10 lessons learned from 10 years with Type 1 diabetes

The long journey to loving my health condition.

Diagnosed at 16, I’ve lived through many years of thinking my misfortune was a curse. Turns out it was only a challenge.

1. There’s nothing quite like the middle ground.

Our lives are defined by the successes and the failures but, if anything, these dizzying ups and downs teach us that life is actually at its most enjoyable when we’re cruising. As much as we should be chasing the highs and avoiding the lows, striving for a happy medium that we can be proud of is the key to happiness.

This is when we’re most content, when when we’re able to finally sit back, relax and enjoy life as it comes instead of frantically chasing the next thing, whether that be a paycheck or an orange juice.

2. Your weaknesses might just be your strengths.

Like a glorious butterfly that emerges from a fragile cocoon, we become our most powerful selves once we reckon with the very things that weaken us. Strength and weakness are two sides of the same coin and it’s up to us to flip that sh*t! By confronting and taking ownership of the things that scare and debilitate us, we can use them as fuel for motivation.

If anything, the affliction of being diabetic has made me a much more resilient, determined and disciplined person by teaching me self-restraint, humility and the significance of my actions on my own destiny.

3. Being normal was never cool anyway.

It’s true, all that diabetics want is to be ‘normal’. To fit in and to not be treated differently because of their illness. This is especially true when diagnosed mid-adolescence, as I was. To my younger self I’d say: “Hey. You’re still about 95% normal, if you want to be.”

The truth is, I wouldn’t have wanted to be normal if I wasn’t diabetic anyway!

Think of your condition as an opportunity to start living an authentic existence and to stand out from the chaff, you might as well get used to it. It’ll be worth it.

4. You’re still in the driving seat.

My most helpful maxim for living with diabetes has always been ‘Either you control it or it controls you’. There’s a lot of truth to that.

That thought has given me the resolve to make that extra bit of effort in saying “NO” to the second serving of pasta and saying “NO” to going to bed without fixing my blood sugar levels. Every diabetic should internalize this stoic attitude, at least to begin with, but…

5. Control is fleeting. The best things usually are.

The downside to the above way of thinking is that it makes you obsessive. Whenever something momentarily goes wrong, you rush to remedy it, often acting too soon and tipping the scales too far to the other end. It’s taken me many years to admit that you can’t always be in control, your levels can’t always be in range. And that’s OK.

As mentioned earlier, life’s most significant moments are its ups and downs and we have to be willing to take measured risks if we’re going to live fully.

6. Trust your intuition, listen to your body.

Our modern society places far too much importance on reasoning over feeling, on contemplation over meditation. I’m an over-thinker, always have been. I’ve allowed myself to be paralyzed by doubt and insecurity too many a time. Even now, as a diabetic, I listen to my monitor more than I listen to my symptoms. If I feel fine but I have a low blood sugar, I’ll have a snack only to find myself with a hyper just 30 minutes later. I knew how I felt and, yet, I didn’t trust my gut (pancreas).

Rationalizing is great and all but I believe there’s a desperate need to balance the scales and to trust in what we feel deep down.

7. Your body and health matters more than public opinion.

I’m sure that most diabetics reading this will recall a time when they postponed taking an injection or checking their blood sugar in public, purely out of fear of someone making a fuss about it. Chances are, realistically, no one would say anything worth caring about. Even if they did, why care?

1 in 5 diabetics reported being victims of social stigma. That’s awful but to even consider neglecting your own health for the sake of not offending or of avoiding embarrassment is utter madness.

No one is worth compromising your own health for.

8. No one will care.

I don’t mean to sound like a boo-hoo, “woe is me”-type victim. Quite the opposite. This belief is the precursor to taking ownership of your own life.

Of course your family and friends will care about your health and check in regularly but most won’t. They have their own shit to get on with and that’s fine. There’s no point expecting them to remember every detail of your situation or to even remember your problems at all.

This is an internal struggle and you need to learn to not be dependent on any one else when it comes to dealing with it.

9. You can’t always get what you want.

This one’s a bit of a cliché really. I’ve learned that the universe has a habit of handing you what you need, not what you want.

Whether you know it or not, whether it feels like it or not, the situation that you fall into in life, that you don’t get to choose, is set up to see you learn from it. The greatest life lessons come from overcoming and making the most of the context and the challenges that you’re born into.

Sure, I would’ve liked to be the most popular, attractive guy in high school but guess what? I wasn’t and, guess what? That made me the much more interesting and self-respecting person that I am today.

10. It happened for a reason.

The first question that every diabetic asks upon diagnosis is “Why me?”. No answer will ever be good enough at that moment, nor could it. We want to know why our unique misfortune happened to us and to no one else. It’s easy to start thinking that you, the protagonist of your life, are destined for doom.

A decade on from that fateful diagnosis, I know fully well that, without my uniquely personal misfortune, I wouldn’t be the person that I am today.

You know what? I’m grateful for it and I couldn’t imagine living without it.