Enough

Today begins the Olympics. I am the only one in my family who really cares about this, especially in winter, so I began my campaign for their enthusiasm (or, frankly, just a bit of tolerance for my own enthusiasm) by using our family movie night to introduce the kids to the movie Cool Runnings. They didn't remember what a bobled race was, or know who the Jamaican bobsled team was, and with both in the news recently, I figured it would be a fun and sneaky way to get them interested.

It worked. At least a little. They laughed. They oohed and ahh-ed and asked a lot of questions as they watched the real footage of the bobsleds hurtling down the tube of ice. We went on the internet and found out more about the original team, and about the team going this year. We looked up the bobsled schedule. They are intrigued.

But while the movie is funny and informative and inspiring, my favorite scene is a quiet one, the night before the big race, where the main character, a young man desperate for a win, confronts his coach who he just discovered had once been disgraced by cheating. "Why?" he asks. "You already had two gold medals." And the coach answers:

"I had to win. You see, I'd made winning my whole life. And when you make winning your whole life, you have to keep on winning... A gold medal is a wonderful thing, but if you're not enough without one, you'll never be enough with one."

That's resonated with me since the first time I watched the movie so many year ago. Not because I've been after gold medals or hoped for the Olympics or anything quite so literal, but because it's really a message for life - for anything we strive for.

Lately I've had a lot of people asking me what I'm working on now or when I'm going to be done with my current novel. A couple of times, when I've answered that I'm working on the same novel I went into my MFA with three years ago, they say, gaped mouth, "Still?" Yes. Still.

Let me be clear: I love these people. I absolutely love that they are asking. I know they are asking because they want to read my next book, because they liked my last one, because they want me to be successful. All of these things in their heart are good.

But I... I can't help but cringe when I hear them, when I have to say, "Yes, I am still writing the same book I was writing three years ago." Because saying that makes me feel like I've failed along the way. I can't deny it. I am a slow writer. I have rewritten this book over nine times because I want to get it just right, and I haven't felt good about that until now. I am distracted by my family, who will always take first place in my time. I have less time now that I am tutoring most days, all day. Even with my best intentions, sometimes at night when I carve a bit of time to work on it, my brain is mush and I just want to watch 30 minutes of TV and go to bed.

And in that late hour, when I stare at the screen, either pouring words onto it or struggling to find the words, I wonder, "Am I enough without this?"

Do I have to keep publishing, keep finishing books, win awards, to be enough?

And while there are times, especially when I am having to say, "Yes, the same book..." that I feel like I am not, most of the time, I am. Because being a writer doesn't make me worthwhile. Having a publishing credit, heck, even having a Pushcart Prize, wouldn't make me more than what I am right now. They are wonderful things, to be sure, but they are not my worth. I don't want to someday say:

"You see, I'd made publishing my whole life. And when you make publishing your whole life, you have to keep on publishing... Having your book published is a wonderful thing, but if you're not enough without it, you'll never be enough with it."

Fill that in with whatever it is that drives you each day.

I'll finish this book. I'll probably write another. And another, I hope. I don't know if anything I write will ever be published, but I'll keep writing, because I love it, because I want to, but not because it gives me any worth.
 
When I watch the Olympics, it is not the gold medals that most draw me. It's the stories. It's the people, their lives, what they've overcome to get there that grab my heart. It is often the underdogs I root for. And sometimes, the fact that the competitors even make it down the track or the hill in one piece, manage to finish a routine even if they fall, makes me tear up. I want each one of them to feel in awe that they are even there.

Sometimes when I'm writing, I feel like that. Without the publishing, without the awards, I'm just writing, and I feel pretty lucky to be doing it.

Things That Matter

 
It's been over a year since I turned in my thesis and unofficially finished grad school. I'm not sure what I thought would happen after that, but this year was not it. I barely had time to breathe after my advisor signed off on my stories before I ended up in a flurry of medical worries. Last December I spent running from doctor to doctor, ultra-sound to MRI to biopsies and, in January, just days after returning from my thesis presentation, surgery.

I might have harbored dreams of surgery recovery that involved the required off-my-feet recoup time being blissful non-stop writing time, but that didn't happen. Instead, I slept. And watched bad TV. I researched some literary magazine and submitted my short stories to a few, and played with a few beginnings of new novels that didn't go anywhere. I job hunted for a job that wasn't there.

I thought I'd have time. I thought all this time I'd spent writing and reading for school would suddenly be open time I could do amazing things with. Turns out, time is like a hole in the sand near the ocean. You can scoop out the water that's in it, but more water will keep pouring in and filling it. 

Finding the time to write became harder the harder writing became. I second guessed everything I wrote. Instead of hearing my own voice, I could only hear the voice of my advisors, whispers that kept my fingers hovering over the keys rather than pummeling out words. With all the demands of the day, was it worth it to stare at a screen for hours on end, only knowing I'd end up deleting it all anyway?

I wrestled a lot with the purpose of writing. Why was I doing it, anyway? While the piles of ideas stacked up in a folder, scraps of characters and plots and themes, none of the stories really mattered in the scheme of life. They were just stories. And I wanted what I wrote to matter.

After graduation ceremonies in June, I returned to a tutoring job with an online tutoring company working with college and grad students on their essays. I love it - best job I've ever had - but it doesn't pay much more than working at fast food and I don't see the same students over and over, necessarily, and I wondered a lot: Am I making any kind of real difference?

I suspect most people at some point ask themselves, Am I doing something that matters?

Stories themselves matter, I know. They matter because they help people see from another point of view. They help people empathize and broaden the scope of their thinking. They provide escape and enjoyment in what might otherwise be a life burdened with demands and worries. Stories let people know they are not alone.

I know all this, and yet, every time I sit to write, I wonder, "Is this worth it? Am I writing something that matters?"

I don't know the answer to that. But I keep writing. I keep at it because I love it. Because I am compelled to. Because I think I have a story to tell, if only to myself.

And when I get frustrated that I have no time to write because I am running my kids to band concerts and helping them with homework and cooking dinner and answering a million questions that fly at me every time I sit to write and cleaning clothes and tutoring some panicky college student through a med school application essay, I think, "This matters. All of this. Investing in people always matters."

The truth is that no matter what we do for a living, what fills the hours of our days, what really matters is how we do what we do, and how that impacts people. People matter.

The Freedom to Read: A year in review

It seems like most of the posts I've written over the past year have been about recovering from the MFA program in some way or another, like going through grad school was some concussive whack to my head and ever since, I'm just trying to figure out how to live a normal life again. It probably sounds that way because, to a great extent, it felt that way. Everything went back to normal, but I was not the same. It wasn't getting the degree so much as just the overwhelming experience of it, the constant "on" of reading and writing that both energized and depleted me. Grad school was like meth: while on it I felt this incredible sense of ability to do huge amounts of things. After it, I crashed.

After turning in my last bibliography, I felt a sense of freedom I hadn't in a long time. I could read anything. Anything I wanted. Good stuff, bad stuff, YA, non-fiction. I found myself not reading books solely because I knew I should read them. I should read this because the author is a friend of a friend? Not reading that! I should read this because all good writers read this? Nope. Not reading that either.

I also had the freedom to not finish whatever I didn't like. Isn't it funny how you never care about a freedom until you don't have it? Before this year, I rarely started a book and didn't finish it. If I started something, I always felt obligated to finish, and always hopeful it would turn out to be better than the first 100 pages. At the very least, I'd be able to say I'd finished it. This year I probably stopped reading more books than I have in the rest of my life combined. I'd read three pages and think, "This is not that good. I'll try something else." I'd read 100 pages and think, "This is not getting any better. I have 25 other books I'm interested in." I have left a slew of discarded stories in my wake this year, and I don't even feel badly about it. 

But the ones I did read and finish... Wow. They are not the kind I'll read and forget. They are the kind that keep popping up in my head, stories and ideas and visuals and feelings they left me with that have become part of me. They are the ones I talk about, even a year later.

Here are some of my faves from this year:

Devil in the White City (Erik Larson). I think about this book all the time. I think about the history of the World Fair, the science of electricity, the horror of a serial killer. The details of it, the imagery it evoked, creep up on me in the weirdest of times. It's the kind of non-fiction that rearranges your brain, changes the way you see the world and think of history.

Flawless (Scott Andrew Selby). I listened to this one on tape as I walked last spring, so I don't know if reading would have the same power, but this one, like Devil in the White City, changed my brain, the way I see the world and history. It is a crime caper, a heist worthy of a movie crammed with stars, but it is real. It happened. And I think about it all the time, even nearly a year later.

Tenth of December (George Saunders). It's hard to believe I'd written off short stories as boring before last year. This is the most unique collection of stories I've ever read, and several of them still haunt me.

The Divergent Series (Veronica Roth). I didn't like it. I couldn't put it down. I thought it was derivative. I couldn't stop thinking about it. I decided if you can't stop thinking about something and can visualize it so completely when you close your eyes, it must be pretty good after all.

Spook (Mary Roach). I read several of her books, but this was my favorite. I can't imagine how I could have laughed more in a book about death. Every high schooler should be required to read her writing. She makes science fascinating and interesting and funny and relevant. I don't love biology, but I couldn't wait to read her book about the digestive system. You can't ask more of an author than that!







The best book I read, though, is one that isn't due to come out until later this year. I've read that one three or four times. It is the kind of fiction I wish I could write.


I don't know what this year will bring. I have about 100 books on my Nook and to-read shelf. I'm trying to be better now about finishing ones I start, mostly because I'm reading my son's AP English reading list with him, and I know he doesn't have the option of putting them down if he doesn't like them. In the last month we've read 1984 and Brave New World together. I love reading the same thing as him so we can talk about them. I've missed the talking-about-books aspect of grad school. :)

So tell me about what you've read this year that sticks out, or what you plan to read in 2014. Anything I should add to my list?

Little Grain of Sand Things

There was a time when New Year's meant a flood of glamorous invitations for my husband and I. You know the kind - the swanky hotels with the pricey dinner and dancing and midnight toasts; the black tie parties, the high-above-the-city or floating-on-the-ocean kind that made my heart yearn for just one night without changing diapers or wearing sweats.

We never went, the cost seeming a bit extravagant or the idea of a babysitter too scary. There was always time for that when the kids were older, I told myself. I shelved the idea with all its glitter and promise onto the same bucket-list-shelf as going to Time's Square to see the ball drop. One day....

What no one says is that the bucket-list is not written in stone. It is as changeable as we are, and while I might feel a twinge of regret for never having seen Times Square on a New Year's Eve, I don't wish to do that now. After an exhausting fall of keeping up with my hectic teens, starting a new job, and escorting my husband to a dozen embassy and business events, I desperately wanted some down time. The idea of standing in the freezing cold for hours on hours crammed like sardines, no bathroom in sight, sounds horrible. By New Year's Eve, I just wanted to stay home next to a fire and spend time with my kids. Honestly, I had no energy for getting all dolled up and dancing and being perky.

But I did want time with my family. Time that wasn't running around, in the car, in a stadium, in an auditorium, in a waiting room. Just time to reconnect and have fun without the pressure of homework and time constraints.

Instead, I got a night of total tech obsessions.

My mother-in-law had gotten a tablet for Christmas, so she enlisted my son to help her set it up and install apps and figure out how to use it. From about seven in the evening to nearly eleven at night, I don't think they looked up once. My father-in-law enlisted my husband to help him with something on his iPad, and they never looked up. My eldest daughter, who'd gone out babysitting earlier, came home around 9:30 and upon seeing the lack of interaction, took out her phone and began to text and search Pinterest. I had a puzzle out and tried to enlist the help of my youngest, but in her excitement and determination to stay up until midnight, she wanted to watch the countdowns. It didn't take much TV hunting to realize New Year's celebrations are not G-rated TV anymore. She settled on a movie.

And I... I worked my puzzle, gave up trying to have conversations, and realized that this would never be one of those nights everyone looked back on and said, "That was a New Year's Eve to remember!"

The thing is, it doesn't take a black-tie affair or a pricey dinner with confetti or - as it seemed on TV, a ton of alcohol - to make a memorable night, but it does take interaction. We could have played some crazy board games, made a huge tent in the living room, built a fire in the pit in our backyard and told ghost stories under the stars. We could have made the sugar cookies we'd planned all month to make, turned our fingers blue and red and green with the icing and sung loudly and off-key to the radio. We could have written down our favorite memory of the year and talked about it. We could have written our biggest failures and fears and tossed them ceremoniously into the fire. Instead, everyone buried their heads in a screen.

I've become more sensitive these days about technology. When I take time off of work and writing to have coffee with a friend and she checks her phone every time it dings and tweets, I feel slighted. When I am in the middle of a conversation with my husband and he picks up his Blackberry to answer an email, I feel devalued. When my kids come home and immediately attach themselves to their technology rather than talk to me, I feel like the housekeeper and cook rather than a mom.

My husband reminds me this goes both ways. That I have, for many years, buried myself in my computer. This is the trap of being a writer and working from home. I have ill-defined work hours and a difficulty in breaking away from a chapter when the writing is going well.

But I'm trying. I've curtailed my facebook use significantly. I rarely blog. I close my computer from the time the kids get home until homework is well underway and we can work together in quiet. I'm not perfect. I still can't just sit and watch a movie with the family without doing something else, but I've begun to substitute crocheting for surfing the web. I'm working on it, anyway.

Our family does a lot of things together. We love being together. We eat dinner most nights all together, and those dinners are full of talking and laughing. We take day trips often, vacation occasionally. We build memories all the time. But in the day-to-day, it is harder to make those memories and easier to get sucked into technology. So this year, I'm making a plan to get myself out from under that, with hopes that my family will want to follow.

I want to sit and listen to my daughter practice guitar. Not just half-listen as I do dishes or work on writing, the way I usually do, but really sit and give her my undivided attention. Sing with her as she plays.  Create a project with my youngest; paint with her or teach her something new. Cook dinner with my kids rather than just for them. I want to build a sand castle with my kids like I did when they were too little to do it themselves. To get out of the beach chair and out from behind my book and get sandy and wet and create a masterpiece. Instead of wasting the day at home, I want to use the kids' teacher workdays to go to a museum in DC we haven't been to before. Replace a few of our Saturday movie nights at home with a game. Turn off my phone when I'm out with the kids, and when they come home. Ask them to turn off theirs in the car. Treat my family's updates on their day with the same interest as I do near-strangers on facebook. Ask more questions. Look at them when they answer. Pray for them. Pray with them.

I don't really have a bucket list. We will probably do enough grand things this year to fill a scrapbook. But what I need to mind is those little grain-of-sand things that fill our hours that either say, "You don't matter much to me," or "You are the most interesting thing in life right now." I love my computer. I love my phone. But in the scheme of things, the people standing in front of me are the ones I value the most. Maybe it's time I showed that.

Hobby Vs. Job: Should there be a distinction in fiction writing?

I wrote this post some time ago, after graduating and floundering a bit with what new project to begin. I never finished it and found it when I was culling my posts this week. 

Every so often I find myself at the beginning again. Like life - and especially this writing thing - is a big circle that just keeps spinning. If it weren't so darn frustrating, I'd look at it as a chance to start fresh, be anything I want to be, write whatever I want, make a new name for myself.

I have nothing locking me into adult literary fiction. I could write serial middle grade. I could write young adult. I could try a mystery series or focus on short stories for a while.

The obvious question is, what do I feel passionate about writing?

Except maybe that isn't the obvious question. Maybe the obvious question is what sells?

Ah, the rub for those of us whose inclinations are not towards sparkly vampires and serial killers and other editor-salivating tomes.

Jolene Perry wrote a blog post last week [okay - a long time ago by now!] about writing the book that is calling you. I completely agreed with her - that one should write the book you feel inside is demanding to be written. You should feel passionate about it. That love shows through, right? Makes for an irresistible book?

Well, maybe I agree that that is the best way to enjoy being a writer.

On the other hand, I keep coming back to the same dilemma every time I round the corner of the circle again... Is writing a hobby or a job for me? Does that distinction matter?

Book Riot had an article Tuesday [again, a few months ago!] titled, "Ten Things You Didn't Know About Authors You Had to Read in High School." One of those things? Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women for the money. And it made her miserable. Yes, you read that right. She didn't want to write Little Women and Eight Cousins and all those other books that made her famous and a favorite author to pass from mother to daughter. She wanted to write "lurid pulp stories of revenge, murder, and adultery." Or, as Book Riot so elegantly says, "smut and violence." But she needed money. So she wrote what sold.

And heavens to Betsy, it made her famous and beloved.

And miserable, according to Book Riot, but let's leave that phrase alone for a minute.

(Also, as an aside, let me muse on the idea that if she lived today, she would probably make much more by writing "slut and violence" than chaste family stories...)

If Alcott had written pulpy indulgent stories, we probably wouldn't have those in our libraries. Her name would never have become known worldwide. I would not have grown up with an entire bookshelf devoted to her books that used to by my mom's. 

The fact is, if we are writing to make a living, to put some money in the bank or shoes on the kids (I love when my family plays any game with dice, my husband always shakes the dice and yells really loudly, "BABY NEEDS NEW SHOES!" before throwing them. Just a random thought...)... if we need to make money, we have two choices:

We can write what sells, or we can sell what we write.

That makes it sound simplistic. We really have to do both. But hopefully you get my drift. Because I wrote like three other paragraphs trying to explain what I meant and then erased them all because - seriously - three paragraphs to explain 12 words?? Ugh!

In short, tons of people go to jobs every day that they hate. Tons of people go to jobs that they love and still have to do things they don't like that much. If writing is a hobby, I have a right to want what I'm writing to be fun and come naturally. But if it's a job - if I want to treat it like a real profession - does that mean I need to let go of seeing it as just what I want to do and the heck with the readers and agents and publishers and what they want? Do I need to try to write what sells?

But then, who the heck knows what sells? Not every big seller is a YA book, although the movie industry might have us believe that.And not every sparkly vampire book is a best-seller.

I don't want to be miserable, of course. I wonder sometimes what made Louisa May Alcott decide being miserable but writing and selling was better than not writing but doing something else that made her happy. And I think in the end, if we write what we hate, most of us would end up with pretty crappy books.

For now, I'm plugging away at a novel that I have no idea whether or not will garner any interest. It won't end up a trilogy or some other big money-making creation. I won't end up writing any others like it. It's a Christian, murder, literary fiction book. Where in the world does that even get shelved?? My biggest fear is not that the writing in my book isn't good enough. It's that the story isn't good enough. That the story I want to tell is just not that interesting to enough people to make it marketable... to an agent, a publisher, to a large enough audience of readers. What if I shoved it more readily into a genre? If I went all full-on Christian with it? Or made it more a crime thriller? What if I crammed that book into something I really don't want it to be?

As many times as I've turned that over in my head, I keep coming back to this: I need to finish this book the way it's screaming to be written, the way I write, and sort the career thing out later. In the meantime, I'll keep stacking those more marketable ideas up in the folder. Maybe one day I'll try my hand at one of those.

The Girl Who Was Hungry

A little less than two years ago, my sister came to visit. We are both type 1 diabetics, and there's a sort of sad hilarity in our conversations at dinner.


"I'm out of reservoirs for my pump. You have one I can borrow? I need tubing, too. And maybe an insertion set if you can spare one."

"How many carbs do you think are on that plate? I bet I can calculate the carbs on this table faster than you."

"Yay! Food with lots of fat! Fat slows the absorption of carbs! Fat is a diabetic's best friend!"

"This entire side of my abdomen is now over-saturated. I've run out of places to put the needles that will still absorb; I think I'm going to have to start sticking the needles in my feet."

"Your pump is purple! That is so cool!"

"Your pump is blue! I love it!"

"Did you hear about that celebrity that was diagnosed with diabetes and claimed it was type 1 and that she cured herself by not eating sugar? Bahahahaha!!!!"

Yeah. It's pretty hilarious. Sometimes it's like a code no one else at the table gets.

Two years ago, though, she pulled out a new drug to shoot up before dinner. Something called Symlin that her endocrinologist told her every T1D should take now. I'd never heard of it.

"What's it for?"

"It makes me feel full. I never felt full before. I used to just stop eating because I saw other people stop."

That was the oddest thing I'd ever heard. She never felt full? How could you not feel full?

After she left, her words stuck in my head. In the afternoons, I realized I was always famished. Like eat a horse and the saddle with it kind of hungry. I'd eat lunch, and feel like I'd eaten nothing. The entire day from lunch to dinner was a struggle not to shove everything in the house into my mouth. I'd been that way for so long, I thought that was normal. Wasn't that everyone's afternoon? Isn't that what vending machines in office buildings are for?

But now I was thinking about it. And I realized that when I put dinner on my plate, it had nothing to do with how hungry I was, but how much I thought a reasonable portion should be. I didn't get seconds most of the time because I didn't think I should. But I rarely left the table full. I mostly left the table thinking I could eat an entire new plate of dinner if someone placed it in front of me. Or not. But probably I could if it were there.

And slowly I realized... I was hungry all the time. And I realized that maybe wasn't how everyone else felt all the time.

It's easy to think we are always at the pinnacle of science and medicine. Sure, we don't have a cure for many diseases, but gosh look how far we've come! Look how much we know! I thought we knew everything about T1D except how to cure it. In reality, we are still, every day, learning things.

Just a decade ago, the thought was to cure T1 diabetes with pancreatic transplants. If diabetes is caused by the pancreas breaking down and not working, you just replace it, right? When the transplanted pancreases also stopped working, some smart scientist discovered that the pancreas doesn't just break down... it is attacked by a person's own immune system. The immune system, for some unknown yet reason, sees the organ as a foreign object and attacks it. Put in another one, and it'll attack that, too. The problem isn't even the pancreas... the problem, it turns out, is the immune system.

In light of this sudden awareness that I was hungry all the time, I began researching this new drug my sister was taking, and I found out something mind-blowing. A scant few years ago, scientists discovered that the pancreas, contrary to popular belief, actually makes TWO hormones... insulin, and something called amylin. This second hormone, amylin, is the hormone that helps your body use the insulin it produces better and more effectively. It keeps the liver from dumping excess sugar into the bloodstream and helps keep the glucose from the digestive track from building up in the blood. Beyond that, though, it slows the digestion of your food and sends the signal to the brain that you feel full.

Mind. Blown.

When type ones lose their beta cells, they not only lose the ability to produce insulin, they lose the amylin as well, and over time, like a frog in cold water set to boiling, you forget what it feels like to feel full. Food goes in the mouth and through the stomach like water, barely stopping to fill it up. You brain doesn't get the signal that your stomach is full. And all that glucose from the food (not just sugar foods, but everything from milk to vegetables have glucose in them) rushes straight into the bloodstream, where the insulin cannot possible work fast enough to catch up.

This is all so complicated. Much more complicated than it sounds, because everything is connected.

Type 1s don't make insulin, so they have to take it in the form of shots (or through a pump). That insulin, over time, makes many diabetics gain weight. (This is controversial, unfortunately. Science has shown it to be true, just ask the NIH, but insulin manufacturers and many doctors and websites resist this idea.) The more weight you have, the more insulin your body tends to need. The more insulin you take, the more weight you gain. It is a vicious circle that I've found screamingly, cryingly, depressingly true.

Add into this not being able to feel like you've gotten enough to eat.

Over the past five years, despite a five-day-a-week gym membership for two years, despite walking miles a day for the others, despite kettlebells and zumba and small-portioned meals, my weight kept going up.

And here... suddenly here is the key.

A synthetic hormone called symlin that mimics your natural amylin, that will make me feel full, slow the glucose into the bloodstream so that the insulin I take has time to work, makes the insulin work better and blocks the liver from dumping glucose so that I take less insulin, so that I can finally lose weight, so that my blood sugars are more even and low.

It sounded like a miracle.

Do I hear angels singing?

I began hounding my endocrinologist. My endocrinologist was frustratingly resistant to symlin. He didn't think it was effective. He didn't think it worked. He thought it was far too expensive. He told me if I wanted to lose weight, I should walk more. He told me my blood sugar averages were fine, even though they'd gone up above the acceptable range. He disregarded my research. He wouldn't listen to my reasons. He shooed me out the door.

This went on for a year. Finally, last May, I parked myself in the chair and said, "I want Symlin. It is my money, and my body. I want the chance to have what your body makes naturally. I think I should have the chance to at least try it, and see if it works. And I'm not leaving until I get it."

So I got a prescription. And a healthy dose of skepticism.

Three months later I went back. I'd cut my insulin use by a whopping 30%. My blood glucose averages (taken by a test called an HbA1C), which had peaked at 7.5 - a whole point above what is considered decent control - were down to a near-non-diabetic 5.5. I'd dropped 17 pounds. My doctor was speechless.

I feel fantastic for the first time in years. I have energy. I am not falling asleep at 2pm every day in the middle of work or struggling to stay awake while driving. I hardly ever have to correct a high blood sugar reading.

I am not hungry. I didn't even remember what not hungry felt like.

I feel like... like me.

Today is World Diabetes Day. It is Type 1 Diabetes Day. We, as type 1s, are suppose to help others know what it is like living with diabetes.

Yes, it is shots. Yes, it is counting carbohydrates and being careful of what we eat. Yes, it is the danger of heart disease and kidney failure and amputations and blindness, but less and less of that as knowledge increases and medicine catches up. Yes, it is pricking my fingers ten times a day to check my blood sugar. It is all of this.

It can be feeling hungry. All the time. Not because we have no self-control. Not because we crave the foods we shouldn't have. It is because we don't have the hormone you have that tells us we are full. It's because we don't have the hormone that let's our stomachs fill up as we are eating.

I may not be a celebrity who is able to somehow, miraculously, reverse the damage done to the pancreas and make myself not diabetic anymore. But a little science on my side goes a long way to making me feel like I am.