I’m not sure if it is age, acceptance, or perhaps even an admission of defeat, but these days when I look at my body, I have come to own that it is broken.

I actually say this with a feeling of achievement – I don’t really feel sad about it anymore. I don’t look at it and wish the brokenness away. I don’t want to cry and dream of a day when it will be ‘all better’.

I don’t even really hate what it is anymore, and that is a huge shift from a few years ago.

I have also come to understand – and accept – a lot of those feelings of hopelessness and helplessness were tied up with my fertility, but it has always been more than that.

It has also been about feeling that I am not enough and that my body is not enough. I’m acutely aware of how limiting diabetes can be some days, even if I am the only one who truly knows it. And often, I am the only one who truly knows it. Because my diabetes, by its very nature, has been easy to conceal.

The invisibility of diabetes doesn’t really make sense when it is your body it’s hiding away in. While my diabetes may be shrouded in a cloak of invisibility to everyone else, to me it may as well be covered in glitter, lit by neon and be accompanied by a marching band. There are days it’s all I ever see and all I ever feel.

The confusing thing is that while it has always been so obvious to me, I’ve tried to hide it away from everyone else. Clearly, I don’t mean I’ve tried to hide away the fact that I live with diabetes (exhibits A – Z: this blog/my job/talking endlessly about living with diabetes to anyone who will listen and those who won’t… etc.), but I certainly have frequently tried to hide away how it impacts my daily life.

Some periods in the last (almost) 20 years, diabetes has been harder to hide. Other times, it’s easier. It certainly has been easier since I’ve been Looping because overall, living with diabetes has been easier.

So when something happens that reminds me of just how difficult it can be, it is like a bolt of lightning.

A dodgy sensor on Saturday meant that I wasn’t Looping for most of the day, and that, combined with a shitty chest infection, resulted in some horridly high glucose levels – the highest I’ve seen in over six months. It hit me for six as the limitation of diabetes reared its ugly head. I tried to hide it until the waves of nausea started crashing over me and I took myself home and lay on the couch waiting for it to subside.

But as I dealt with it, I did something I wouldn’t have done in the past. Instead of denying there was anything wrong, or trying to blame anything else I could point my fingers at, I admitted just what it was: it was diabetes.

My broken body is my diabetes body. And it’s all I have. I can’t have one without the other. I may be lucky enough to be able to say that by and large I can manage to keep it in a place I’m happy with. But it is undeniable that there are times I cannot. We can’t always fix what is broken, but we can work around the brokenness. That’s what I do. Every single day.

Broken denim on my broken body.