Diabetes isn't something I talk about very often, unless you get me drunk and try and get me to down a sweet shot, when suddenly I can't stop myself going on and on about it until you bugger off and leave me alone to dance badly in peace.
Ever since diagnosis it's been a part of my life that I'd rather ignore apart from when I have to do something about it. If you'd asked me at 17 (when I first got it) whether one day I'd write a mildly self-deprecating blog post about my condition I'd probably have said, well, nothing; I was a very shy 17 year old. But in my head I would have been thinking, "Ha, no mate, not likely. Why are you even talking to me? How can you see my face behind my massive fringe?"
Now, seven years later, I'm still not fancying the idea of writing too much in detail about it because a) it would bore you senseless, and b) I'm no expert; I'd get loads wrong and look foolish. No-one wants that. But I can write, with a little more clarity, about the idea of control. Control is something that is pretty important when it comes to diabetes and more often than I'm proud to admit, I lose it. My blood sugar gets out of hand and either goes ridiculously high or incredibly low, making me fall over and cause a scene. That's happened twice in the past couple of months and you start to lose sympathy from people when you keep passing out. I don't want that reputation, if I can at all avoid it.
For a long time I figured my body would just sort itself out, but that was very naive of me and it played a big part in things getting to where they are now. By pure fluke I've been fairly healthy for the most part, but now fluke won't cut it anymore. I need to take action. When diabetes gets out of hand it makes the rest of my life go out of hand too. My emotions become more difficult to handle, my attention span goes off the boil and my incredible physique falls to pieces. Yes, I just said that. Recently I lost control of a lot of things and that made me panic and forget, for a while, who I really was. Little things were frustrating me, big things like my blood sugar were making me very annoyed and everything else started to look a lot more severe. Oh God, the outside?!? How can I go there?!?
So, in short, I had no control. None at all.
It dawned on me that I had to do something about that. If I can't control myself then what chance have I got of controlling anything else in my life? Naff all, really. If I could take charge of one thing and come to terms with that, maybe everything else would seem easier too. It sounds very simplistic, but simple is all people who choose to do an MA in Creative Writing can really fathom when it comes to the real world.
Today I made the very simple decision to start on a new routine of insulin and try and get things back to a level that makes me happy and, ultimately, keeps me on my feet. But in the lead up to today I made other small changes too, changes that made this one possible. I was unhappy with a number of things, so one by one I put plans in place to make those things better.
Control is a big deal, not just when it comes to your health but when it comes to your life in general. If you start to feel you're losing it then you panic and start sweeping your massive fringe in the opposite direction in the hope that it will be the cure to all your woes. The feeling of getting some of that control back, though, will make you put the comb down straight away. Take command of the things you can have command over and leave the rest to do whatever it wants to do.
It's going to do that anyway, so why worry yourself about it?
