Finding motivation

Coping & Support
1

Hi.

I’m a 21 year old college student going into my last year of college. I’ve had diabetes a little over 10 years now and I’m getting to the point where I am barely checking my blood sugar and only bolusing when I eat which is always a guess. I’ve never had an A1C over 10 but I’ve also never had one under 7. My control is slipping through my fingers and I’m getting so terrified for my future and health. I find it so hard to find motivation because I feel “healthy” and look “healthy” to others but I feel as if my body has become accustomed to always running high. Since college, I have gotten so scared of running low, that running high seems like my best option. I just don’t know what to do because I am trying to have a social life, do well in school and get into grad school, exercise and have control of my diabetes. I am always on the constant go and no matter how hard I try, I find myself falling back on trying to do my best at other things like school, exercising and being social/going out with friends.
I know I have people who care about me and love me, but I don’t want to act defeated by this disease and I know that I am ultimately the one in control of my disease and how it plays out.
This is a complete rant and I’ve had it bottled up for so long, but any advice or motivation would be so awesome from someone who understands or is going through the same things.

2

hi @Brookec1996 Brooke,

(I found your post stuck in our system so that’s why it didn’t appear when you wrote it… sorry for the lag)

I had pretty much the same experience, filling my life, quite on purpose, with other things so that I could justify to myself what I was doing. After many years, I have had to realize that life fills up life so there will always be big things, important things, crazy important things, and there will never, ever be a time where “things” slow or calm down a little to make taking care of diabetes “easier”.

In my case, the fear of looking directly at diabetes and what it really means was enough to seek out and dive head first into chaotic madness so I wouldn’t “have the time” to look at it… directly. again, because it is terrifying.

I was stuck like this for about 10 years, and when I couldn’t lie to myself anymore about being busy, I changed. Life didn’t change, I din’t have any more time than I did before, work and other things haven’t stopped, or even slowed down… I changed.

There’s a million stories here about when people finally decided to look directly at diabetes and deal with it… I am not different than anyone, other than taking ownership of wasting those 10 years as opposed to maybe only wasting 9 or 6 or 4,

I’ll comment that the anxiety that you describe about not taking care of yourself and are harming yourself is a really good sign that you are on the verge of deciding to deal with it… it takes indescribable courage to ask directly for help and you did it without being bloodied by time or waiting for some scary complication… you just did it. the way I see it is that courage isn’t always like running into a burning building and saving a kitten, sometimes it’s a thing more like walking right up to the thing that scares you the most and looking right at it, and not back down.

The guy who saved my life said “nobody who does that isn’t scared, they were scared, they just acknowledged the fear and did it anyway”.

for practical advice I would say: get back in touch with a CDE and buy the book “Think Like a Pancreas”. I am sure others will have practical advice as well.

please stay in the forum and talk about it. I wish you luck.