The Manx Den

Oh, God, I know how much of what I write in here is difficult, dealing with negative emotions, or thoughts resulting from moments of sadness, but in all honesty, this page functions as a diary for me. One at times just needs to dispense of thoughts – and for me, it’s at times here.

Back in ’97, around the springtime, my family had just moved from Maryland to Georgia, following a job transfer from department to department for my dad in his career. Transplanting from one school and community was of course difficult at 16, and after that my real connection with friends and any leisure activities was really on the internet.

In one way you might say that from ’93-97 that the net really was my escape – at least, writing, chatting, and various role-playing and games formed the body of my teenage years. I don’t consider life after 16 to be much of a teenagerhood to be honest, because that year I started dealing honestly with having type 1 diabetes. (Anyone who reads this and has diabetes, I am sorry, very sorry. There has been little else so painful and frustrating in my life, at least outside the scope of other folk causing emotional pain.)

The focus of this entry is – well, the state of my mind and body at that time. I had consistent high blood sugar, poor testing habits, and a complete refusal to follow the regimented diet that is the staple treatment for a diabetic. This is how one must live, every day, for the rest of their lives, to handle the disability properly:

• Wake up, prick your finger (ow!), take a shot of mixed insulins, eat a calculated amount of carbohydrates for your breakfast.
• Eat lunch (another calculated amount of carbs) exactly six hours after your morning shot, but NOT before testing your blood sugar (OW!). (You get a false reading if you do – it’ll look too high.)
• Test again at dinnertime (ow.) and take your second shot. Eat the dinner (calculate your carbs. not too much, not too little).
• Test again before bedtime (ow.), eat a tiny snack if anything at all, and then sleep.
• Do this every day for the rest of your life.

Simple, you might say – but friend, if you had to test your blood before ever putting food in your mouth, you would not remember every single time. If you had to inject insulin before every meal, you would be in an even more difficult circumstance – one does not on purpose push a thorn into their flesh on a regular basis. It is plain and simple, for eating is natural, and everything about diabetes is unnatural, when one considers the very life one must lead to deal with it. It’s easier to live without your left hand than to live with diabetes. (Comments welcome. O_o;)

But the real difficulty of it all is in the mind – after all, is that not where all great battles are fought, for folk in western culture? We fight indeterminate things.

I cannot speculate precisely the thought processes and troubles that passed through my father’s mind at that time. We moved away from poor circumstances up north, where my mentally-ill and abusive divorced mother lived, escaping constant harassment (She had shared custody of my sister and I. Can children be owned?), and in fact, we bought a house, for the first ever!.. a real house! Yet the diabetes came with us, and it was just unfolding to my father’s eyes what horrors might lay in wait for his firstborn.

I deem it no laughing matter. If the difficulty of maintaining the illness is bad, the late-age troubles are worse. Kidney failure, rotting of the feet leading to amputation, and eventual blindness are the most striking of what can occur.

Nothing is ever quite so simple in life as it is in paper though, and what perhaps, for the eyes of my dad seemed a relatively easy pattern for me to adopt in everyday life was for myself a hellish ordeal. My stepmother had become a lifeline, caring for me in the first year of diabetes, but a 9-5 work schedule kept dad far from close. We hadn’t had that luxury, but the moments of light in amidst turbulent and awkward years. He took the warnings extremely seriously, and discontinued the house subscription to the internet.

Internet?!

I have to laugh at it now, but honestly at that time it was like a daily spanking. Remember what I wrote at the beginning of this entry? All my friends were on the ‘net. Folk who, actually, in that odd way, a support structure, were removed from my reach, and the daily places where I was able to forget my dilemmas existed no longer.

I had a wash of emotion as I lay in bed this morning, recovering from a low blood sugar that happened in the early hours. The feelings of that month came back to me – the first time ever in my life that I got into a shouting match with my dad, and just how angry and frustrated I became with him. I felt like I was being judged harshly for something I barely could understand and control myself, and that he saw my struggles as if it were as simple as doing homework, walking the dog, or taking out the trash.

I know that dad’s actions were motivated by fear, and the idea that they were actions motivated by love, but for that short time, he evoked the same things my mother had, many times. Unloved.

I wish I knew why these .. emotions stick so deeply into my mind and heart so deeply today as if they happened but a day ago. Sometimes I feel as if I am trapped in a conundrum, or as if I have not changed or grown at all from that time to this. In a few months, all those things will have passed entirely a decade ago. In fact, in February I’ll be going to see my dad again, for the first time in four years. I’ll speak with him face to face, and hopefully forgive in such a way that I won’t find myself crying over them at odd hours in the night, when my diabetes (it is a disability and not an illness) weighs me down.

I forgave my mother a year after I moved – I felt like a whole new person. There’s something about being female that makes these thing somehow important – I carry these traumas like anchors, and if it isn’t discussed and resolved, there’s no freedom from them.

And if you perhaps are a parent, a wife, husband – or even a kid living the reality of diabetes, don’t be afraid or despair.
A diamond is not made in a day, and without the pressure of the earth upon it’s shoulders, it would never form.
Forgive yourself when you swing low or high, and share your burdens with others. You cannot shed the responsibilities of the life before you from your shoulders, but love lightens the burden.

I haven’t had the chance to talk with my dad honestly, in a way that makes me feel as if this stuff is resolved and an understanding reached, but I have forgiven him for what happened – and before too long… Huh. I will have my head and my heart say the same things – everything is alright.