Day 3 - Embracing Diabetes

In the previous post about Social Stigma I left off with a point of embracing ourselves within diabetes and this is something that I would like to touch upon within this blog.

Embracing yourself when having an illness or a disease can be a difficult thing to do. We will usually define ourselves as being less than or as being a victim to the illness or disease and in this develop a relationship of being less than or being submissive to the illness or disease - so it becomes hard to embrace the disease because it is seen as a burden or an illness or something that is making you less than others or less than your previous self or less than who you would like to be. This is something that can drastically affect not only the relationship with yourself as you start to see yourself differently with having the illness or disease, and it also affects your relationship with the illness or disease, meaning that now that you see as if you're less than the disease which can mean that there is a harbouring of resentment or anger or frustration towards the disease or illness itself. If that is the case then there is certainly going to be issues to walk through in order for self to embrace self within the disease and embrace the disease itself.

When I was first diagnosed, I did not know what to expect out of the disease and I certainly didn't want to face the fact that my life was going to and had to change in order for me to support myself, and this means that I didn't fully embrace the fact that I have diabetes. I still wanted to and tried to live my life as if I didn’t have diabetes, still ate what I wanted and only injected insulin for what I ate, which still meant that my sugars were quite off the wall. I still did not know what my regime or routine should entirely entail - so that allowed me to stay within an ignorance towards diabetes and further not embrace it, I suppose that made it easier to not embrace it = remaining and creating ignorance around diabetes.

Not embracing diabetes did make it difficult for myself to manage my health, and I did end up seeing it as a burden, something that limited my life, something that was detrimental to my life, and because I started to see it that way, because I was comparing it to the past life that I was living, it did make it really hard to embrace it. It affected…rather I allowed it to affect my social life, my love life, my eating patterns, my enjoyment of myself within activities or hobbies or tasks and that I BLAMED on diabetes. Blame here is a key word because within blame I was placing the responsibility for my own enjoyment, for my own love life within diabetes, not seeing or realizing that I was the one in fact creating the limitations on those aspects of my life based on what I wasn't willing to accept within diabetes. Obviously this can and does create such a turmoil within ourselves because all the while we are blaming this `outside` source for all of our issues we are failing to realize and understand the fact that we ourselves are creating that ourselves. We are creating those limitations and those hindrances ourselves yet placing the responsibility for those points upon the disease or illness that we have which is ill-placed responsibility because the responsibility is within/on ourselves.

So diabetes became a burden, became a place where I could place my frustration and anger at my life not working out the way that wanted it to, or stopping me from doing things that I wanted to do. Sure this does and can happen but from experience there is ALWAYS a way around it, planning just must be a bit more meticulous, or we just must push ourselves that much more to do the things that we would like ourselves to do, but first we must embrace diabetes, embrace having diabetes, embrace the fact that we ARE going to live this life with diabetes and only from there can we actually start to embrace ourselves with diabetes and start to decide what and how we are going to live with diabetes, changing it from being a burden or a hindrance and into, well, an embrace.

So what I have aimed to show here is that our illness or disease is only a limitation if we allow it to be, sure there are some physical points that cannot be set aside or just ignored but there are ways to move around it within/as the disease, and when/as we embrace the disease or illness and not demonize it or blame it for creating these limitations or hindrances within our lives and realize that we are the ones who are creating these limitations it becomes easier to embrace, it becomes possible for ourselves to take responsibility for ourselves within the disease or illness and not hold it against ourselves because we're the ones who are holding it against ourselves within the first place.

If you still see diabetes or any other illness within your life as a burden or hindrance then please - realize that it is ourselves that are creating these ideas about the illness or disease towards ourselves and it is OUR responsibility to let go of the ill feelings and/or emotions towards the disease so that we can embrace it, accept it, then move ourselves within our lives, expand ourselves within the disease and create more of a symbiotic relationship with ourselves and the disease or illness.

Thanks