This time last year, I had just brought out my book, Your Life Isn't Over ~ It May Have Just Begun!, I had an official launch event scheduled for October (National Diabetes Awareness Month), and I was feeling my oats. Everyday, I did something to promote my new book -- handing out flyers, attending and speaking at health fairs, talking to medical professionals, giving away book after autographed book (that I was paying for) -- and I just knew I was going to help all kinds of people suffering with diabetes. After all, there are thirty million of us and an additional five thousand new cases diagnosed every day! How could I go wrong?
As the weeks and then months went by, however, I slowly but surely realized that most folks that share my condition don't want to think about it and certainly won't pay to read about how they could (let alone need to) change how they are dealing with it -- or not. I shook my head sadly, admitting that I should have expected this disappointment, but the fact is that had I done so, I quite possibly wouldn't have written the book at all. It was a lot of work and cost me money to publish and distribute. And while I was proud of my accomplishment, I didn't have much to show for it.
Few of us will ever run a marathon. Several years ago, I won a 5K run for women in my age range (coming within a hair's breadth of beating the first place male) and I'm still bragging about it. I haven't run competitively since because there's nowhere to go from there but down. And I get older every day that I stay alive.
My point is that running 27 miles is more than most of us are up to, especially as we age. People do it, but it takes a lot of training. It takes a lot of commitment of both time and energy. And it takes the willingness to push through the wall you hit when your body say "no." From what I understand, it's that last factor that really makes the difference. And that's the topic of today's post.
Three weeks ago, I stood in front of an audience of 1900 strangers and admitted that I'm seventy years old. I had to work up to the admission for a month before the event. I had spent some years already telling people, "I'm really, really old." But I couldn't typically find the nerve to casually admit my age in conversations. Except with my doctor. Or a very close friend. And then only in a whisper.
I cracked jokes about it in front of my students in class. "I would tell you how old I am," I'd say, "but I'm afraid they'd come make me retire." Or I'd quip on a different occasion, "I'm perfectly fine with getting old. There's only two options, you know: getting old or getting dead -- and I'm not nearly ready to get dead yet."
I'm no doctor or nurse. In fact, I'm not a trained health professional at all. And I know that each body is different. Some of us are older than others. We represent different genders and body types. Some of us jump out of planes for fun. And some of us can't get out of bed. It's complicated. But I hope that, if I communicate anything at all in these posts, one of the principal messages that comes across is that balance is key to managing diabetes.
When I was diagnosed with our shared condition in February of 2008, all I heard was, "Here's a list of everything you ever loved about food and drink that you can't ever eat or drink again" (a list four feet long) "and here's a list of what you can eat and drink from this point forward" (a list that fit tidily on one page of a 4" x 6" notebook). New information was coming at me so fast, I couldn't possibly catch it all, let alone understand it. So I got some of it confused. And I got some of it wrong. And I missed some of it altogether. Not to mention brushing some of it aside until later -- years later, actually -- because it was complicated and my brains were already stir-fried.
This morning, I'm sitting down to write this post on Monday instead of Sunday (as I usually do) because I was out of town all weekend after a week so hectic that I didn't have time to write it in advance. This caused me to remember that, when I was a kid, my mother used to say ruefully when someone would fail to meet her expectations, "A day late and a dollar short..." But, though I'm a day late, I'm richer than I've ever been. Not richer in money, but richer in spirit.
I try to be upbeat as much as I can. It isn't always easy, but I've been around long enough to have already tried many of the possible responses to life. At one point or another, I've used rage, whining, and liquor; eating until I was stupefied; buying things nobody needs; working until I just couldn't anymore; and throwing myself headfirst off the cliff of a highly questionable romance. None of those methods ever fixed anything for more than a minute. And all of them left me with some kind of negative fallout to deal with. So whether I feel like it or not, I try hard to take the road less traveled: seeing the glass half full (or whatever platitude comes to mind at the time).
But that doesn't change the fact that there are just some things I don't like -- or even hate -- no matter how positive I try to keep my attitude. Today, just to prove I'm not really made of sugar and spice and everything unrealistic, I'm going to admit to five of them.
I was a child of the sixties. By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I had "tuned in" to the social changes that were manifesting themselves all over the country, "dropped out" of mainstream America (leaving a job, a husband, and a walk-in closet of clothing behind), and "turned on" to alternative lifestyles that opened doors to new adventures in consciousness. Soon, I was eating brown rice and veggies, granola and home-baked bread, and salads instead of cheeseburgers, while supplementing my daily food intake with vitamin and herbal supplements. Though I was still smoking cigarettes (and other things) at that point, "dessert" or other excuses to eat sugar appeared only as "treats" on special occasions and it didn't occur to me that it should be otherwise.
When I "dropped back in" five years later, I assimilated into the norms that I realize now were moving our entire culture in an unhealthy direction. We went from fresh to canned to frozen vegetables, from homecooking to fast food, from playing outside to playing in front of a computer or a television monitor, from pushing mowers to riding mowers, from lots of sleep to lots of coffee, and from "treats" on special occasions to pop tarts for breakfast, McDonald's fries (dipped in sugar-laced catsup) and chocolate shakes for lunch, and dessert after dinner that rivaled the size of the meal. More importantly, we grazed all day on "snacks" with little to no food value and lots and lots of carbs.
When we packed on a few extra pounds, we chalked it up to middle-age and bought a larger size. And when diabetes, heart attacks, and strokes became as common as catching a cold, we drowned our anxiety in spoonfuls of Ben & Jerry's New York Super Chunk Fudge ice cream eaten out of the carton while we watched the Late Show on the way to bed.
