Indecisive Spoonie

[indecisivespoonie]

Escape

I've used social justice analysis as an escape from the realities of my life for so long. They are so important but I use them as a shield between myself and the world. A way to avoid having to develop interests and a sense of self outside of the identities that come with my structural location. I need to figure out what I love. I need to separate my job from the work I care about and establish my sense of self independent of both.

[indecisivespoonie]

Perfection

I feel so much pressure to do everything perfectly. Not everything I write or do is going to be a master work. Most of them won't be, but I'm never going to write anything if everything I write has to be perfect. I've got to get over myself and do the work. I've got to be willing to be bad even just mediocre.

Why is it so much harder to just okay at things than it is to be actually bad? I think it has something to do with this idea we've created that if we put any effort into something we should be good. Bad can be from lack of effort. Medocre, average feels like a lack of talent. A personal failing. It's not. And I need to move beyond that.

[indecisivespoonie]

Bad Diabetic

I find it remarkably odd and unbelievably horrific that I have a disease you can be "bad at." The number of times I have heard doctors, friends, strangers, refer to someone as being a "bad diabetic" astounds me. I have even had this term used against me. This usually comes down to a few things: inability to tightly control blood sugar at all times, a "high" A1c, not always keeping up with the unbelievable high number of demanding and painful maintainance tasks. What's funny to me is that I have never met a truly "good" diabetic. Those who I've seen come arguably close did not also get to be people. To manage this disease with any success it has to consume you, body and mind.

Because our pancreases have failed, our brains have to do the work of two organs. We dose all our own medication even though we don't have medical degrees. Doses that need to change by the day, by the hour, by the minute. To ask this of someone with nearly any other chronic illness would be unheard of. And yet here we are. We diabetics do it. A remarkable feat particularly when you consider how doing 99 things right doesn't matter to our bodies if we get one thing wrong.

I'm proud of us. We are resiliant, beautiful beings. It's not possible to control every aspect of our existence and no one should demand it of us or demean us for imperfection. There are no bad diabetics, just people who don't understand the challenges of our reality.

I will not let their ignorance define me.

[indecisivespoonie]

It's really odd to me to think about the fact that I've always been sick. I never know if I can say this because I was diagnosed with my first chronic illness when I was a couple months shy of three years old. The thing is though I don't have any strong memories from before that, and the ones that are there may have just been reconstructed from photo albums. My first set of undeniable memories is lying in a hospital bed. I remember the doctor was terrifying. The nurses were nice, I think. There was an odd advertisement on TV for some sort of lawnmowing device. There were tubes in both of my arms. Or hands? My mom was there. My dad was there. He had a can of Pepsi. I walked from one side of the hospital bed to the other and pretended to go "shopping" for the can, retrieve it, and bring it to him. There was a bathroom attached. There was a crib set up for my baby sister. I felt a sick feeling that permeated every cell in my body. I still remember that feeling. I get echos of it to this day.

[indecisivespoonie]

I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with this blog yet, but the advice I've gotten about writing is that you really just have to start doing it if you're ever going to get anywhere so that's what I'm doing.