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Submitted by Shloka Ramachandran on 25 November 2020

Shloka Ramachandran, diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at 7 years of age, delves into important learnings on how to take care of your physical and emotional health and not fall into self-damaging patterns.

In my experience, when most people think diabetes, they think about sugar. Unless they have diabetes or know a diabetic, they do not think beyond that. I don’t blame them for it! Diabetes is often the butt of many an unfunny joke about something being sweet enough to ‘give you diabetes’ or the like. Like most long-standing stereotypes and assumptions, the lived reality of diabetes is far different and more nuanced than the narrative allows for.

Sixteen years ago, I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. It’s very complicated and very simple, all at once: My pancreas don’t produce any insulin; insulin breaks down complex carbohydrates in the bloodstream and regulate blood sugar levels; I don’t have any insulin; this leads to several consequences that I have to spend my life trying to deal with. They are simple, yet very complicated.

Understanding glucose level

Very simply put, it is exhausting having to explain to your friends and family what’s going on inside your body. Diabetes is an invisible illness; you can look at a person who has diabetes and not know that they’re feeling ill. It is also exhausting wrangling with your own body all the time. A lot of diabetes management is about regulating what’s happening internally inside your body. High blood sugar levels, low blood sugar levels, slower rates of recovery from illnesses and injuries, sudden fatigue: these are all things that every diabetic must grapple with. There are the literal highs and lows of blood sugar levels and the figurative highs and lows that accompany it. High blood sugar brings with it fatigue, dehydration, aches and pains in the body. Low blood sugar brings with it nausea, shakiness, and a risk of fainting from hypoglycaemias. Both are dangerous and need to be dealt with as soon as possible.

I say all of this not to gain sympathy or pity, but to explain the reality of diabetes. As a diabetic, I must be constantly on alert all the time, and I must be equipped to deal with the physical and emotional fall-outs of anything that could happen.

One of the biggest things I had to learn, over the course of my nearly two decades handling this very tricky disease, is how to take care of my emotional health. It’s easy to fall into self-limiting patterns and neglect your emotional well-being when so much of your energy is diverted to taking care of your physical health. Ironically enough, though, taking care of my emotional health has led to me having the mental resources to keep myself physically healthy as well. Here are some of the most important learnings:

1.   Being kind to myself:

All my life, I have felt like I haven’t been doing enough about my illness. Illness is framed as a battle in everyday narratives, something that you must fight and conquer every day. Self-blame comes free with diagnoses of a long-term illness, like the world’s worst ‘buy one get one free’ offer. It was not until I was eighteen or nineteen that I realised just how harsh I was being to myself. If I was sick and missed a day of school, for instance, I would beat myself up with guilt over it: was I sure that I had done everything I could to power through what was going on in my body? Was I even sick at all? Was all of this in my head? Was I not trying hard enough? Why wasn’t I victorious? Slowly, I had to reframe the narrative in my head. Chronic illness comes with good days and bad days. Some days are bad, and whether people believed me or not, I needed to learn to believe myself and trust and listen to my body. Invisible illnesses like diabetes come with everyone doubting you all the time; I didn’t need to add my own voice to the cacophony. It was me and my body, I realised, against the world: I needed to work with my body, not against it, and be kind to myself about bad days.

2.   Learning to ask for – and accept – help

Being kind to myself was only the first step. It was the most important one, but it was just the beginning. Once I stopped feeling guilty and blaming myself for everything that I couldn’t control – including my body – I needed to stop thinking about illness as a battle: me against my body, or me against the world. A lot of the world is unkind about illness. But there will always be people who are not. My family, friends, a few teachers at university: these were people who wanted to help me, if I only told them how. At university when I wasn’t feeling well, I asked a friend if she wouldn’t mind bringing me chocolate from the grocer’s. I asked a professor for a couple of extra days’ extension on an essay. I called my family and told them how I was feeling, when everything got overwhelming. Support systems are important. Nine times out of ten, if someone who cares about you knows about an easy way to help you and make things better, they will want to. Learning to ask for and accepting these small bits of help lessened the emotional burden of my illness.

3.   Finding healthy coping techniques

The final thing I learned was how to cope when everything gets a bit much. A chronic illness is, as the name suggests, chronic, and recurring. A lot of times, the same bad things will happen again and again. Sometimes your support systems, and your own body, will feel as if it isn’t enough. So I’ve learned to channel my feelings about my illness into coping techniques. I like to go on short walks when I’m feeling particularly upset, or to lose myself in writing some poetry, or even just to allow myself to check out of my real life and re-read an old book from my childhood I loved, or watch an episode of a television show that brings me comfort and joy. Sometimes I get out my tarot cards to play with, or even just go and find my dog and play an intense round of fetch. All of these allow me some distance from my problems, and some space away from having to dwell in my sadness. After I return from whatever tiny flight of escapism I have, I feel ready to return to the real world and handle my own mind.

These are all just what worked for me. Other diabetics might have a completely different way of dealing with their emotional health, and I don’t want to invalidate whatever their methods are. What should be unequivocally up for debate, though, is that while diabetes might be physical, it can – and does – affect your mental health, too. Taking care of your physical health should go hand-in-hand with taking care of your emotional health. Both impact one another in a myriad of ways, and we shouldn’t forget that.

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