What’s in a Name?
I have a new diagnosis – diabetes, specifically LADA, latent autoimmune diabetes in adults. It’s one more piece of my overall diagnosis of autoimmune polyendocrine syndrome type 2, the same disease that already claimed my adrenals, thyroid, and ovaries. There’s no cure, and I will eventually have to take insulin all the time for the rest of my life. The new label, "diabetes," didn’t really sink in until I was filling out forms for a new doctor and had to check "yes" next to the diabetes box. At that moment, I felt a mixture of relief and anxiety. Relief that the thing that was causing the new symptoms had been given a name and was at least treatable if not curable, but also anxiety about the toll it would eventually take on my physical health. Experience tells me that there is more processing to come, but I can’t go there yet. My heart isn’t quite ready. I know that grief, anger, and frustration will swirl together and wash over me, and I will throw myself one hell of a pity party. But when the party’s over, I will accept my new reality and let hope in, no matter what the future brings. Then, I can figure out how to be a person with diabetes, not a diabetic. Each time a new facet of my disease shows up, I have to summon my resilience and dig up the courage to continue to embrace what is still good in my life and remind myself that I’m more than my disease.
After that jolt, I moved on to the following sets of boxes: marital status, gender, race, and ethnicity. After I finished checking the boxes, I started to wonder about the many labels we give ourselves or that others impose on us. Labels are a necessary shorthand, but as we identify more closely with one label, we forget to nurture the other parts of ourselves because we are so focused on being a husband, a wife, a mother, a father, a nurse, a sick person, etc.
I’ve been shrinking myself to fit in boxes that are too small my whole life. One of those was labeled “Teacher.” Everybody thinks they know what teachers are like because they went to school. Usually, people asked, “Which grade?” I guess that mattered because they often pictured me as the teacher they had in that grade. They had an image of me that mirrored those memories. My children attended the school where I taught, and it was sometimes difficult for the other mothers to relate to me outside my role as a teacher. Some even called me Mrs. Prather instead of Michelle. When we are children, we don’t think of our teachers as having a life outside of school, and we couldn’t possibly imagine them having families, hobbies, faults, or talents beyond teaching. I tacitly agreed to that perception by trying to live up to the role of the perfect teacher. If I had been braver and hadn’t neglected the parts of myself other than teacher, wife, and mother, it might have been easier to navigate life when some of those roles changed or disappeared altogether when I got sick. I had to figure out who I was without those labels and tend to the parts of myself that had fallen fallow. I didn’t want to check the box labeled “Sick Person.” But now I realize and accept that living with LACI, the acronym I use for life-altering chronic illness, is a part of me, and the box is already checked, but it's not a cage. I can check it along with other boxes: friend who listens, woman who laughs out loud at corny jokes and puns, dog lover, writer, wonderer.
Which boxes have you checked?
What parts of yourself have you neglected?
