Keeping it inside

It’s Diabetes Blog Week! Thanks to Karen from Bitter~Sweet Diabetes for coming up with and coordinating this exciting annual event. It’s a great chance to discover other diabetes bloggers from around the world. Here’s my second entry for the week!

I am an open book. I am an over sharer. I have no filter. I frequently blurt out things that people really don’t need to know. ‘I’m just going to have a pee’, I might exclaim, getting up from the table and rushing to the bathroom when really, a simple, ‘Excuse me for a moment,’ would have sufficed. I find ice-breaker exercises at work meetings excruciatingly difficult because I can rarely think of one thing that no one knows about me or something interesting about me that I haven’t shared.

I wish I could say that I only share stories that paint me in a positive light, where I am all elegance and class, and look like I have it all together. But apart from being a complete and utter lie (seriously, the word ‘klutz’ was invented for me), it would give a really false sense of what diabetes is about. So you get the embarrassing and hopeless and ridiculous. You get the stupid and the nonsensical and the repeated mistakes. All of it. I am sorry.

But, having said that, there are things that I do not write about on my blog, or even speak about with others. There actually are parts of living with diabetes that are difficult to write about because I don’t like how they makes me sound.

There are days that diabetes feels overwhelming. Of course I write about that. (Oh, don’t I write about that?!) But what you probably won’t see me write about – and what I rarely talk about – is that sometimes I think that I have been dealt a really lousy hand when it comes to my health.

I don’t compare conditions – you will never hear me say that I have it worse than you, or, conversely, that we should just get over ourselves because it’s only diabetes and it could be worse. (By the way, don’t ever, ever, ever say to someone with diabetes – or anything else for that matter – ‘It could be worse’. Seriously. Just don’t.)

But you know what? There are days – usually after a bout of nasty, recurring lows; or vulgar, unforgiving highs; or this freaking burnout that seems to have moved in permanently – that I do really want to say ‘Enough! It’s not my turn anymore’.

And the reason I don’t share this is because apart from making me sound pathetic, I can’t allow myself to get into the sort of funk where I just feel sorry for myself. It’s too easy to start to believe it; it’s too easy to start to think that I really do have it tough, that it really is unfair.

The truth is, it’s not unfair. It’s just life. We all have crosses to bear, health issues to manage, shitty things that happen. And I don’t want to be the person who focuses on the crap when there is, somewhere in there, some sort of silver lining – often in the shape of a jar of Nutella.