Different

In my teenage years and perhaps a bit beyond, I desperately wanted to be different from the sort of bland middle class girl I seemed destined to be. My parents thought that was all I should ever want. My teachers (mostly) didn’t understand why I wasn’t content, although since I did my work and didn’t cause trouble, they pretty much left me alone. And oh, how I longed to be different or special in some way. I was smart, but I wasn’t one of those kids who wrote a publishable novel at 12 or who got a 1600 on their SATs. I was a pretty good dancer, but I was never even going to come close to being a professional ballerina. People liked me, and I was lucky enough to have some truly great friends, but I was shy, and reserved and lacked that sparkle that so many of the people I admired had. At the time, I tried to be different by dressing in black, piercing my ears a couple of extra times, dyeing my hair frequently and skulking about with it hanging in my face, listening to the Cure and Siouxsie & the Banshees and Depeche Mode and Ministry and the Sisters of Mercy and Bauhaus. I was “artistic”. I smoked way too much. I read Camus and Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and graphic novels and watched movies like Repo Man and La Femme Nikita and the Hunger. My friends and I would hang around Dupont Circle and Georgetown, wandering through Commander Salamander and Smash and then we’d con our way in to clubs on alternative music nights, trying to look disaffected and cool. Of course, none of that actually made me different. It made me a teenager who was trying to be different. Perhaps I was a teenager with a slightly wider range of experience than some of my peers, but I don’t think I was ever really the rebel I thought I was.

Now, many years later, when all I really care about is being me rather than making any effort to be different, I find that I am. (Of course I still want to be special. Who doesn’t want to be special? But that’s another story.) Diabetes makes me different. I have to exercise five or six days per week, every week, for the rest of my life. It will always be easier for me to gain weight than it is for other people, and it will always be harder for me to lose weight than it is for other people. I will have to work harder than they do just to get to the same place. I can’t go to Starbucks and get a Venti Latte every day like my friends can. Not that I would, since I don’t like coffee, but I do have to justify having half a tall non-fat chai once per week. I will always have to pay attention to portion size. I will always have to count carbs. I will always have to think harder about the food choices I make than other people do. Never again will I unthinkingly scarf down cookies or donuts or soda. I will probably always have to take medication and check my blood sugar.

My ancestry is mostly Irish and Scottish, with a little German and Dutch thrown in for good measure. In addition to ensuring that I have a practically vampire-like pallor, that apparently also means I am built rather solidly and will do well in situations where food is scarce and hard labor is necessary. I suppose you could look at me and say “Now, there’s a lassie who’ll survive a potato famine.” However, since I live a nice cushy, modern, first world existence, chances are that won’t come up. I certainly hope not, although there is always the remote potential for a zombie invasion (have we learned nothing from World War Z?) Seriously though, I realized this weekend that I have to stop pretending to myself that I’m like everyone else when I’m not. Having diabetes makes me different, and it’s time I faced up to that fact and accepted it.