pretty, with tons of homemade cream cheese frosting. 

but your kitchen is 90 degrees.

and the layers start to slip and slide a little bit.

so you decide to throw the entire cake into the freezer just to make sure it's going to stay perfectly tall and white and martha stewart-worthy.

an hour or so later you slowly open the freezer door and NO. NO. NO. NO!!!!!!

the top layers have slid in three different directions, and the cake has had an avalanche of sorts, and there is really, truly no way to salvage it for the auction, or for any destination.

did this hypothetical happen yesterday in my very own kitchen?

yes. yes it did.

honestly i couldn't really fix it for the auction. so i went back to hanging out with my family instead of freaking out, and by the end of the evening i decided to go for plan b. 

i looked at that sad pitiful falling apart cake and chopped it up into pieces on a platter for the teachers at the girls' school. one platter had blue and purple chunks of the rainbow, and one had red-orange-yellow-green chunks of the rainbow. not the most amazing thing ever, but hey! lemonade out of lemons! 

i've been thinking a lot lately about expectations vs. reality, especially because so much of what is smacked up onto facebook or instagram or pinterest is a perfect, idealized version of what is really happening in our lives, and it can feel defeating. comparison looms large, and it can feel like your own life is a little less shiny than everyone else's. 

some parts of my life don't look the way i expected my life would look at 41 years old. some weeks i end up getting almost nothing i planned done. some days feel like one massive, unproductive failure. so how do i shift my perspective to make what i have work? how do i chop up the failures, put them on a platter and lean into that being the new plan? as i sit working in my studio today, that's what i'm wrestling with. 

thoughts?