Word of the Week is...

I sat down to jot some ideas down for my blog on Monday. I hadn’t written anything in a week. The first thing that sprang to mind was ‘New Beginnings’. It was the first day of spring on Monday, and after my gran’s funeral that past weekend, it felt like there was finally some closure on what, quite frankly, has been a shitty few months.

But as I sat there, writing about new beginnings and how great everything was going to be now, I felt so disingenuous. It felt a bit like I was writing down New Year’s resolutions; and I don’t do those, because to be honest, I think they’re a load of rubbish.

I scrapped the whole lot. I don’t know – maybe it’ll see the light of day in some new form, some other time. But it wasn’t the way I was really feeling, and I promised to keep this blog honest. So, on that note…

The word of the week is ‘guilt’. For such a long time, guilt has been such a prevalent emotion in my life. And I don’t mean that people in my life are making me feel guilty all the time; I mean that I feel this overwhelming, internal guilt, on pretty much a daily basis.

It’s not just with diabetes. I recently handed my notice in at work, and I felt so guilty I actually wanted to cry. Why?! Surely everyone is out for themselves at work? But I felt terrible. Or I’ll forget to message a friend for a while, and I start to feel so guilty that, instead of just messaging and saying ‘sorry, I’m a bit rubbish’, I’ll just avoid messaging altogether. I’m sure this isn’t just me who does this.

But this blog is about diabetes, and so I’ll talk about this crazy diabetes guilt. I haven’t been well this week - I had a bit of a cold – so, in turn, my sugar levels have been high. Simple, right? Not my fault, right? Wrong (in my head, anyway). I woke up this morning, and my sugars had been high all night. Now, there’s two factors to this; one, the illness that I’ve already mentioned; and two, the fact that I was ASLEEP. Literally unconscious. Sometimes high sugars wake me up, but not last night.

This morning, I woke up to my sugars at 15. I instantly did a correction dosage, and decided not to have breakfast. I couldn’t really have done much more. But as lunchtime started to get closer, and my sugars started to go down to a good level, I started to feel so guilty that I hadn’t used that high blood sugar to go for a run. Never mind the fact that I’ve been ill, and my body probably needs a break; my good old brain was nagging at me again that I’d done something totally wrong.

This past week, I’ve struggled a bit with my readings spiking and falling. I think it has been a mixture of things; a bit of stress, a change in routine, illness, hormones. I’ve really tried, but it really has been a struggle. I thought all this would magically go away with the pump. I wish I could just accept that it’s a lifestyle change, it’ll take some work to get used to, and I’ll get there eventually; but I get so annoyed at myself. I just want things to be perfect, straight away. I don’t remember when I started being like this; I don’t think of myself as a perfectionist by any means, but recently I’ve realized more and more that I need to get things right straight away, or I get so frustrated.

Sorry, back to the point; what I mean to say is that the guilt because of my readings not being in one perfect, unwavering line on my Libre app, is just overwhelming at times.

I’ve even felt guilt about this blog. I started this as a bit of a release; almost like a diary (you know, one of those diaries you share with anyone on the internet who might want to read it?). It was supposed to be something for me, a form of self-care, if you like – but I’ve put pressure on myself to make it something else; put a timeline on when I should post, criticized myself when I’ve thought my ideas aren’t good enough to write about, or my posts are terrible, or long, or boring. Don’t get me wrong, I’m loving doing it; I just can put too much pressure on myself to do it ‘well’, or at a certain time – anyone thing I might actually be a bit of a control freak?!

So anyway, I did a bit of digging into this, and I read that these feelings of guilt can be caused by ‘diabetes distress’. Obviously, I have guilt surrounding pretty much everything, but stick with me here. Diabetics are constantly making decisions. We make these decisions with the best intentions, always, but they don’t always turn out to be the right decisions. Wrong decisions cause feelings of guilt; and there you have it. When you’re making, what, 100 decisions (I wish I was exaggerating, I think I’m actually downplaying this) a day, you’re going to make SO many wrong decisions, and you’re going to feel guilty all the bloody time. And this is going to seep into everything you do.

I looked into how to help with these feelings. Diabetes UK had a few tips;

• ‘Be kind to yourself’ – easier said than done.

• ‘Take a break’ – I wish.

• ‘Talk about how you feel’ – this is a new one for me. For years I didn’t talk about how I felt, and once I started talking, I couldn’t shut up. It’s pretty much the only decent bit of advice. 10/10, would recommend to a fellow diabetic.

• ‘Get support from a healthcare professional’ – please refer to my last post; this is very much hit or miss for me!

Personally, the only thing that ever works for me is talking about it. You can take all the breaks, be nice to yourself, practice all the self-care you want, but I think, without talking about it, it’s so hard to get over it, or move through it.

With that being said, thank you all for making it this far with my ramblings again. If this has helped even one person, diabetic or not, I will feel like I’ve done something right.