Like many people with chronic illness, I spend a not insignificant amount of my time trying to process my thoughts and feelings about living with type 1 diabetes. How I view this little box on my body that keeps me alive, whether a crashing hypo is truly as scary as it feels in the moment. The need to be three steps ahead at all times, the ways in which diabetes makes me. The ways it threatens to break me.
My perspective for the most part stays within my control, but it’s also aided hugely by the shared experience of others. When I talk about diabetes to people with diabetes there is an element of mirroring – we might all see things slightly differently, but the picture is instantly recognisable.
But I sometimes find myself wondering whether I wang on about it all too much – in my real life, or on Instagram, or anywhere people without diabetes exist which is, of course, everywhere. Because as consuming as type 1 diabetes is, it’s also part of the gloriously messy tangle of my life, which is many things that aren’t type 1. That to those beyond the bubble of this lived experience all this chat is a big ol’ eyeroll or a mammoth winge because everyone’s dealing with something and there are, of course, bigger problems in the world. To the extent that I think I sometimes play down the realness of what it really means to live with, which helps precisely nobody at all.
On World Diabetes Day I then found myself startlingly confronted by this fab post from @allontheboard. To see diabetes articulated like this on a platform that isn’t about diabetes was a different reflection entirely. That this perspective CAN penetrate beyond our community and that other people CAN see it made me feel weirdly exposed, completely amazed, and then of course utterly ridiculous because you don’t have to experience something firsthand to have empathy. I simply don’t expect anybody to because it’s impossible to make room for everyone and everything in this life.
There’s no tidy conclusion to this, but I (in)articulated these sprawling thoughts in my Stories and received quite a few knowing nods from the Internet. Perhaps we diminish the stuff we’re dealing with – diabetes or otherwise – because the gloriously messy tangle that is life is a perspective that is both unique, yet universal.
These thoughts are written as part of the Beyond Type 1 #diabetesand conversation.
No Comments