When life throws you landfills.

You ever look around your shambly room and all it's piles of garbage and laundry and spiderweb condominiums and feel burdened? Why can't things be cleaner? Why haven't we gotten a Roomba for Christmas yet? How can we be expected to fit in chores when we can barely handle stumbling out of bed at 8:45 a.m. to grope-crawl for our Abilify without having a panic attack?

Moments like this, when you're lying on the floor sobbing because you just didn't know it was garbage day until it was much too late, these moments call for gratitude.

I know I know. Shut up with the gratitude. But just give me a second.

Yes, recovery is very hard. You do sometimes cry in your car before meeting your boss, and silently strangle pillows in your closet before tucking in your kids, and miss bowling and dancing and fishing to spend hours resolving in front of strangers how your dad caught you stabbing a Ken doll when you were nine.

And yes, you probably did have had a very crappy life from which you now must recover. Aunt Betsy sat you on the stoop saying she'd return in an hour and didn't come back for fourteen years. Mom couldn't afford more than Icebreakers and cracker sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And Grandpa celebrated your birthday by dispatching three jugs of stout and tearing down your dead grandmother's rose-print wallpaper.

This is all real and painful. No one should ever diminish what you're going through. But, sometimes, finding the joy buried under your legitimate pileup of pain can transform everything.

Take this everything-that-is-adorable-in-the-universe girl:

Landfill Harmonic

Now watch this video (seriously, watch it):



If these kids who live literally in piles of garbage can make Yo-Yo Ma's muse out of said crap, so can you.

Maybe you can't get up and mow your lawn or burn the dishes. And that's okay. But while you lie there on the floor, patiently waiting for your soul to heal, maybe notice that you too are kinda like these cuteness wunderkinds. Beneath all the junk life's thrown on you, there is your courage, resiliency and beauty, the stuff of which Mozart dreamed.