I promise I’ll get off my numerous soapboxes. (After today, I mean.) And this one I suspect is a little bit preaching to the choir, yet my fingers are itching to write this again:
I want a different name.
I’m trying to figure out how to explain this desire. I wonder if natural blondes feel similarly when a bottle- bleached platinum blonde stands next to them and whines about blondes not getting any respect?
Or something. I don’t know.
I just know I want a different name.
I don’t want to ever hear someone ask me if I eat cinnamon because cinnamon is supposed to cure diabetes. Or blueberries or the latest wack-a-fruit found in the Amazon. I want to never see that question on someone’s face that starts with “but you aren’t overweight.” I want my inbox to never contain email about preventing diabetes. Or prediabetes.
Just give me a new name. Please.
Is it because I never had the chance to prevent my diabetes? Or is it because I spend quite a bit of time explaining my disease to others who think it’s the other kind of diabetes? Do I feel like some sort of victim of the media’s mass marketing of the solitary word “diabetes” to mean something that does not apply to me? Or is it that I’m offended by the condescension I read into messages from the American Diabetes Association, who I would have thought understood me? Or am I sad my body destroyed a portion of itself decades ago and can’t believe anyone could be so complacent to knowingly let a similar thing happen in their own body? Am I bitter that I don’t ever have the chance to reverse or improve my diabetes?
Probably a little bit of all of those. I don’t know.
I just know I want a new name.
Not a new type. Not a new term. Not a new prefix or suffix. No anagrams. No new rhyming jingle that works on a bracelet or bumper sticker. Nope, I don’t need any of those.
I just want a new name, and I think I deserve it.
Out of all of the things about living with type one diabetes I deal with every day as I sleep, wake, eat, breathe, work, dream, move, cry, laugh, and think, THIS is the one I think I really would like one hundred percent. No conditions, no complications, no pills, no lab work, no trials. Just a new name.
I’m ready.
Are you?
