Life Struggles

As a type 1 diabetic since I was six years old, all I’ve known is the struggle. At such a young age, you don’t understand why you have to be so different and do things so differently than everyone else.  You don’t fully understand why you can’t eat all the candy and sugar in the world that everyone else can and why you have a “diet” and have to monitor your blood sugar.  I mean, you do understand why, you just don’t feel like a “normal” person.  It’s funny to think how I am now being the one to embrace uniqueness and being weird and as abnormal as possible, but growing up I never truly felt normal and I wanted to feel as normal of a kid as I could feel without being looked at as weird when I had to pull out a syringe to inject insulin. Crazy thing is, no one ever teased me about being diabetic and the majority of my friends were super supportive (and as I got older, every girl I dated was supportive and receptive), but I just never felt comfortable or normal being the only kid who had it. Sure, I went to diabetic camps here and there where there were tons of kids and adults like me and it made me feel right at home, but then when I ended up going back home, I was right back in a place I didn’t feel comfortable and yet again being the only kid who had to deal with this disease with no one around who could truly relate to me or understand me. It was hard growing up seeing everyone not having to deal with the same restrictions I had, plus I got tired of kids asking why I couldn’t eat this or that or have as much of this or that I wanted so I decided to just say “forget it” and try to live like a normal kid doing everything the normal kids did including eating whatever I wanted when I wanted. Even took a risk and stopped taking my insulin shots (which landed me in the hospital so that wasn’t a smart idea at all).   It took almost the end of my teenage years for me to finally embrace the life of being a diabetic, but the problem was that my eating habits would stay the same because I spent so many years being wreckless, it’s what I became accustomed to. You read about all of these complications that come with mismanaging your diabetes, but I never had to deal with any of them.  I was young and healthy plus I was too young to think about life past 30. I was just living in the moment and figured I had time to get it together eventually. But damn, as you get older, those complications will creep up on you like a mofo and little by little they will begin to tear you apart because they don’t forget what you’ve done. I know I can’t reverse anything or go back and do things over again like I wish I could, but I do work on taking much better care of myself now and trying to preserve the health I do have at the moment. I’ve got this and will make it happen. Diabetics Unite!! Or something like that. Hey, one thing I’ll always have is my sense of humor.