Eating Your Problems…..

Eric Pone
Open House Writing
Published in
3 min readJan 26, 2018

My family operates by the saying “ How do you eat an apple? One bite at a time.” Being Black life has been very very very hard. Its not I didn’t have a advantages. My parents ensured that we had good educations, a safe place to live, and access to good mentors. This went a long way towards making life easier. I couldn’t imagine how much harder my life would have been without these advantages. But I have learned 3 things that have allowed me to weather life’s storms.

You can only solve one problem at a time and the most important is your mental well being.

I have had the privilege as a trusted adviser to engage in the lives of many people. The number one thing that moves a problem to epic crisis levels is awareness and care of your mental health. If you read the news many of our countries greatest tragedies is due to unacknowledged and untreated mental health issues. Many economic crisis and relationship crisis are made much much worse when one of the parties suffers from untreated mental wellness issues.

Don’t let the bill collectors control your actions.

If you have bill collectors you have lost control of your finances. BUT that does not mean they control your life. Once you have your head together you have to be clear and blunt about what you can and can’t do. IF that isn’t good enough for the kid on the other end of the phone oh well. Let’s say your car gets repossessed. It’s not the end of the world, things will get better, and you can take the bus or ride a bike to work until your money gets better and it always gets better. Inconvenient yes, but you have control. Everyone has money and relationship problems. If people say they don’t have these problems they will lie about a lot of other things too.

Yeah those Pinterest, YouTube, and Facebook pics and posts…most are lies.

Many people post how awesome their lives are. You get the great photo-shopped pics of the beautiful family and homes that are anything but. I had one goal for 2017 and that was to be completely honest in my social media posts. And it was really hard on my readers!! Some dropped me because they didn’t want to hear truth or share a common burden. But many many more also took time from fantasy life to step into reality and find support or at least an ear from a stranger with no dog in the fight. I have decided to maintain this habit into 2018 and I will probably just keep it up. Being open and honest means that you don’t have the to carry stupid burdens or meet the standards of people who are just as broken as you are.

But most of all you can only bite a problem, one small bite at a time. You can’t solve your problems by the hustle or the right furniture or taking the perfect vacation. You solve problems one at a time. I don’t know what you are going through. But I can tell you have dealt with everything from poor health to several major financial crisis you can only eat a problem one small bite at a time.

--

--