D-Blog Week 2017: More than Diabetes

Let's wrap up the week by sharing a little more about ourselves, beyond the chronic illness we or our loved ones live with.  Share an interest, hobby, passion, something that is YOU.  If you want to explore how it relates to or helps with diabetes you can.   Or let it be a part of you that is completely separate from diabetes, because there is more to life than just diabetes! 

Whenever I am asked to describe myself, 'diabetic' usually doesn't make it into the list.

Which is kind of strange, because it has and has had a huge impact in shaping who I am today, and likely who I will be tomorrow.

It impacts those things - but it doesn't define them.

I am a Girl Guide. (Yes, still. And this is why. And this, and this, and this, and this, and this.) Guiding has taught me so much and has probably had more of an impact on who I am than anything else. Fifteen years, and still going strong - lifetime membership, here I come.

I am resourceful.

I am courageous.

I can make a difference.

I am CONFIDENT.

I am caring, and kind, and I love deeply and widely.

I knit like nobody's business.

I still sleep with stuffed animals. I love dinosaurs. My room has not ever been redecorated - it still has the hot air balloons and clouds that my parents decorated with when it was a nursery. I still sleep with the duvet that I got when I was two. I still have the duvet cover from when I was less than two. Until recently, I had the same mattress as when I was two.

I really want to own a life-sized, anatomically correct, skeleton model.

I am a nursing student.

I love working with kids.

I love polka dots and bright colours.

I love adventures. I have a persistent and bad case of wanderlust. Last summer I went to Russia and Mongolia just because.

I LOVE trains. So much.

I love music. I love pop songs and Disney soundtracks. No shame. I know every word to Hamilton, and I listen to Taylor Swift at headbanger volume when I'm driving.

I love sunshine. I love driving with my sunroof open and sunglasses on.

I love young adult novels, even though I'm starting to age out of that population.

I can't put stickers on anything. The commitment scares me too much.

I always have coloured pens on me, and my agenda is so colour-coded and so organized it's ridiculous.

There is so much more to me than Type 1. I don't know who I would be if diabetes had never come into my life, but that isn't something that I have to be concerned about. Without diabetes, I could be just as much the person I am. And diabetes may play into some or all of these things, but I am more than my diabetes.

As Kerri so eloquently puts it, diabetes doesn't define me; but it does help explain me. And that's that.