When You Don’t Wanna Do It Anymore
Every person with diabetes will know what I mean.
It’s not that you don’t want to do life anymore, it’s that you don’t want to do life with diabetes anymore.
It’s a mindset that draws little empathy from wider communities: “Aww, I get that but you’ve got no choice,” “That really sucks but you just gotta keep your chin up,” “God wouldn’t have given it to you if He knew you couldn’t handle it …”
Bless. They mean well, but they do not understand.
Life with diabetes sometimes isn’t LIFE.
LIFE is a series of moments, but when you have diabetes you can’t enjoy those moments without trying to, without setting yourself up beforehand in order to enjoy those moments ahead:
You gotta bolus now or you’ll feel sick later and won’t find that joke funny—you gotta eat now or you’ll feel sick later and won’t be happy about that good news—you gotta check that blood sugar now because it might be on its way down and that will make you feel sick later and you won’t be able to pay attention in class.
And you certainly can’t enjoy a moment when your body is screaming at you: “Water—now!” “Toilet—now!” “Insulin—now or you’ll die!!!”
When my boyfriend, whom I love endlessly, first asked me out my reading was 18.2 mmol/L. When he asked me, my heart didn’t flutter at his words because it was too busy palpitating at my high blood sugar. My stomach didn’t get butterflies because it was already churning from the ketones that were building up inside of me. When I kissed his cheek, my lips were dry from thirst because my blood was turning acidic. It was a moment in LIFE that I missed because I didn’t try hard enough beforehand to enjoy it.
The thing is, you never know when that next special moment in life is going to happen, and you don’t want to miss it, so you have to try; you have to be trying all of the time to enjoy your moments, the good and the bad, while everyone else seems to manage it so effortlessly.
It’s not fair. It’s exhausting. Your brain is always on and it’s always worried.
The problem is that this is a dismissive feeling. It’s a fleeting thought that will pass because the disease won’t, and because of that, when the feeling does come round, it’s often deeply and intensely felt, then packed down and ignored. Because how silly is that? To want a break from trying to not die?
Well, stuff that. I’m a human being. I feel exhaustion, frustration, despair and I’m allowed to feel that way; I’m well within my rights to want to give up on everything. I’m allowed to wonder what it must be like for people who can wake up in the morning and just eat, and just leave the house and just live, without trying to not become an amputee, or to go blind, or to go into kidney failure, or to have their heart give out. They don’t have to put needles in their fingers and their stomachs, or pump a toxin into their bloodstream that, with a wrong dose, could kill you anyway. They can be curious about their own mortality without being faced with the realities of it every day.
I can’t do that. Even on the days with the perfect readings, I’m still thinking about it, stewing over my health, trying to enjoy my moments but just not being able to stop worrying about the moments ahead…
So what do you do when you don’t wanna do it anymore?
Get angry. Real angry. Let yourself feel. Sit in it for a while and say to yourself, “This is valid. What I feel is real and allowed and I can cry, and I can shake and I can get runny snot on my pajamas because this Breakdown is mine and I can claim it. I can be less than my best for as long as I need. I can call my friends for support, or I can sit here alone and quietly scream. I can do what I want, and I can take all the time I need to let out the dirty feelings sitting inside of me.”
Of course it’s then a matter of remembering that you’re a Queen, to touch base with your support network, and to put that crown back on your head; to get back to living your LIFE WITH DIABETES. There is so much material out there on how to get out of the woods in the light of day, but there’s not much on what to do when you’re in the woods and the sun’s down.
I’m not a psychologist, I’m not a mental health professional, but I am a person with type 1 diabetes in search for someone to tell me that I can feel sad, and that my feelings are real and make sense and that it’s god damn OK to feel not OK.
Read Diabetes Burnout by Mark Heyman, PhD, CDE.
