#DBlogWeek ’13 – Day 4 – Coming out of hiding

It’s Diabetes Blog Week again! For the next four days, I’ll be letting other people dictate my blogging topics (I relinquished control this time last year, too). Today I’m supposed to write about accomplishments, big and small. But writing for seven days straight is hard – so instead I’m going to do it in pictures.

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Just two short years ago, I was shy about my diabetes. I kept it to myself and kept all signs of it hidden.

Just two short years ago, none of these images would have been possible.

My grandmother gave me this hat last summer. I wore it everywhere. (Until I accidentally left it outside in the rain and it got covered in mud, then put it in the laundry. It hasn’t been the same since.)

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This bracelet, and the effectiveness of its message, lasted longer than the LIVESTRONG bracelets some of my friends wore.

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After moving to a new neighborhood, I learned that there’s a T1D living just around the corner. I thought it would be a friendly gesture to go with her in the 2011 JDRF walk — a nice “meet the new neighbors” kind of thing. It turned out to mean so much more than that.

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Image from SurfaceFine.com, used with permission.

In 2012, I proudly joined Alecia’s (aka SurfaceFine) Stem Cells, not only raising money and bringing traffic across the Brooklyn Bridge to a temporary halt, but being very vocal in telling my friends and family (and in a larger sense, all of New York) that I’m proudly living with diabetes, even though I’d much rather live without it.

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For years I would only put my pump in a faux-leather cell-phone case that covered the front display so no one could really tell what was on my hip. Just recently, I gave that up and went with the standard-issue holster with buttons that tell the world that I can “B an ESCape ACT” (that’s gotta be a metaphor for something, but I’m not sure what).

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No photo of this encounter was available, so I improvised.

This was at the top of a water slide at Sesame Place (Langhorne, PA) last summer. I realized I had put my sensor on my arm rather than “below-the-belt”. I seriously contemplated not going on the rides, swimming with my shirt on, or pulling the sensor. In the end, I told myself Ahh, screw it. Let people see it and see what happens.

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I thought that putting my diabetes on display would make me increasingly self-conscious.

I was wrong. It made me increasingly self-confident.

To me, that’s an accomplishment.