I’m Still Fighting — Are You?
Today, I am 26.
To most, this is an irrelevant birthday, and a boomer might tell you “it’s all downhill from here.”
(Thanks, Dad.)
While I know and realize health complications tend to increase as you age, since I was 10-years-old, I have realized the blessings there are in every moment, and the importance of minding your health and wellness to prevent this mentality and “doom and gloom” outcome.
Just after turning 10, I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, a chronic autoimmune disease in which your cells don’t produce the insulin you need to function properly. As a result, you become fully insulin-dependent and need it to survive. Insulin is the only therapy for people with type 1 diabetes. There is no cure or other medication.
It’s insulin, period.
When I was first diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, all I knew that it meant was that I might not be able to have ice cream as much. Luckily, I would later figure out this was not the case and that with good management, you could find a balance to allow yourself certain foodie joys. In fact, you sometimes require sugars as a person with type 1 diabetes to treat low blood sugar levels and get back to a stable range. (Mine is between 75–130.)
A few weeks into my diagnosis, after going through a period of denial and self-pity, I realized that if I was to truly live well with this disease, I would have to grab it by the horns instead of fighting it. This change in perception was mostly triggered by my little sister promptly asking my dad one afternoon in our living room hallway as I was standing alongside him longingly, “Why is Julia acting like a baby?”
Ouch.
I was still in my self-pity phase and letting others baby me because they felt the same numbness. Luckily, this shout-out became an awakening. Though, at the time, I felt competitive to prove her wrong, her words reshaped into much more meaningful lessons as I grew.
Thank you, Sarah.
While there was a period in my teenage years in which I resented my condition and neglected it, I gradually overcame this phase and learned in my young adulthood that accepting and embracing your flaws is the best way to live a happy and fulfilling life. Working against them is working against yourself. With all the fights we have as people with type 1 diabetes, one we can’t have is with ourselves. We must willingly give the compassion we give to others to ourselves. Not baby ourselves, but be patient, kind, diligent, resilient, and caring.
In most cases, you can select the problems you want…
If you’re in an unhappy relationship, you can choose to work on it and remedy what’s broken, or leave it and work on problems in a new relationship. If you’re in an unhappy work environment, you can choose to work on it, or leave it and look for a new job and work on problems there.
Life will always be full of problems. They are unavoidable, but what makes the difference is how we handle the problems in front of us.
We must ask ourselves, “Are these problems we want to manage?”
In the case of T1D, we don’t have a choice, so we must ask ourselves instead, “Is this something I can manage?”
Hell, yes. Hell, yes we can.
We can never give up on ourselves. Whatever we are going through, we are worth working on. We are worth fighting every battle — internally with our bodies, with insurance companies, with doctors — whatever the situation may be. There are a lot of times we are fighting for our lives as people with T1D, and as dramatic as this claim may seem to someone not closely related to the condition, this is the everyday for many people managing it or for those who love someone with it.
We constantly have to think ahead about where our next vial of insulin will come from, if we’ll be able to afford it, adapt and pivot if our health insurance changes with work, consider the implications T1D will have with pregnancy, relationships, friendships, and work environments, ensure that our blood sugar levels are okay to eat, sleep, and exercise without consequence, and much, much more.
When you have this condition, it walks next to your individuality, though it does not define you. It’s a part of you, like anything else, but it’s just one part — it’s not the whole thing.
Some days, it’s easier than others to be positive and manage well. As with anything else. You will have days where all you can muster is, “that sucks” or “this sucks,” and so long as you don’t stay in those feelings long, but work through them, that’s okay. That is a healthy coping ideology.
For people with type 1 diabetes, it’s moment-to-moment. Every consideration revolves around type 1 diabetes, though most people I’ve met who’ve had the condition for as long as I have or longer have also realized that it’s best to work with the disease and not against it as to enable your control and prevent it from controlling you — your health, your wellbeing, your happiness.
You can be happy, no matter your circumstances. You can, and you should, and you will so long as you act towards this vision you see for yourself.
It may be difficult to get there. It never came easy for anyone, but to feel this way, you must work hard and get through the rolling hills to find stable ground. Life is not linear. It’s full of ups and downs, but it’s how you move through those ups and downs instead of around them in avoidance that matters most.
You have to be ready to make the change in perception. You have to be ready to fight for yourself, to love yourself wholly, to accept yourself undeniably.
So long as you shape your mentality into positivity, nothing stands in your way. It’s the belief you can’t do something that holds you back. It’s the belief that you’re unworthy that keeps you from seeing your worth. Life is simple, but it’s just not easy.
We are worth working on in every moment. This isn’t to sound vein, but to anyone who is struggling to manage any condition, I beg you to look at yourself as a valuable human being, not to be entitled or self-indulgent, but self-embracing and self-accepting.
The care you show yourself echoes onto how you give and receive care from others. How you treat yourself shows others how to treat you.
At 75, I hope to be writing to you in much the same way, feeling the same, having grown and developed in new and exciting ways I can’t imagine now, restoring and renewing my hope in positive thinking as I go through the hills alongside the family I aspire to build in love and learning.
Life will be difficult, but it will be worth the love. It will be worth the fight.
So, are you ready? Will you fight for you?
