Is there such a thing as being too relatable?  How much does it backfire when someone tries just a little or really even a whole lot to tell us that they can totally relate to what we are going through?  Understanding & that “me too” feeling is amazing yet that thing beyond can be a big time turn off to say the least.  What am I getting at?  Have you experienced those times when you run into someone who vehemently tells you exactly what living with type 1 diabetes is like even though they do not live with it themselves & they do not live with someone who has it either.  In no way am I referring to the kind-hearted folks who attempt to learn & have more of an understanding of type 1 or another “365” challenge & try to be more compassionate as a result of what they have learned.  Let’s call a spade a spade.  What I am really getting at is those times when we run into a type of either know it all behaving person or someone who has learned a few things & insists that they get it & then go on to tell us exactly what our lives are like living with type 1 or another “365” challenge.  Personally I cannot put just one word on how that rubs me the wrong way.  Worse than that though is the situation beyond that where another person has ulterior motives to try to appear genuinely understanding.  That is not okay on any level.  The phrase, “I know exactly what you mean” coming from someone not living with a chronic disease is kind of bizarre.  My tolerance for people choosing to fake behaviours is profoundly low.   It is okay with me for someone to not be able to relate & admit it & say something like “that must really stink.”  Prior to 7 years ago I had no idea what living life with type 1 diabetes was like. When type 1 or another “365” health challenge would be described my position was to admit that I did not have a clue what these diseases were like yet my heart went out to the people living with these illnesses.  Even living with type 1 myself I would never dream of painting all people living with type 1 with the same brush.  We each live with type 1 with different experiences.  The only common denominator that I would say with zeal is that every single person living with type 1 diabetes that I have come across has had big time determination & the spirit of warriors.  Are there some pretty brutal days living with type 1?  You better believe that there are as far as I am concerned.  Am I growing stronger every single day as a direct result of living with type 1?  Absolutely yes.  It does not make type 1 less of a beast.  It is the choice to fight for our lives literally every day that brings indescribable strength.  And man the gratitude for a few hours off for good blood sugar behaviours is amazing.  What I am referring to are those times when my blood sugars land in the heavenly 5-8 zone & I feel physically & emotionally great big time.  The level of energy that I have when my blood sugars are in that zone is beyond great.  My thankfulness for those spurts of feeling really well is huge.  Prior to 7 years ago I realize that I took what I considered to be my then perfect health totally for granted.  Now my attitude is that I will be the healthiest type 1 that I can be & live life to the fullest sticking my tongue out at the type 1 beast as often as possible.

Type 1 has as I have mentioned before found that voice inside of me that previously had been one of don’t rock the boat & replaced that with rock the world with the truth instead.  It can be strange in life how a once profoundly shy girl can find herself as an adult being a strong voice of advocation in so many settings.  Just this morning I had a frustrating discussion with a small box thinker who was spouting off policy & ignoring the fact that the whole reason for the discussion was being completely dismissed.  If you are a parent you will get what I mean when I say that when the adults in a situation that significantly impacts the well being of a child take the easy way out it is not okay, not okay, not okay.  That once shy girl once upon a time would have accepted decisions of others in the spirit of not rocking the boat.  Thank goodness there are no traces left of that mentality within me!  Wrong is wrong & it did not make me popular this morning respectfully advocating for one of our children yet that is never the point.  When something significantly impacts our children in a negative way & the writing is boldly on the wall that this is the case, can we afford to sit quietly & not rock the boat.  We each answer this question for ourselves through our actions.  To make a long story short, I am not done with this advocation in this situation & I know I cannot even reason with someone to do the right thing but I will not give up.  Our children know that their Mom will stand in front of wrong every time whether I am tired, have low blood sugar or high blood sugars.  Incidentially, during this recent conversation with the individual taking the easy way out at the expense of children, I was in a low blood sugar  & I was still able to make a cohert case for right.  Take that type 1 in the rising above the low blood sugars too.  This type 1 Mom on a mission for a child is unstoppable I believe.  As an aside it sure cheeses some people off when you point out logically, respectfully, and intelligently that they are doing the wrong thing & give them the opportunity to do the right thing & they don’t take it.  Type 1 provided me with that warrior spirit & I will use every ounce of that for a good cause or as many as humanly possible in my lifetime.  For those who do not have a voice, we can choose to come forward to advocate in truth for them.  How cool is that!  There is that spirit of “we do not give up” within the type 1 community.  I love that big time!

This aside leads beautifully into the segauway that I was going to share with you next.  For a couple of decades or more, I have had a less than delicate saying that has served me well in practice.  The saying is that I can see nonsense like shit on glass.  Please forgive the indelicate wording but it is what it is.  It is a neat super power right?  It means that the majority of the time I can sense whether someone is giving me a line of bull or if words & actions are in alignment or more to the point whether someone is behaving in a faker way.  Recently, I had an individual tell me that they totally understood type 1, all about all the different insulin pumps & more & how lucky I am that I don’t have to worry about thinking about diabetes at all since I have an insulin pump.  Hmm, I thought to myself, this is not an episode of “The Magic schoolbus” so what the heck!  You know those moments where you have to tell yourself over & over again to pause & take that long, deep breath?  Yes, this was one of those times.  It was time to see if there was “brown stuff” on the glass so to speak.  Yes, there was my gut was telling me…screaming at me really.  In any case, I did decide to tell the person that does not have type 1 diabetes & does not live with anyone with diabetes that I am not proficient with all other insulin pumps but that I feel that I have an excellent understanding of the pump that has been attached to me for just over 5 years.  Then I asked the person how they arrived at the opinion that if we have an insulin pump that we can shut off our brains & that the insulin pump will magically make our blood sugars perfect.  The answer I got was a bunch of gobblygook.  So yes, the glass was dirty big time.  The thing is though that some people even when they logically realize that they are not making sense would rather stick with their stance than admit that they do not know something.  Yikes!  In that case, I decided to change the topic far away from the topic of anything diabetes related because there is no way I am choosing to die on the dirty glass so to speak going around & around in circles with someone making an irrational argument because they are too delicate to admit to being wrong.  Advocating is one thing but wasting my breath is another thing so I do not choose to die on every hill.  That leaves me with full energy to advocate & fight for what truly matters I have found.

To share a humourous experience that I had in second year university, you will see the dirty glass analogy in full play again.  There are some teachers & professors that leave incredible impressions upon us in life right?  I have had the honour to cross paths with many teachers & professors who have a profound calling to teach.  They are the outliers…the out of the box, do the right thing no matter what the culture is promoting, the go the extra mile to show an example of what hard work & doing your best work looks like, the ones that raise the bar because they know you can reach it…they see the gifts within the student & they strive to draw these gifts out fully.  I have had some of these teachers & most especially professors myself & our sons have had several of these teachers with callings too.  Post secondary school can be a pretty spectacular experience in that you finally get to take most of the courses that you want to take.  You are working towards your field of passion at long last.  There are some mandatory courses to meet degree requirements yet there are still lots of classes that we get to choose.  You know I love choices.  In second year university I found a course in English authors of absurdity.  I will tell you that to this day I have no idea what Kurt Vonnegut was talking about in most of his books yet it was so enjoyable reading authors that I would have otherwise not have crossed paths with.  I have never been a person that tries to phd (pile it higher & deeper) so if I did not understand what an author was getting at I did not start digging in the brown stuff.  Do you know people that do dig in the brown stuff though?  Sometimes they get away with it for a while.  Sometimes it backfires.  The professor of this English class was a gentleman by the name of Dr. McCormick.  He had a thick Scottish accent & looked every bit the part of a Scotsman & he had an intolerance for brown nosers.  He was forever announcing to our class whenever gifted speakers & authors were going to be at the university.  He would always follow up the announcement with “and starving students, there will be free coffee & donuts so you should go for that reason alone!”  He was quite a hoot.  When he wrote his first novel just after I graduated, my husband purchased the book for me & he & his buddy went over to Professor McCormick’s office & had him sign my book.  My husband’s friend was carrying his physics textbook so Dr. McCormick told him to hand that over & he put an absurd inscription in that too.  He was tremendously brilliant & eccentric & the real deal. 

Okay, back to second year English class.  After reading Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party”, Dr. McCormick did what he always did & asked us a barrage of questions to turn our brains on & then he set them upside down most times.  There was this boy in our class that always sat in the front roll & seemed to have his right arm welded upwards because he could not resist being in the spotlight & commenting on everything every single class.  He never learned though that this was not the class to try to bs in.  Dr. McCormick asked the class what the point to this novel was & this boy with the permanent hand in the air gave a real brown stuff on glass answer.  Warrior style, Dr. McCormick crushed his answer & called the boy out on his digging in the brown stuff.  I thought I was going to pass out when the professor said, “hey, brown haired, quiet girl that we have not heard from all term in the pink, what do you think.” (That was me).  All that came to mind was “it was entertaining.”  Then I prepared myself for the intellectual falling on my sword to come.  Instead of this though, I received from the professor, “exactly.”  He went on to say that sometimes in life a book is only just that, a book for entertainment & isn’t that reason enough at times.  Along those lines, I recently happened upon a quote by the painter Monet.  He stated that he detested it when people insisted that they understood his art when all they needed to do was to simply enjoy it.  He was likely referring to the people specifically that were trying to be over-relatable & that lead to the brown stuff on the glass.

That is what type 1 is like to me…it is what it is.  Do the people that I cross paths with that don’t have type 1 need to be over-relatable to the point where I see the brown stuff on the glass?  Type 1 is not entertaining obviously but it just is what it is. Just keeping it simple & honest is what wins my trust & heart every time.  We are each beautiful originals so what gets in my craw will not necessarily be the same for you.  What do we value though?  My list would include:  honesty, genuineness, compassion, care, love, and clean glass!

My heart’s hope for you is that you do not come across too much of the brown stuff on glass.  Instead, my hope is that you surround yourself with the real deal.

Smiles & Feisty love, Saundie :)

May the glass stay clean for you this week & next week's story is "Echoes, Noise & Shadows."    :D

How great is it that there are countless mentors, inspirational people, role models & people that we admire!  There may be aspects of the behaviours of some of these people that we may choose to emulate.  Are there times where you find yourself asking yourself if there is something that you want to develop or grow within yourself?  This is a continuous journey for me.  A couple of years ago I made a concerted effort to try to grow more in the virtues.  Okay, so when I got to the virtue of patience I really found myself proceeding very slowly.  I had my own plan complete with completion dates to get through the virtues.  If only life were as simple as us doing just that.  Realizing quickly that the over achiever in me was setting me up for a big fail I decided that working on growing in the virtues was still a great thing for me to pursue yet the dates that I had placed on this was not only unrealistic but also perhaps kind of silly.  I am really not in charge of the dates on this one.  The actions & the effort, yes, I am responsible for yet beyond that, I surrender the dates to exactly who is in charge of that.  I know that patience is not my strong suit by any stretch of the imagination so you better believe that I did not begin with that one.  Instead, I put it at the mid-way point on my growth journey as far as the virtues of:  love, joy, peace, gentleness, patience, goodness, faithfulness & self-control go.  I like to call that the sandwich approach to life.  I like to start with something that is already naturally there, then work into the middle with something that I need a huge amount of work on & then end with things that are not too much of a stretch because I am wired for a happy ending so I always build one into my life daily.

My personal viewpoint is that if I want to get better at anything in life then I am going to need some training from someone who is already good at the thing I am working on.  As I threw myself full force into growing in each of the virtues, a face or several faces even would come into perfect focus in my mind.  These would be the faces of people that I was certain had mastered the virtue I was working on.  I would look to these people as guides either simply by watching them…their examples in action of the virtue and/or I would ask them questions.  Once I got to the mid-point or the filling to the sandwich as I like to call it, there it was, patience.  Yikes, I knew this was a biggy for me.  To sit quietly & ask myself how I am doing with patience & answer with raw honesty was humbling.  Instantly, I knew I was in for a good kind of challenge because patience is the virtue that I have struggled with throughout life.  Not to blame the culture of today, but rather to be mindful is helpful to me I have found.  What I am getting at is that it is a fast paced culture.  Two years ago our family was still on dial up internet.  And the only “i” device that I owned were 2 “iballs”up until 2 years ago as well.  Sure, I had my old trusty flip phone that I referred to as “Rusty” the classic.  Then our family entered into the new millennium albeit 12 years late.  It did not take long though for me to find that I was even more impatient than ever before even when we got onto high speed internet & I updated my cell at long last & wait times were incrementally improved from the years prior.  There was this type of mentality within me that wanted to do even more things at once even faster & it was a real pain in the neck when our computer would glitch and line ups got on my nerves like never before.  The faster we could move due to modern conveniences, the more impatient I found myself until I started noticing this trend within me & that my state of peacefulness had been replaced with a stressed out version of myself that I was not going to continue to allow.  Once I identify problems in my life, I go into creative problem solving.  And one of the solutions is that I set limits for myself on how much time I will allow myself to be on my cell phone or pc each day.  Some days I give myself a full day time out from internet.  And I miss it & start kind of “jonesing” for it but too much of anything can be addictive I have found.  Going out of balance is so easy unless I am mindful of this daily.  Today a lovely lady pointed out to me that if we each took the steps to really look after ourselves we would be a lot better off.  She provided an example of a person who looks after his health, spirit & soul daily with incredible care.  He then shares the best of himself with others & is incredibly peaceful as a result of the daily choices that he makes.  He has a series of daily good habits & he has a great outlook on life & I have not seen him stressed out in the 7 years that I have known him.  There is no way that he has a less bumpy life than most yet it is in how he looks at things & deals with stress that keeps him calm & peaceful even in the midst of chaos & strife. 

I will share with you that I am still “stuck” on patience because I know that I have not grown enough in that area to “graduate” to working on the next virtue.  And I have been stuck now on patience for about 2 years.  When I first began my working harder on patience, I saw the humour in the fact that I decided that I would begin this endeavor by purchasing a recommended book on achieving more patience in daily life.  The book was on backorder & then was discontinued & to make a long story short, I finally managed to purchase a second hand copy six months later.  The day that I began trying to read it, I was at the blood lab at 7:30am in the morning waiting in a line behind about 35 people to get a fasting blood sugar lab for my A1C done.  Each time that I would start to read a sentence, the gentleman in front of me kept asking me questions & engaging me in conversation.  After a few tries at reading I realized that my motto is “people before things” & that this gentleman wanted to talk & this was evident so it was time to show him a human level of respect & put the book away & listen to him instead.  I was very glad that I did since he had so many interesting stories to share & we ended up having a very Dear person in common (my Godfather) & we ended up having quite a hoot together while we both waited almost an hour for our turn at the lab.  While I have made significant progress with patience over the past couple of years, I am truthful with myself that I still have a long way to go since I don’t naturally practice patience consistently.  Traffic is a great example.  Being in a traffic jam brings out the impatience big time in me.  I realize that I am making a choice to get frustrated versus choosing something better for myself like putting a cd in & listening to something wonderful instead & focusing on that or something else.  Dealing with people who take a minimalistic approach to life derails my patience progress big time.  The list is still pretty long so I will stop there.  Suffice to say that I realistically see myself working on greater patience for a very long time & that is okay & I do see some wee bits of progress.  That is better to have snail pace progress than not to bother with growth at all & see no progress or even regression.  That is just the way I look at it. 

 I find that I have made some progress in the area of patience with living my life with type 1 diabetes.  Beeping noises, having to check my blood sugars at certain times, going to the blood lab and the waiting for A1C results for a week or two, waiting for low blood sugars to come back up & high blood sugars to go back down & all the countless frustrations of type 1 are things that for the most part I have experienced significant progress in as far as patience is concerned thankfully.  That took effort though just like doing all the things that we need to do to take care of type 1 also takes enormous effort.  Progress has been made in my own way & I look forward to being able to see in time & with effort greater attitudes of taking even type 1 in stride.  In the meantime, it is what it is & that is okay because I am trying.

Another thing that has helped me immensely in staying committed to making progress with patience is the quiet time that I schedule in for myself at least once a week.  Not only has that helped with patience, but it has inadvertently helped with every single one of the virtues.  I realize that I am not going to reach any level of perfection in any of the virtues or even most things in life.  Instead, I look at it as an approach towards a messy perfection or roughly right approach.  One of the things that I like to have on hand to quieten my mind since it loves to race in a zillion directions left to its own tendencies is to have a book on hand that corrals my thoughts & helps me to focus on quiet presence.  I love books so I always rotate the book that is being used at the beginning of some quiet time.  Today, I picked up a lovely book that I have had for about a year.  I have not yet made it all the way through the book but it is not a race towards patience of course.  It is the opposite right?  Today, I read day 7 out of “Set Your Heart Free.”  The book is cool in that you receive a centering thought for the morning to start the day off with & then there is just one short sentence that pertains to the hours throughout the day & then there is a short summary at the end of the day before bed.  I will admit that I am pretty good about reading & digesting the morning thought & I usually think about it throughout the day but I fall down on usually getting to the before bed summary.  I am most definitely a morning person so by bedtime I am in near zombie state & would generally fall asleep mid sentence if I read in any other posture than standing straight up.  So 2 out of 3 is better than 0 out of 3 is my attitude.  One day I will get to 3 out of 3 but I do not beat myself up over the 2 out of 3 currently because I need to also have patience with myself.

Have you asked yourself how it is going for you where the patience towards yourself goes?  Do you find you have oodles more patience for everyone else & a minisule amount for yourself?  That is what I found.  I decided to work on changing that too.  If type 1 is beating up on my body or I am having a roller coaster blood sugar ride that I did not ask to have, I try my best to be a little more gentle with myself.  It is a work in progress & that’s okay too…at least it is progress a little at a time.

We are each beautiful originals so what works for me will not necessarily be the answer for you & vice versa & that is okay.  Today’s thought as outlined in the guiding though in the book I mentioned for today is essentially to live the purpose each one of us was placed upon the earth to live.  It goes on to basically say that there is no use being a perfect carbon copy of someone else but rather to be a fully passionate & engaged you or me.  You cannot serve my purpose & I cannot serve yours & that is a great thing.  So yes for sure I love to look to mentors, inspirational examples & people who are shining in any given virtue.  Then I take that example & give it my messy “me” ness & live it out as me instead of trying to be a carbon copy of someone else.  We each put our own paint brush on life & we each are a piece of a huge & beautiful puzzle in many ways.  How great is that!  The throughout the day thought in the book today is simple, “Be who you are!”  The idea is that we are being encouraged to be exactly ourselves & to fully embrace & let our talents bloom to share in the beautiful human puzzle.

My heart’s hope for you is that no matter what you are working towards growing in that you bring your “you” ness with you big time.  The world needs that!  The world needs you!

Smiles,

Saundie :)

Whether it is messy or imperfect patience or some other goal that we have set, it is the genuine trying that counts don't you think?  May your week ahead be filled with wee steps forward in the direction that you are focusing on in your life...the little steps add up over time.  Next week's story is "It is What it is."  :)

Have you noticed that there are shining examples of both visible & “invisible” heroes that received the honour of becoming inspirations to millions of people through climbing profound obstacles?  Have you also had the experience of being in the company of people who choose to find flaws in absolutely everything that they think, talk about or are a part of?  What sets these 2 diverse groups of people apart?  Both groups may be going through challenges yet one group chooses to take that difficulty & bring about some form of goodness from it.  I applaud champions who choose to do something amazing, kind & loving with his or her profound suffering.  And honestly, when it comes to folks who see the glass empty no matter what, even I find that I have a point at which I choose to spend less time in their company because they have drained their glass & mine too.  Have you too had that experience?  I am not about enabling misery in the form of encouraging endless complaining for the sake of complaining.  For sure, I have an endless amount of compassion & I hang in there in situations that many people declare they would have run away from ions ago.  At some point though if a person seems to thrive on staying in chosen drama as a form of negative attention seeking behaviour no matter how many life rings I give them, then I have come to realize that it is a situation that is not going to change unless the other person decides to change.  Do we sometimes end up being stuck in quick sand with a person who is mean spirited or chaos junkies  whether life is going well for them otherwise?  We each answer that question for ourselves.  When I answer that question I realize that I have come a long way & have a long way to go.  There have been times when I have found myself in situations where an individual will be so caught up in continuing personal misery that they just want to pull me into the quick sand of misery with them & that they have no intention of making an effort to change anything for the better.  They do want company though.  I have had to ask myself when this happens if I am truly doing this person a favour by being a companion to the quicksand misery.  If the person wants help & is showing through his or her actions that they are trying to get out of the situation then that is one thing & it is quite another if the person is in essence using another person in the spirit that “misery loves company” or worse as a form of enabling endless drama.  Please do not get me wrong…I am in no way referring to situations where someone is going through depression.  That is entirely different.  Instead, I am referring to people who try to keep others caught up in their negative cycles of drama for the sake of selfishness & mean-spiritedness.  On the flip side of things, courage& joy, deserve company too.  And people who truly need true help most definitely deserve company beyond words.

If you have type 1 & you hear someone who has pretty great health go on & on about how horrible of a cold that they have, it may at times be difficult to muster up much sympathy for that person’s situation.  You & I may be thinking that of course it is no fun for anyone to get a cold yet there are so many things that are more difficult than a simple cold & after all an end does come to the cold as well.  There are folks out there that battle things way beyond colds & when those people get a cold on top of this, then it can become a near emergency.  Admittedly, my patience is not high for complaints about colds if that is all that the person has to deal with.  I felt this way before I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes & the feeling has been magnified for the last almost 7 years living with diabetes.  My belief is that I can choose to let anything in life crush me or I can lift the weight of the struggle in a way that it strengthens me.  It is a daily decision.  It is hard.  It is some days an uphill battle.  It is difficult & it is right & will always be the choice that I make daily no matter what.  Are you right there beside me on that attitude?

I don’t want to leave a legacy of being a moaner & groaner but rather a person of strength, humour, sensitivity, compassion & love.  It is as simple as that.  Some days I will ask myself the question of what if today were my last day on earth?  I ask myself how I would live it & how I would treat those around me, what would matter & what would be complete nonsense.  We each wake up each morning & we just have each breath of that day & nothing is guaranteed.  That is a sobering thought. 

Recently, I had one of the most precious moments with our oldest son right after I had gotten home.  As a mom I have wondered sometimes how the heck to connect with our teenaged son.  He is a creative, humourous, incredibly intelligent young man.  Trying to engage him in conversation many times over the past couple of years has been a challenge.  Between the grunts or one word answers, I wondered if I was going about this new phase of teenage-hood parenting correctly.(whatever that would look like)  And basically I thought that I am not very good at connecting with teenagers.  A couple of months ago I was reminded vividly that often as parents we forget that our children are always watching us.  They watch us in our homes, with others, in different situations and in ways that we do not realize.  They hear what we say & they really really see what we are doing.  As I walked into our home last night, our oldest son looked me in the eye with such presence & said that he wanted to share something with me right away.  He explained that his class had been assigned a writing piece on the topic of who their life’s hero is.  He handed the completed writing piece to me & my eyes filled with tears.  He wrote about his mom & how he gets his strength from a mom who is strong, always there for him cheering him on in an eccentrically enthusiastic way & who chooses to win even on the bad days with diabetes.  There are no words to describe how loving this writing piece is & a treasure of the heart.  My heart’s hope is that our sons are strengthened & know always that no matter what happens in their lives that they can choose strength vs defeat.  That’s my hope for all the Dear Hearts in my life & for you too.

My thoughts go to 2 examples of people who showed strength with their life stories with incredible struggles.  Both of these individuals have changed our world for the beautiful.  One gentleman you will be very aware of & the other, you may or may not have heard of.  There is a gigantic list of inspirational champions to choose from.  Today though, let’s think about these 2 heroes.  Both heroes fought for something way beyond themselves, for gifts that the world would have always.  Each man looked at his struggle with champions’ eyes.  You will be very familiar with Nelson Mandela & his story.  Do you find that you love his quotes & that they are timeless?  He took his eyes off of himself & onto the mission to free others.  While he was imprisoned, he did not let his mind become a prisoner, nor did he ever lose hope & he prepared himself to climb the barriers & obstacles as full of hope on the first day of imprisonment until his mission was finally realized.  He was a hero of strength, courage & selflessness.  Through his choices, he changed the future in a beautiful way.  A second gentleman that lived his mission with strength & courage was Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan.  This hero of a man was also imprisoned physically.  Spiritually, he remained free for the 13 years that his physical incarceration lasted.  I often find myself reminding myself that I am blessed to live in a geographic area that celebrates freedom…of speech, of political & religious freedoms.  This was not the case when Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan was travelling to become a new Bishop to Saigon Vietnam in 1975.  The people of Vietnam were hungry for spiritual encouragement we are taught through the book, “The Road of Hope.”  Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan found ways to write to the Vietnamese people & fill them with hope & love while he was in prison.  He took his eyes off of himself always & placed them on the good of the people of his land.  He was imprisoned physically yet spiritually free, filled with hope & continued to provide spiritual nourishment to the people.  Contained in one of his writings, he said, “the most impenetrable barrier is not a fortress or an electric fence, it is indifference.”  We sometimes hear the complaints of people for the sake of complaining & other times statements or actions of indifference.  It may be that both of these things take away strength if we let it.  Indifference can be as insidious as thinking or saying that yes there is a problem that needs attention & action yet someone else can figure it out because we have our own problems.  It is easy to cave in on ourselves any day of the week & we may say to ourselves that if we are going through a struggle big or small that we have the right to not reach out to others.  My experience is though that when I choose to reach out in love to someone else & take my eyes off of myself that I can literally feel the strength building up.  Then I use this strength to build more strength.  A mind stretching quote by Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan that has strengthened me many times over is, “Peace depends on victory, and victory depends on struggle.  If you desire peace, you will have to fight continuously.”  When I think of peace, I also think of joy & meaning.  If we value peace then we may find that the answer to the question we may ask ourselves why it is that we are going through a struggle may be that we are strong.  We don’t have a struggle I believe due to anything that we did or did not do in the case of type 1 diabetes.  We do not however ever need to choose to be prisoners of type 1.  If it becomes a road towards further strength in other areas in our lives that we give away then we win every time.  I cannot imagine being physically imprisoned & there is no way that I would choose to allow myself to imprison myself with thoughts that steal my strength away from me.  My heart’s hope is that you find this to be true for you as well.

As I think of the folks out there that for reasons only known to them that are choosing to stay in the quick sand of complaining for the sake of complaining while enjoying great health, I find myself coming up with a new response.  I choose to drop the exasperation or biting my tongue or the “come on” that is in the bubble captain above my head at times.  Instead, I will either hand folks that have chosen to remain caved in on themselves even with countless offers of help, something new.  The plan is to either answer with a description of either Nelson Mandela, Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan or Viktor Frankl.  These were all gentleman who were all physically imprisoned yet indescribably free.  They struggled, they made a beautiful difference in the world.  They each chose strength.

My heart’s hope for you is that you have a huge number of profoundly impactful & beautiful champions who take their struggles, turn them into strength & that strength goes out into the world.  Better still, may that person of strength be you!

Smiles, Saundie :)

May you cross paths with champions all week long.  Next Monday's writing is "You Be You & I Will Be Me."  :D

What did some of your very first friends teach you about life that you have taken along for your whole life’s journey?  Was your first friend a family member or someone else?  Did he or she teach you something by word alone or with action too?  To share with you, one of my first friends was my Grandpa Brown.  The gem he taught me through action was that good natured humour is on the top 10 list.  We could get all fancy here & start thinking about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as we build our own top 10 list of things most needed or valued by each of us along life’s journey.  I won’t go down that road though because I like to try to take myself lightly so the list that I am referring to for the journey will be in that spirit.  What would be on your top 10 list or even a top 3 list?  Mine would be: faith, family, friends, love, compassion, the golden rule, doing the next right thing, helping one another with no expectation, walks in nature, books, tea and humour!  Okay, so if my Dear Heart engineer husband were here right now he would be quick to point out that yes, there are actually 12 on my top 10 list & the truth is that I could easily go on & on well towards 100 of the things that have & will always sustain me & mean the most to me on the whole of my life’s journey.

Humour is second only to insulin for medicine in my life.  I do not intend to ever give up humour & I sure hope that no one gets to that point.  It is not that there is something funny in every single situation.  Some situations in life are frankly devastating yet at some point, I find that I need to get away from the intensity of even that with humour.  It would not be laughing at that situation but rather taking a break & putting on a dvd of a favourite stand up comic or movie that breaks that intensity at least for a bit of time.  Left to my own natural tendencies, I could fall into being a little too intense because I feel things big time intensely.  If someone else is crying, the lump in my throat is there in no time too & the tears too whether I know the person or not.  To live permanently with a heightened sensitive response though is a wee bit exhausting I find at times.  Humour is like a healthy vacation for me I find & I take that “vacation” often & on purpose.  One of my first friends, my Dear Heart grandpa could see early on that I was going to need to be taught the value of humour.  He had that natural good natured humour that made him a fast friend to countless people in the community that I grew up in.  His humour influenced me for a lifetime in the short time that I was honoured to love him on earth.  Love lasts absolutely forever & so do the lessons that he shared with me growing up.  Grandpa had a love of being outdoors, was down to earth, had a genuine & good natured laugh & sense of humour & he treated people with the golden rule always.  He was a big time character.  He & my Gran owned a number of apple orchards as well as a small hand built by Grandpa fruit stand.  That was my first job…the fruit stand.  One of the things that I really loved to do from a very young age was bake.  At the fruit stand, I got to bake homemade apple pies in a very old oven that the smoke would come bellowing out of & you could see the evidence of the pies baking from the highway.  The smell was irresistible so once people came into the stand to purchase apples, to leave without a homemade pie would have taken profound discipline.  Grandpa loved homemade pie & knew that they would all be sold by the end of the day.  He would telephone me at the stand at least once a week & it is difficult to describe this but it was like he was giving me a wink by telephone about holding back a pie.  The first time he called, he said to me, “Saundie, you are not going to sell every pie today, right?”  I understood.  After that, all he would say was, “pie?”  Grandma would get so perturbed by the one pie left over & question me at length about what happened.  Grandpa & I did not let her in on the pie wink.  When we saw one another we would just laugh about the inside pie understanding.  Grandpa loved to fish & camp.  He naturally appreciated nature.  He had the Eastern Canada down to earth nature & he was big time loved (and still is big time loved). This is my wink to you now Grandpa all the way to heaven ;)   And he could laugh & it was contagious so I thankfully caught my sense of humour & ability to have a medicinal, cheek hurting (in a good way), belly laugh…the kind that has your eyes watering & you think nothing of it. 

Okay, I could talk about my Grandpa Brown all day & all night long yet I will leave it there for now & return back to the spun out on salt idea.  Speaking of humour, have you heard of the comedy group, “Kids in the Hall?”  My husband & I use to watch them on tv when we were first married & laugh our butts off.  There is one episode at least that for some odd reason my husband over the years has never seen.  He tells me each time (in good fun) when I refer to a scene out of that episode that I have hallucinated it. The scene I am referencing right now is the one where a businessman is sitting in a very boring meeting or conference & you can hear his thoughts in the sketch.  He is saying to himself, “don’t put salt in your eyes.”  Then the phrase keeps going through his mind until it starts coming out as “put salt in your eyes, put salt in your eyes…”  Then he does & of course then starts bellowing out in pain.  It sounds a little lame as I describe it but when you watch it, it is just funny.  With this sketch in mind, I have found several times over the years that when I feel especially confused & spun around in circles (usually due to conflicting information) that the” don’t put salt in your eyes, put salt in your eyes” scene from this show comes back to me.  It is a really good thing too because it is the comic relief needed to help me so often to take a step back & look at things in a different way & figure it all out.   

Are there intersections where East meets West as far as medical diagnosis or treatments are concerned?  That is a good question.  In my current experience, I think there is an intersection although it is just my opinion…one not especially shared by the folks working along with me on the Western medicine approach.  That’s okay.  I don’t even need full agreement…but just had really needed something to make more sense so that I could get to a diagnosis & subsequent resolution & finally to the present of having days where I feel better than I had in nearly 4 years with the abdomen pain mystery.  On the way to the figuring out what was going on, many potential diagnoses have been eliminated.  I found the wait for the diagnosis to be so lengthy.  In any case, the intersection that I did see happen was confusing & yet strangely encouraging.  I had a follow-up with my G.I. specialist & the scary stuff has been ruled out so this was great news.   I had continued to see a Naturopath for the past year.  Within one week of one another, I received results pointing to potential food intolerances or allergies from the G.I. specialist as well as results from a food allergens test I had done through my Naturopath.  Each doctor has provided a list of foods that I need to eliminate & then potentially reintroduce back over time.  The challenge is that the lists do not match up too much so if I exclude every food on both lists, then there will be so little left to eat that it is surprising to me.  And where one list says eat almonds, the other one says do not eat them at all.  The one spot that the 2 lists intersect is in the area of dairy but not totally there either.  It goes on & on with the conflicting information so it kind of gave me a headache & I felt spun around & the “salt in the eyes” so to speak. To top it all off, I received a third list of foods to eliminate due to the continuing psoriasis that just persists on & on.  Yet more foods had to be eliminated & menu planning has become a challenge for sure.    I decided to take a step back & really look into both lists for a bit & come up with a common sense plan that I felt may work for me.  It was ultimately up to me to figure it out & although it was a bit confusing, I am not one to back away from a challenge.    I feel jubilant as it has now been 5 weeks of avoiding the foods on the lists & I feel amazing!    Ah, at last, the pain & nausea that had been driving me up the wall for 4 years has subsided.  The cool thing is that because of life with type 1 over the past 7 years, I have built up even more of an attitude of “I am going to be as healthy within any diagnosis & live life with enthusiasm no matter what!”  And I have & will continue to do things that are not easy to get to feeling as well as I can.  Type 1 is a marathon that kind of prepared me for whatever struggles along life’s journey I face I really believe.

So, thankfully I am back to a state of “don’t put salt in your eyes” again but it is easy for any of us to feel spun around at times.  We can feel this way health wise & in other parts of life.  We don’t have to keep being spun around though & that is the great news.  We are able instead to take a step back to clear the salt away.  And thank-you Dear Heart Grandpa Brown for instilling that sense of humour that is the first step that I need to get my perspective back.

My heart’s hope for you is that no matter what confusion or spinning around that comes into your life that you are able to take a step back & stay clear of the “salt in your eyes!”  And may you always have someone that reminds you daily that love absolutely lasts forever no matter how long they share time with us on earth.  Wink, wink ;);)

Smiles, Saundie  :D

May your list of 10 things that bring joy to your life include at least 12 things too!  Next Monday's sharing is yet to be written...

Are there quotes or messages that especially fit for you?  I love quotes & uplifting messages & subscribe to several sources for these gems daily.  Don’t you find that it is the easiest thing in the world to wake up in a certain mood with or without a reason that is obvious & have it at least initially affect our attitude?  If the initial attitude that we have in the morning is a negative one, do we hang on to it or not?  We each answer that question for ourselves.  What works for me is in the knowing that I can discard a bad attitude at any time during the day by my own decision.  For sure there are situations that are challenging yet I try very diligently not to fall prey to a woe is me kind of state of mind.  There is a warrior within each one of us I believe.  It is incredible to see & listen to the struggles that many people are experiencing & yet they never give up.  That is the spirit of a true warrior in my mind.  I am not talking about putting on a faker mentality & going out into the world in an almost denial state.  Instead, it is the people that are struggling, feel those struggles fully, are honest about them & they go ahead & find a way to give encouragement to others & love.  They do something loving with the struggle & become selfless by choice.  Most of us will know people like this & find them to be amazing.

This morning one very long quote that landed in my email inbox spoke about the behaviour of reducing ourselves within the world by choice in an attempt to fit in or not to be a burden or bother to anyone else.  Have you found yourself in this behaviour before?  Until about a decade ago that is pretty much where my actions landed me.  As I have shared before, my nature left unchecked gravitates towards being a people pleaser.  If you remember Rex the dinosaur from the movie, “Toy Story”, you may laugh too when he says the line, “I don’t like confrontation.”  My name literally means “peace maker.”  In the perfect world that lives only in my mind, everyone would get along by implementing the golden rule.  Thankfully we each have free will to choose to do exactly that.  There is the choice though as well to not live with the golden rule in mind & action.  If we get hurt as a result of someone else’s decision not to follow the golden rule, what do we do with that & about that?  Do you know any or maybe even several people who will not apologize period?  To me there is almost not even a word that properly describes that situation especially if we tell the person that what they did or said hurt us deeply & the other person still chooses to not apologize or be in the least remorseful.  I personally do not intend on becoming less than as a result of another person’s choices.  I know how it feels to shrink away from expressing my own hurt feelings due to the people pleaser peace maker within me.  Thankfully, over a decade ago I made a decision that I was finished with becoming smaller, less me or a Gumby-spined person.  It was one of the best decisions that I have made I have come to realize.  Along with this came the need to find a way to deal with hurtful behaviours that are received in life.  It was really something important to get a grip on because as I have shared previously, God gave me a profoundly sentimental & sensitive heart so I feel everything big time. 

Most of us will be very familiar with the saying, “it is important to learn to forgive for the apology never received.”  More & more I am learning that we do not have an accurate idea of what is going on inside our own physical bodies, in some cases our families, to an extent our schools, workplaces, and the lives of others around us.  The saying of “each person is fighting a tough battle” is very likely profoundly true.  In so many instances we have little to no idea at all what our human family around us are going through.  We are each usually going through something though that we determine whether we will let reduce us, define us or strengthen us.  We will each leave some sort of legacy.  The great news is that we get to decide by our attitudes, and actions what our own legacy will be to a large degree.  I remember taking the “7 Habits” course many years ago & the participants each being provided with time in nature to answer an essay question about what we see our legacy being.  Even then I thought, “hmnn, this is not it so far” because I was such a “yes man” type of person & described time & again as nice & sweet.  There is nothing wrong with that yet I knew there was more & that if I went ahead & let myself stand up tall & be exactly myself & have a voice & even confront situations that were not right or okay that I would get closer to living fully.  One of the vital things for me along the way was learning to get better & better at accepting apologies I never received.  Let’s face it, it is easy to get beaten up emotionally along the way.  Once type 1 came into my life 7 years ago, I was at least glad that I was firmly on my feet as far as knowing what mattered most to me & what hills to die on even though I still prefer peace.  The accepting an apology never received is a work in progress truthfully.  I am making progress though & plan to continue.  It is coming in handy with life with type 1 as well.  Have you too had countless experiences of people saying insensitive things (and inaccurate for that matter) about what you can & cannot do or have with type 1 diabetes?  How about if you have told the other person that you found that action or statement hurtful & they give a snide remark instead of an apology?  In life & with type 1 there are likely going to be those times when people say or do the most offensive, insensitive things & do not have the grace, good judgment, intuition, humility or courage to apologize.  Or how about if you are left out of an activity altogether because someone makes a decision that you are not well enough to participate since you have an illness.  I feel totally like a 5 year old when that happens.  Then I go ahead & work on forgiving the person & accepting the unreceived apology.  Let’s face it, there just may not be enough life times to wait for some apologies…some will never come.  That is a decision that some people make & we just cannot get inside that other person’s head to figure out why that would be his or her choice sometimes & more than that, we cannot make someone do anything that they do not want to do.  All I know is that I refuse to become reduced by someone else’s decision to be mean spirited or to develop a bitter attitude of the world as a result.  I firmly believe that there is profound beauty & goodness & I will see more of that if I keep that picture in my mind & live life from that point.  It may also seem counterintuitive but I have also come to realize that a self governor is needed to provide a mini time out for my reactions to be on track with what matters most.  In other words, if someone ticks us off, what would our natural unchecked response be?  Would it be fair to say that it would be to hurt back?  Whether the answer is “yes” or “no” to that question, the main thing is that we have the full ability to choose our words & actions in every single circumstance.  How big time excellent is that!  Here’s the counterintuitive part…when someone hurts me with words or actions, I choose to forgive them with or without an apology & to not return hurt for hurt.  If I return hurt for hurt, the poisonous cycle continues & I do not want that to be a part of how I live my life.  None of this is easy yet it is worth it to me.  It does not mean that I will shrink from telling the truth or accept a perpetual onslaught of mean-spiritedness from anyone.  I will forgive though & in the situations where the other person chooses to continue his or her hurtful behaviours, I will do the forgiving from a distance.  We are each beautiful originals so we each find our own way of not being reduced to such smallness that we practically become invisible & less & less ourselves.  The world after all needs each & every one of us. 

A quote that I am very fond of is by Mother Theresa & essentially tells us that rather than bothering someone who is going through a struggle by asking them what we can do for them that we ought to figure out how to be compassionate & caring & act on that instead.  In some cases I have found that fits with life with type 1.  Many times I have heard people say, “oh I wish there were something that I could do to help you to feel better.”  The thing is that there are things that would really help but I first use my gut to determine how genuine the statement really is.  Sometimes people feel the need to just say something.  And sometimes people want to seem like they would like to help yet are not prepared to put any actions behind the words.  Those situations in my mind are instances of empty words.  Please don’t get me wrong, there are times when people really do want to help yet have not used his or her creative juices to act on coming from a good heart.  Another quote by Mother Theresa that fits is “do small things with great love.”  If someone puts in love & care in a heartfelt way, I feel so loved.  Here’s a small, big thing…receiving a meal or baked good with all the carb per serving written on the meal. (Or even the measurements & list of ingredients so that we can do the math).  How thoughtful is that!  Or how about a hand written letter from the heart?  Or a phone call to say I care or was thinking of you?  Or some flowers picked from our own garden & given to someone who is having a tough day?  As a wee aside, my heart was filled to the top with love received recently from friends in exactly these ways.  One friend quietly went out into her garden while I was sharing tea with her at her home & picked a large, gorgeous bunch of my favorite flowers (hydrangeas), tied a lovely bow on them & gave them to me with a smile.  It touched my heart so big time big!  There are some dear friends that have this way of placing the loveliest of telephone calls throughout the year & they called recently.  They are these incredible surprises from the heart that mean more than words could possibly describe.  There is an infinite list of small, big things that would make a difference.  The point is that it makes a huge difference when we & others put some thought into doing something caring using our big hearts & creative abilities.  To think of doing something thoughtful & then failing to act on it is such a waste in my mind.  Acting on the kindness could have sent out such a far reaching ripple of care that then went on again & again.  Choices to do something kind do matter.  As a humourous aside, the ingenuine offer to help someone out is illustrated in the movie, “Christmas Vacation” in the scene where Clark’s Dad offers to help him out with the Christmas lights by saying, “if you need any help, I will be upstairs asleep.”  Let’s not any of us be like Clark’s Dad in life seriously though.  That’s the thing about type 1 though.  Don’t you find that living with this beast of a disease provides us with such a magnitude to think outside the box especially when it comes for caring for others.  Dealing with the minute to minute demands of type 1 teaches us so much.  If we turn our struggle into reaching out to others in creative ways of care then that is in my mind a pretty big time beautiful part of our legacy.

I too believe that we are each struggling with something whether it is a physical challenge, emotional struggle, spiritual wrestling, family challenges, school struggles, friendship difficulties and more.  If we believe this then what are we doing about & with this knowledge?  It is a choice to follow the golden rule, do the opposite or do nothing at all.  This becomes a part of our individual life stories too.  We do not know what goes on to a large degree within our own bodies physiologically or other people’s nor within the minds & homes of others.  Do some people look like they are “living the dream?”  If they do, please get to know them better & when you do, there is sure to be a struggle of some type.  We get to choose how to treat others & how we live.  My choice is feisty love.  Yours will be all your own.  Let’s not live life on the fence though in the neutral zone. 

It must be the sociologist in me that notices & wonders about people around me.  For about 3 or 4 years now, there has been a lady who Monday through Friday during the school year ends up running behind her son in the mornings.  The son is late for school every day even though they are always running.  What is it that is making the little boy & his mom need to run to school every day?  It looks like a less than peaceful start to the day.  We do not know what goes on in others homes though so I could not begin to guess what potential struggles they go through just to get that little boy to school each day.  And the same is true for most people in one way or another.  We cannot see inside of one another…sometimes past a bright smile & what would appear to be a person who “has it made” from our perception.  That could be the exact person who is on their way to visit a sick family member or friend or has an illness themselves even though they “don’t look sick.”  I am not fond of assumptions in general but one that I have decided to agree with is that everyone is living some type of struggle.  Should knowing that change the way we treat one another if nothing else has?  My heart hopes so.

My heart’s hope for you is that you give & receive compassion, care and love always in little, big ways.  And don’t forget to include yourself in gentle, compassionate, loving acts of kindness too!

Smiles,

Saundie :)

May your week ahead be filled with beautiful small, big moments that touch your heart.  And please create moments like this for others.  Next Monday's sharing is "Spun Out With the Salt."  (with a special smile & nod to my Dear Heart Grandpa Brown) xo

Life can be a balancing act in many ways don’t you find?  It is very likely safe to say that is true for most people whether they are living with type 1 or another “365” health challenge or in perfect health.  We each have 24 beautiful hours each day to live & hopefully reach out in a way that will make a positive difference to those around us.  You & I may share that if we are feeling especially well on a given day that we can & do accomplish an impressive amount of taking on the world, getting stuff done & reaching out to others.  On the other hand, on the days that blood sugars run rampant & we are chasing them around in circles, we just may assess the day when our head is about to hit the pillow & be tempted to beat ourselves up with the messages that we say to ourselves.  The one that I try to stay away from saying most of all to myself is anything that starts with the words “if only.”  On the occasions when my mind goes to those words I make a choice to stop & say instead, “I did my best today.”  It may sound like a small thing yet I realize that beating myself up message wise on top of having a challenging day at the end of the day provides no benefits.  I just realize that the next day is a brand new day & I need to simply be present when that day comes each & every day.  Do you find that you either talk more about the past or the future than the present?  I had found that to be true of myself as well when it came to talking in the future.  Of course it is prudent & mature to plan for the future yet all actual living occurs in the present so I had to learn to focus as well on the present moment since I did not want my whole life to pass me by & have a feeling that I was never quite right there in any given moment fully.  I still find it pretty tough to do because left to my own runaway mind, I can be a worrier.  That is a continuous work in progress.  In many ways the internet has been a feast for feeding into the worry.  We have the access to so much information from various sources.  Do you fall prey to “googling” your symptoms when a health issue crops up?  I know I sure do & I bet I am not alone by a long shot.  The thing is that to try to diagnose based on an internet search is pretty unreliable the vast amount of time I have experienced.  My latest ongoing battle with guttate psoriasis is proof positive that doing an internet search is a long shot at best at least for me in determining what is going on health wise.  When I searched out my symptoms, the flesh eating disease popped up.  Do you think that freaked me out?  The thing is that along with that came up everything from temporary non worry conditions and everything in between.  My mind instantly went to the worst diagnosis though briefly until I got a hold of myself with some common sense.  Needless to say that I made a doctor’s appointment right away.  It kind of fed into my fear of the worst though when I arrived to my doctor’s office & was immediately put into a quarantine room for 90 minutes.  Sometimes it takes a while to get to the actual diagnosis I have experienced a few times in life.  Take diabetes for example.  Since I was an adult at time of symptoms, automatically the endo in Toronto diagnosed me as a type 2 diabetic yet it only took him a week to realize that I had in fact type 1 diabetes.  My ongoing tummy difficulties have been a work in progress in trying to determine what is going on.  Everything to celiac disease to lactose intolerant to allergies, IBS, gasteoporesis and others had been speculations.   It looks like it is food allergies that have been the culprit.  Ah, an answer at last & it did not come from internet searches but rather from being determinated & acting on every reasonable possibility.   Here endeth this tangent I have fallen off on.  The point is that the famous quote of “waiting to worry” is a motto that I adopted a long while ago because I know where my mind goes to left to go off on its own.  Balance I have found is needed when it comes to where my mind goes regarding worry.  There is the need for due diligence like making a doctor’s appointment when something out of the ordinary flares up health wise & then there is the off the charts speculation on my part as to how bad the news may be.  The decision that I make is to go to the doctor’s & then try to “wait to worry.”

Two situations that a Dear Heart of mine was involved in this past week got me thinking about these thoughts today of the balance specifically between choosing to be a high maintenance Diva, getting necessary health needs met & being a martyr.  Have you noticed that there are some examples of behaviours that come to mind where people are leaning towards the high maintenance Diva behaviour category?  They are the instances where the person is demanding that they be waited on hand & foot by those around them.  There is an air of entitlement to being treated as royalty.  There may be situations that you have found yourself in whereby the other person is wearing you down with the level of his or her demands.  I have come to a point in my life where I can laugh at these situations.  This was not always the case.  A Dear Heart shared with me this past week a situation where he found himself on the receiving end of a very lengthy list of demands so excessive that the Dear Heart referred to himself as a temporary slave to this person.  The list of demands was long & specific & had quite an air of entitlement.  The red carpet was to be rolled out in other words.  Type 1 diabetes at times I have found has turned me into a slave temporarily to it.  The first year living with type 1 comes vividly to mind.  I lived like a robot & achieved very good A1C results but I felt miserable.  Every day for that first year I woke up at exactly the same time of the morning, ate the exact same thing every day for breakfast, had exercise at the same time every day, tested my blood sugars a lot even in the middle of the night & so on.  I felt like a total slave to type 1 diabetes & its freakish demands.  I could not wait to request an insulin pump so that I could feel like I could get at least some of my life back again & could discontinue feeling like a robot.  This is just my experience.  I am not implying that other people who choose or have to be on multi-injections have this experience.  Every one is a beautiful original after all.  That is how my body & my life worked that first year with type 1 that’s all I know.  Even after 5 ½ years of pumping, I still pinch myself to be able to have an insulin pump & the freedoms that it has given me.  I love my newest insulin pump, Angus.  We are after all quite “attached” to one another! Ha! Ha!

While type 1 has its way of being demanding even with the insulin pump, my personality is one of I don’t want to bother anyone.  That was pretty tough the first time that I went into a low blood sugar & did not want to bother anyone by interrupting what they were saying to me by grabbing a juice box & drawing attention to myself.  I had to treat the low but I must have apologized 20 times for interrupting what the person was talking about.  For the first couple of years I did not do a glucose test in front of others because I did not want to be a bother so I found myself excusing myself instead to do tests behind closed doors.  It was excessive, over the top politeness to a fault.  If I had high blood sugars & felt like I was dragging a boulder up Mount Everest, it did not matter, I put on a high energy face & wore myself out trying to carry on with all commitments.  The only person who truly knew how sick I was for the first couple of years living with type 1 was my husband.  Thank goodness for him because it is exhausting on top of being sick pretending to be well.  He has shown me through words & actions that I am not broken due to type 1 or my other health challenges.  I am not a slave to health challenges when I am with him because he truly lives out our wedding vows including loving one another in sickness & in health.  There are no words to say how grateful I am to the love of my life.  Okay, so let’s call a spade a spade, for the first couple of years living with type 1, I behaved my way into being a martyr.  For what though?  I answered that question with a resounding, “For nothing.”  I had treated others around me in a sense as if they were too fragile to handle reality.  I did not let them see what was really going on.  I pretended to be super well all the time.  It cost me big & it felt isolating big time.  I made a decision to have the courage to be my balanced self with others.  I realized that there was a possibility that some people were only in my life to be served & live in a world where everything was fun & great & that they would leave my life when I let myself be myself.  I know though that I can only control my own actions & thoughts & not others behaviours & thoughts so it all had to just be okay. 

The land between being a high maintenance diva & a martyr I found was being myself within a group of Battle Buddies & Dear Hearts that are trusted & genuine.  Within this group I am free to be myself & to say that I am having a great day on the great days & to admit that I am having a stinker of a day on the stinker days.  Our relationships don’t crumble one way or the other & that is a beautiful thing.  Honesty I think has made these friendships & relationships stronger & built on solid foundations.  To share with you, this past week, 2 of my Dear Hearts went to an Anime convention.  They described the experience especially the elaborate costumes that people had made & were wearing.  My dear hearts said that every person that they met was extremely polite & accepting.  They said that there was no back biting or gossip or making fun of one another in that venue.  That impressed me big time.  I loved that big time that a group of over 2000 people could get together & be polite, accepting & kind towards one another totally.  And I thought, yes, that is the balance between being a high maintenance diva & a martyr when it comes to dealing with type 1.  If we can get ourselves surrounded with polite, accepting, kind people we are rich beyond limits.  And just be ourselves…well that is a priceless gift.

My heart’s hope for you is that you find yourself exactly in the balance of being surrounded by a group of accepting, polite, kind people that you can be yourself totally with!

Smiles,

Saundie :)

Wherever you go this week may you find that type 1 or any other "365" does not ever turn into affecting you in either a diva or martyr way.  Just be beautiful you, struggle & all.  The world needs more genuine, fully life embracing people I believe.  Have a beautiful week & enjoy some nature.  Next Monday's sharing is "Inside Out Mystery."      :D

Are you on the lookout for being present & ready to catch someone doing something right?  Do you find that often times human nature tends to notice the negatives versus the positives unless we retrain our brains?  It seems pretty easy to notice things that peeve us off yet do we focus mostly on this or on the acts of kindness & things that are going right in the world around us?  Perhaps it can at times depend upon how strengthened or beaten up we are at a given time.  I have found that it has taken me big time practice to get to a point where I can move past my initial feelings of fixating too much on a mean spirited behaviour that has been tossed my way.  I refuse to let the small percentage of people choosing to behave unkindly affect me for long.  And more than that, I remain determined to always see the good in the world…the people & experiences that are beautiful & worth focusing on.

It seems that I need to be reminded often that love is not merely a romantic feeling but rather so much more.  Intellectually, I know this is true already.  From an emotional perspective, I however never want to fall prey to the aspect of doing something if I feel like it or not doing something because I don’t feel like it.  Feelings are valid yet they sometimes are big time inaccurate at least for me.  Sometimes the logic or maturity of some of my feelings have to be tested out if I am feeling especially exhausted or sick or my blood sugars are spiraling all over the place.  If something is the right thing to do, it is the right thing to do.  Right is right & wrong is wrong no matter what my feelings of the moment happen to be.  That means that even though I may not feel like doing something, if it is the right thing to do, I do it.  I do not want to merely rely on feelings which are changeable.  Today, again I was reminded that to love others takes a decision.  Love is a choice.  It is a choice to love others when we are feeling great or all beaten up.  It is a choice to love when others are kind to us & when they are big time unkind to us.  I would like to point out though that if someone is abusive, the love may need to take place from a distance. 

Is it easy to like & love everyone when we are feeling like we are at the top of the world?  I sure think so.  Does it take big effort when we are feeling off our game if we have either been beaten up from the beast of type 1 or someone has said or done something unkind to us?  I sure believe so.  This past week I received an inspirational quote into my email inbox.  Essentially it was a reminder that unkind & unhappy people need our love the most.  My perspective is that I would not totally agree with that statement.  My thought is that everyone deserves love.  I hope that I do not become a judge of whether someone deserves more love than another person.  I kind of could not measure love.  Being a mom of 3 sons, I can say that love is not split but rather by grace, love is 100% there for each one of our sons.  With the birth of each son, the love did not become divided.  If one of the boys is behaving unkindly, I would not say that he deserves more love than the other 2 boys.  What I would say is that each one of our sons deserves 100% of my love no matter what.  This is just how I see it.  I kind of laugh when I sometimes hear people say that relationships require people to meet half way or that it is 50-50.  My mind does not think that way.  The way I see it is that if we each give 100% then there will be no shortfall.  The thing is that I know that in life I have to be prepared to give 100% love no matter what the return is from another person.  That means to me that I cannot let my 100% be contingent almost like a contract on the expectation of the other person giving 100%.  We have no control over other people’s behaviours & choices often.  We have decision making over our own behaviours & choices & for me that is enough.  I have found that to be a saving grace for me because I am not crushed if someone decides to behave unloving towards me.  Of course I don’t like it & it hurts my feelings but I can get beyond that.  This was not always the case though so I really am grateful to have made these discoveries.

It has become a habit of mine to try my best to be present enough wherever I am to notice an “I caught you doing something right” behaviour.  Last weekend my oldest son & I went out for coffee together.  While we were at the coffee shop, a mom & her 2 young children came into the shop for a snack.  The lady’s young son accidentially grazed the display shelf & a number of items came crashing down loudly.  I felt badly for the little boy as this can happen to anyone.  The wee boy began to sob as he felt so embarrassed & upset that this had happened.  Not missing a beat, the young mom knelt down to look her son right in the eyes & told him a story of a time when her Dad had recently knocked over a whole display.   She told her son that accidents like this can happen to anyone & that in this case nothing was broken.  Then she showed the little boy the face that his grandpa had made when the display of glasses had come down in that story.  The little boy broke out in laughter & the mom joined in.  They tidied up the display at the coffee shop & all was fine again.  I smiled & thought that it was a privilege to see such a loving act of kindness between the mom & her son. 

Here’s a profoundly loving act of love & kindness that I would love to share with you from last Sunday.  Over the past week I have been taking a new medication that has made me at least initially pretty dizzy & nauseous & it has also played havoc with my blood sugar control.  On top of that, last Saturday night I had a brutal low blood sugar in the middle of the night & as a result of that had almost no sleep.  When I got up on Sunday morning I felt unwell big time.  Still though, I have a stubborn tendency so I did not want to let anything stop me from doing what I had planned to do with the day.  I got all ready to go to mass.  All the while I was feeling more & more nauseous & dizzy & not myself.  When we arrived for mass I wondered if someone had cranked up the heat because it felt like 100 degrees Fahrenheit to me.  (Yes, I know I should be thinking in terms of celcius but I grew up when I learned both so I tend towards Fahrenheit but 100F would be over 30 C right?)  Suffice to say I asked around to see if anyone else was feeling like it was unbearably hot.  You know that moment when you ask a question that starts with, “is it just me or is it…?”  Often, we will hear a “yes, me too.”  That kind of feels a lot better to me.  It was not the answer I got this time though.  Anyone who knows me at all is well aware that I have type 1 diabetes so I received the answer to my question in these words instead, “you better check your blood sugar because it is not at all hot in here.”  Sure enough my blood sugars had plunged down yet again.  I did something that I have never done before during mass & that is that I left halfway through because even after treating the low, I felt dizzy & sick big time & not one bit well.  Once I arrived home I felt pretty sad that diabetes & my other “365” health challenges got to win that round.  Not long after though my husband gave me an act of love that I could never give a full description of since it is just so huge…too huge for a container.  My husband is a fairly new Eucharistic Minister.  If you are unfamiliar with that term, in the Catholic faith it means that it describes the people within the congregation that assist the Priest in giving the body of Christ to each person during mass.  My husband advised our Priest after mass was over that although I had been to mass that I left just prior to communion due to illness.  My husband was permitted to bring communion to me at home so we completed mass as a family in our family room & when my husband did this for me I was overcome with a feeling of being so loved.  It is beyond words.  Tears streamed down my face while I received communion from my Dear Heart husband.  This is a moment that I will forever cherish & remember vividly.

It is difficult to fully express my gratefulness for Battle Warriors & Dear Hearts who are the encouragers, the ones who day in day out give that 100% care & love that I spoke about earlier.  There are days when type 1 or one of my other illnesses beats the heck out of me & I have never once reached out to my Battle Warriors & found anything other than care & encouragement.  That is big time love to me.  That is also big time, catching someone doing not only something right but something that makes a huge difference.  My hope is that I can be as great a friend to my Battle Warriors & Dear Hearts as they are to me…that I always give them my 100% too.

My heart’s hope for you is that you find yourself focusing on the circumstances that are out in the world that are all about catching someone doing something wonderful, caring & loving.  To be a witness to those acts of love is after all an honour don’t you think?

Smiles,

Saundie :)

It is my belief that you & I have a well of limitless capacity for love & compassion.  Living with type 1 and or other "365" health challenges provides a fork in the road to each one of us to realize that because we have experienced struggle, we can do something loving with that for someone else.  Each day I also realize that I can concentrate on the beast of type 1 battles and my ever present psoraisis or I can choose to reach out & give compassion & care for someone else.  My experience is that it feels big time beautiful to choose to reach out to help others who are struggling.  May you both give & receive love at 100%...you deserve more than a mere 50%!

Next Monday's story sharing is "High Maintenance Diva vs Martyrs."  :)

xo

Do you find that in life at times we get to a point where we need to take a conscious break from too much heaviness?  Other times, we may automatically give ourselves a break.  These breaks could be in the form of changing our environment temporarily.  We may choose to take a short physical or psychological vacation to restore our strength & rejuvenate our determination so that we can continue our marathon that is either type 1 or another “365” challenge.  Have you found that breaks can also come in the form of purposefully looking at life’s day in & day out events through a fresher pair of eyes.  And we can make choices with a dusted off attitude.  One thing that comes naturally to me the majority of the time is the natural tendency to make light of myself or find humour in the challenge or the absurd.  Also I attempt to look at many challenges through the lens of adventure.

As Spring has bid us adieu for another season & summer is charming us with its warmth & slower pace, I find myself fully embracing the approach of taking challenges as much as possible in my life lighter.  In putting away our bulky winter & still weighing down spring clothing, we can attempt to add levity to our summer if that is what would serve us best.  I made a decision this past late spring that I am ready big time to move towards lightening up the heaviness that winter left behind in terms of challenges.  It does not mean that I am going to deny that the challenges are there or pretend that everything is perfect.  Rather, I am looking to balance the reality of living with several chronic illnesses with the equal reality of joy & gratitude that I feel despite these challenges.  The joy & gratitude are magnified.  It truly is the little moments that I cherish most.  How about you?  The challenges will be there & I am okay with that.  The thing is though that I have the choice about what I want to focus most on.  The answer for me is a resounding big time, “my family & friends!”  The focus is being even more present with a lighting of my attitude.  Too much intensity I realize is exhausting.  Perhaps you have found this to be true for you as well? 

Okay, Saundie, how about some real life examples to take these ideas & put them into practice.  We each will have ways that work best for us in bringing levity into our lives.  There are several real life examples that I have recently experienced that I would love to share with you.

Recently, a friend of mine lost his battle with cancer.  After attending his funeral, I not too surprisingly felt a heavy heart & at a bit of a loss about how to best get on with that day.  My heart naturally felt heavy & sad.  I had a schedule of tasks all organized for the remainder of the day.  It felt though that to simply pick back up on my list of tasks for the day was far from any type of tribute to a life that had made such a difference in our community.  What I decided to do was literally rip up the task list for that day & gently let an idea come to mind that would celebrate & honour this friend’s life.  This friend was all about humour, service to others, taking himself lightly, a love for animals & being outside in nature.  It came to me quickly that the very best way to spend the next few hours was to take my goldie & get outside in nature on a huge nature walk along the shoreline.  At the halfway mark, there was a bench overlooking the smooth Lake in our area.  It was a picture perfect day out.  I pulled out my tea flask for me & set out a small tea picnic for myself & a couple of tasty treats for our goldie, “Beddy.”  (Short for Lady Bedford but she is one to roll in the mud so such a fancy name did not stick so she is Beddy).  I poured my tea into a camping style cup & gave a toast right out loud to a friend who left us far too soon.  And a smile came to my face & I knew big time that he was smiling down on an eccentric dyad.  To passersby we likely appeared a wee bit strange yet it felt so amazingly just right in the form of an appreciation of a friend.  The pace was gentle & I felt so big time present with the light breeze blowing & the water cascading to shore.  It was a way to feel sadness & joy all at the same time.  They do occur together for me when I am fully present & living in gratitude for the natural beauty that is a short walk from our back door.

As I have shared with you over the winter months, I came down with a severe case of strep throat.  It should be long gone & not even a memory by now however the strep left me with what has become an ongoing unfortunate “souvenir” in the form of guttate psoriasis that I am been advised will be with me on & off throughout the rest of my life.  It is a menace.   Trying to get a specialist for this chronic disease is an exercise in patience since the waiting list to get in is close to 6 months.  Since I have now been living with this for nearly 3 months, that would mean that just getting a start at getting it under control will take the better part of a full year from the time that it surfaced.  And it will be back as mentioned for the rest of my life if I am exposed to strep or even another virus or even something as simple & mundane as increased stress.  Oh bother!  There is no way that I am going to let my attitude however go to a place of “woe is me.”  If there is something that type 1 has taught me it is that I can & will be strengthened by any physical challenge that comes my way & not reduced or redefined by health challenges.  Health challenges will not change the essence & spirit of who I am.  I am just plain feisty & determined that way!  How about you!  The silver lining in needing some specialist help is that geographically we live in an area that is close to some unique clinics in terms of commuting.  My family doctor described a neat option available to commute to to confirm my diagnosis & have 1 appointment with a specialist while I await my turn to link up with an ongoing specialist.  The clinic that was available for a 1 time consultation is located in the Distillery District in Toronto.  I had heard of that area before & had even worked in downtown Toronto for nearly 10 years yet I had never veered off & experienced the Distillery District.  As luck would have it the specialist consultation clinic is located right in the centre of the Distillery District.  Last Friday my husband & I took the trip to the specialist’s in that District & I decided to treat the whole thing like an adventure.  The waiting room was very busy & you do not have an appointment but rather simply wait for your turn.  I could tell that it was going to be a significant wait time since there were at least 40 people ahead of me.  In preparation for this wait, I brought along a brand new cookbook that I had received as a gift from our sons this past Mother’s Day.  I brought along several wee pieces of paper to use to bookmark recipes that I want to try to make soon.  It was a thoroughly enjoyable 3 hour wait & it was a very lovely waiting area that is reminiscent of the 1800’s which is my cup of tea.  The specialist was extremely pleasant & helpful & caring.  She has started me off on 2 topical super strong prescriptions & has referred me to an ongoing specialist which I should hear from in the next few months.  In the meantime, I feel like I am at least doing something to work on the menacing spots.  The spots on my arms have begun to fade & that is a positive even though the ones on the legs are being especially stubborn.  It is a start at least & I am grateful for that.  Back to the Distillery District.  If you are not familiar with this area & find yourself in the Toronto, Ontario area, I encourage you to visit that area.  It is a wee gem in the heart of Toronto.  It will come as quite a delightful surprise to you.  You may want to search the history of the area in advance via internet.  It is very interesting.  Basically, the area was the hugest distillery in the world in the 1800’s.  When the distillery was going to shut down in the 1990’s, the distillery buildings were purchased & restored to remain in the 1800’s period.  It is like stepping back in time.  There is a great deal of unique shopping & several cafes that remind me of a time long ago.  It was exactly my cup of tea complete with European like cobble stone areas.  It is breath taking.  After my specialist appointment, my husband & I stopped at a small café & enjoyed tea & delicious homemade pastries at a wee round table outside in the area within the cobblestone walkway area.  The area was bursting with life & gentle excitement.  My way of thinking is basically that if I have to have these menacing red spots that at least an adventure that I would not have otherwise had occurred.  It is just a new way of looking at things that works for me.

There is a group that I love sharing time with usually a couple times a week that I have missed profoundly.  For the past month in particular I have had so many medical appointments that I had not seen these Dear Hearts for nearly 4 full weeks.  Today, I was determined to see them.  I did & it was quite a surprise when I arrived & found out that a tea party had been arranged for everyone to just have a gentle hour as well which we had not done before.  I felt super grateful for all these Dear Hearts & we all felt such joy catching up with one another & not rushing like we usually do.  There was such a magnified feeling of appreciation for these friends since it had felt like the medical appointments had stood in the way of getting together for quite a while.  The great thing though was that it felt like no time had passed at all & we just naturally picked up from where we left off as if we had just been together yesterday. I simply joked about the red spots & we all laughed & I took myself very lightly today which felt freeing.

Last night, I got all hooked up to my new insulin pump.  Five years sure goes by in a blink of an eye.  Since I am a really sentimental person, I felt a little like I was saying goodbye to a trusted friend by retiring my blue insulin pump & welcoming a black one.  I realize that it is not really goodbye though but rather, kind of a tuck in with the knowledge that should any gliches occur with my brand new pump that my blue one is waiting in the wings all ready to have my back in the form of a back up.  That is big time peace of mind!  Today, I was proudly introducing my new pump to my friends.  I could not help myself.  It is difficult to contain natural enthusiasm right?  My new insulin pump has been named by me already.  May I introduce you to Angus!  It is a good sturdy Scots’ name that should suit the feisty determination of this gal.  Angus will help with the heavy lifting that my pancreas decided to bow out on in November 2007.  Okay, Angus, we’ve got this!

What’s the best way to attract people to us in the form of new friendships?  Do we go out into the world with that purpose in mind?  If we do, how does that work out for us?  We each answer that question for ourselves.  My experience is that if I go out into the world with an anything can happen, adventure type spirit & just be enthusiastic & genuine me with no agenda then wonderful wee surprises just happen on their own.  It is really simple I have found to welcome new friends by simply being one first.  Today, our oldest son went to the orthodontist’s office to get his braces off.  Yay!  It has been 2 years so I am super happy for him.  While I was in the waiting room, a natural conversation was struck up with another mom waiting for her son who was just starting the process of having braces.  We were complete strangers yet after about 5 minutes & several “me too’s” we were talking nonstop & laughing big time.  We each left with a new friend & that was a very cool surprise.

You will have your own experiences in life that you just may also decide to turn into adventures.  Or you may make a decision to take a break from the heaviness by adding levity in different forms into your life.  Have you noticed though that when you are feeling an especially heavy heart it feels more difficult to add the levity & give yourself a gentle act of care?  I know this is the case for me.  What do we do about this?  We each answer that question for ourselves.  To share with you what works for me, the key that I have found to that answer is in having a list of gentle levity activities, reminders and things that bring a smile to my face already ready.  I did my list up years ago & I just add to as ideas come to mind.  The list was done up during a time when I was feeling especially brave, strong, determined, joy-filled & when I had a tip top big time positive attitude.  I know that if I tried to think up ideas of levity when I am going through a struggle that is weighing me down that I would not have an easy time coming up with a list.  The best time for me at least to do the list up was at a time when I felt on top of the world.  I did up the list at that point knowing that life is not lived on a straight line & I would need that list all ready when needed.  We are each beautiful originals so perhaps you have a different idea that would work better for you & that’s exactly right.  No matter what I am going through in life I try my very best to begin the day with a thankful heart & end the day that way too.  It does not mean that I don’t come across difficult people & situations, but rather I know that it is my decision as to whether or not I let those unfortunate negative situations overshadow my gratitude.  My feisty determined spirit answers, no one gets to have that power over me.

My heart’s hope for you is that you find the list of activities & battle warrior supporters who will help you to give yourself a gentle break in a way that will best nurture you when you need it.

Smiles,

Saundie :)

May you have a week of gentle, purposeful release from the heaviness that can weigh us down at times & replace it with everything that big time nurtures your whole self.  Next Monday's story is "The Best of Humanity."   :D

Do you lift weights?  If you have diabetes or another “365” health challenge I would suggest that we do.  We may not be lifting the traditional weights found in gyms.  And I have found that “lifting the weights” of type 1 & other ongoing illnesses have helped me to become a stronger, more resilient, tenacious warrior for everything else that life throws my way.  My heart’s hope is that this is your experience too.  Of course we did not invite any “365” health struggle into our lives yet if it is here, what if we can use it to catapult it somehow into strength for life’s journey.  What if the fight that we need so much of the time to battle type 1 & other health challenges can be used for good in other areas in our lives & the lives of others.  Would that then at least give our battle profound meaning?  We each answer that question for ourselves.  I answer this with a big time, “yes!”

In my little corner of the world the month of May was different I found from previous ones that I can remember.  The season was behind & you may have found this to be the case for you as well in your corner of the world.  The other thing that I have noticed too though is that many of the days throughout the month were on again off again.  What I mean by that is that you could wake up to a sunny day & minutes later huge dark clouds could be rolling in.  Then minutes following that, you may experience a torrential downpour.  Not too much later, the sun would be back out but not for long.  This cycle each day continued.  Planning outdoor activities was like playing a game of weather roulette.  That’s not a huge deal but just something that I observed that is different from other month of May’s in previous years.  The clouds & clearing & cycling like this over & over again got me thinking about how this parallels life with type 1 in my experience.  Aside from the ups & downs that go along literally with high & low blood sugar levels, there is the emotional impact that type 1 can have day to day & even within hour to hour.  Trying to hold the emotional “wheel” steady when blood sugars are either skyrocketing or plummeting downwards takes more than 2 hands at times.  We may be trying our best to get ourselves out of a funk or a potential funk due to the beast of type 1 & how it invisibly beats us up inside.  We may have an arsenal of activities, go to game plans, team of battle buddies, and strategies ready to put in place when we feel like the weight of what we are coping with is becoming so heavy that we could use some reinforcements to help us out at least in the short term.  In weight training, I believe we refer to these types of people perhaps as spotters.  It is like we do not want the weight to crush us if we are literally lifting weights & the same may be true for real life as we battle type 1 or another “365” health struggle.  A “spotter” when it comes to coping with health challenges may be ideal & we may at times have to wait for help with the weights.  What do we consider if we need to wait?

Being weighed down, tired out & in need of encouragement, care, compassion and love while keeping our heads above water is big time tough don’t you find at times?  Some days we have to find a way to carry our own lanterns & keep them lit until someone that we trust & know “get’s it” can reach us.  It is a little like treading water & holding our heads & lanterns above the water at the same time.  What if though we pack a life jacket in advance for ourselves?  Would that make it easier to stay afloat?  Of course it would big time!  My life jacket is going to look different from yours because we are both beautiful originals & we get to kind of design our own life preservers.  One thing that I know from living with type 1 for 6 ½ years though is that I need to pack my own life preserver & lantern daily just in case I need it.  It is a little like an emotional first aid kit.  Just because my background is in counseling, I have the humility to admit that I too can fall prey to emotional funks up to & including depression so I am ever on the watch for those signs.  Beyond that though, I try to have prevention strategies in place for myself.  That is really what the life preserver & lantern “first aid” kit is really all about at least for me.

Would you recognize a person who was beginning to drown?  Would you help them?  The answer to those questions of course is yes.  Have you considered that there is more than one way to drown?  There is the obvious one that involves water yet another variation of this is emotional drowning or depression.  Would you recognize the signs of depression?  If you have even a moment’s hesitation that you would know the signs & point a person in the right direction for help then please visit a website such as:  www.depressionhurts.ca

Can we afford to turn a blind eye to people drowning in any fashion be it either physical or emotional?  My answer is that we must know the signs & symptoms & be ready to lend a hand by connecting people up with the professional help that is ready & waiting.  If we believe that signs & symptoms to any illnesses are important to know so that we can help others, why would depression be any different?  I don’t want to lose anyone to any kind of illness & that means physical or emotional period. 

Here’s the thing that I have found that is a bit of a curve ball when it comes to potential reliance on others.  First of all, I am profoundly independent.  I have had to somewhat behave my way out of that.  I have learned to ask for help at times even though it feels extremely unnatural to me & big time uncomfortable.  I love to help others but had built a lot of one way streets as far as reciprocation goes.  Type 1 has a way of forcing the situation though.  I have experienced times over the last 6 plus years that I have needed to ask for help even if it is as simple as asking someone to put a straw in a juice box when my low blood sugar is making a small task seem monumental.  I have found myself asking for help in the form of patience from others when I am either in a huge high or low blood sugar & need some extra time to get things back into better control.  And I have asked for encouragement on days that really sucked big time with the type 1 beast.

The thing is though that type 1 is largely invisible & emotional drowning is too.  We may look amazing on the outside.  We may look super healthy.  We may have put a smile of determination on our faces as we leave our homes.  We may have dressed up & done up our hair & look well & happy.  It may be super difficult for others to know that we could really use a life preserver in the form of encouragement & care when all looks well on the outside.  It may just take a super perceptive battle buddy or Dear Heart to pick up on what is really going on.  It surely would take a caring & profoundly present person I believe.  Is there much of that in the world?  Is there enough?  If we answer those questions with “no” then have we considered & begun to actively become that exact type of person for others.  That is a start & it just may be the best contagion out there!

Another curve ball that I have found in my own life is that because God made me to be a profoundly sensitive person, I have had to pack a brighter lantern & a few extra life jackets.  For many years, I found that how others treated me or rated me at any given time went straight to my heart with no governor/filter.  What I mean by this is that if others behaved negatively towards me or said something unkind, I accepted it as the truth & I felt sad & unvalued.  On the other hand, if others were complimentary or singing my praises so to speak then I was like an “appreciation junkie” ever doing even more kind deeds in the hopes of keeping those wonderful feelings in good supply.  Both ends of the spectrum were unhealthy for me & exhausting & at times even confusing.  About 10-15 years ago, I made a decision to cut that out.  I came to the realization that I cannot let others have the power to define me one way or the other.  I had to find a way to not let it matter whether I am being perceived one way or the other.  I had to do kind acts with the expectation that they would never be noticed much less appreciated.  I have even come to a point where I don’t care if I am thanked or not anymore & that is a freeing feeling big time!  Also, I realized that I needed to concentrate on doing the next right thing each day & not focus on reactions one way or the other from others.  The neat outcome of that is that if I am having an especially trying day with type 1 & someone “kicks me while I am down” either on purpose or not on purpose, I do not go to a place in my thoughts that says anything like “I deserved that” or some other self deprecating thought.  Instead, I just acknowledge either out loud or silently that the mean spirited behaviour on the part of the other person was uncalled for & disappointing yet reflected more on whatever is going on with them than me.  Perhaps I think at times people can be so wrapped up in their own misery or struggle that they do not have anything at all good, truthful or right to offer us.  In those instances, I choose to love that person from a distance.  This all likely sounds more negative than usual coming from me.  I want to make sure though that I am always 3 dimensional.  Everything is not always coming up roses for anyone.  I have on occasion tried to  reach out for help & had to wait longer than I had hoped.  That’s why I pack the extra “first aid” kit.  One of the things that is in my first aid kit is the fact that all those years ago I let go of the being defined as good or bad by others.  It has been a huge blessing & has strengthened me for the journey.  I don’t rely on people to make me feel good or bad about myself.  For sure my strength is given to me from far outside myself but it most definitely does not come from good or bad statements from others.  It comes instead from love.

This morning as the clouds were again lifting & the sunlight began to peer through, our 3 sons were getting up to face a new day.  One of our sons opened our front door & picked up the local newspaper that had been delivered earlier that morning.  “Look Mom at this cool story” our younger sons yelled out.  They went on to say that the front page had a story in it that gave the great news that a wee boy in the local area had won his battle with cancer.  Our sons were so happy for this boy that they had never even met.  I loved that & I love that big time!  I went ahead & read the article.  In reading it I realized that I vividly remembered that wee boy from 2 years ago when I had heard about his diagnosis.  My heart had been heavy for he & his family.  I smiled big time to read that he had won the battle over the beast of cancer.  That is worth celebrating big time!  That family had surely been through so much turmoil or clouds & sun.  The sunlight wins big time. 

What do I pack the most of in my first aid kit for cloudy or sunny days while battling the type 1 beast?  I pack big time love!  I pack the knowledge that type 1 or anything else does not dull or steal love from my life.  I cherish loved ones all the more through the ups & the downs of type 1 & life.  And I pack the words in action that we “make time for that which truly matters.”  That means that my days don’t go the way I plan them on paper very often.  There are detours throughout most days in the form of making time for giving & receiving love.  That could mean that I need to postpone one task to give time to a Dear Heart that needs their well of love replenished by me being present.  And I have learned to accept that in return too even though it is still really a work in progress.    At the end of each day, the only question that matters to me is whether I can lay my head on my pillow knowing that I unapologetically gave out of my love that day.

My heart’s hope for you is that you have everything you need all packed & ready for the clouds & clearings of your life journey.

Smiles, Saundie :)

May this week be full of light either from the sun or your own lantern.  The last couple of stories have been a wee bit heavy I realize albeit I believe all a part of life.  It is time though I think to lighten things up for next week so next Monday's sharing is "Taking it Lightly."  :D

Recently, I read a quote that essentially said that we are unable to clearly see our reflection in choppy water.  It did not take long to translate that statement to life.  Whether we live with type 1 or another “365” health challenge, or enjoy what would appear to be perfect health, choppy waters tend to surface in most people’s lives.

Is it okay to say the words out loud about struggles?  We each answer that question for ourselves.  My answer is sometimes & with some very select people in my life.  When or if we ask ourselves to visualize the faces of people that love us at our best & during our struggles, who do we see?  Who can we get totally real with?  Who are our “lighthouses?”  Who provides a safe haven when we are struggling big time?  Can we even say the words “sadness”, “fear”, “depression” or the sentence, “please help me” with some “lighthouse” Dear Hearts in our lives?  My heart hopes so for absolutely every person battling any storm in life.   In my mind, lighthouse people are not the ones that say cliché things to me like “don’t think about that but rather think happy thoughts” or “hang in there because it will get better” or something like that.  Those to me are empty of light.  That is just me though.  For sure many people’s intentions are good even with those words but really, how helpful is that?  Do those words make us feel any less upset at that time?  Those kind of statements don’t help me I will admit.  Those statements in my mind are brush off statements.  They come off as ways of discounting a real struggle & even speak volumes to me of that person not wanting to feel uncomfortable or be a true battle buddy.  When I encounter a person that says what I believe to be brush off or denial or flakey responses to a gut wrenching struggle I learn that he or she will not be a person that in future I share my inner thoughts with because they are not my safe haven.  That’s okay to be discerning I believe.  The great news is that there are a beautiful group of people in my life that are true lighthouses & I feel even more grateful for them through all of life’s ups and downs.

Lighthouses have always been something that I have been drawn to throughout my life.  When my husband & I were expecting our first son, we went away together on a lighthouse vacation.  It was incredible.  We even stayed 2 nights in Saugerties Lighthouse in New York which was the highlight of the trip.  As a funny aside, we were a wee bit naïve & timed our arrival at the lighthouse at high tide & were knee deep in the Hudson River on our walk in with our luggage.  We stopped at all the lighthouses along the Eastern shore of the U.S. on that trip.  You could take such a calming deep breath.  One of the other lighthouses that I adored was Block Island lighthouse.  To get there, you board a small ferry & the ocean breeze is something that stays with you forever.  It was just right that we journeyed over there through a pea soup fog.  The Island reminded me of what I think Scotland would be like although I have not yet experienced that trip.  Everything tasted so much more delicious there including the perfectly brewed tea. 

Just as lighthouses keep ships from hitting rocks, lighthouse people I think are people who lift us up when we are crashing close to being in that too sad approaching depression.  Are we allowed to say that word out loud yet?  It seems like the stigma of any kind of statement that we are not fully in charge is met with loathing in society.  If we are physically unwell, it seems that there is a tendency for people to want to either not talk about it or simply tell us that they hope that we get better soon.  To be honest, it bugs me personally to receive written words from someone for instance saying that they wish me the best of health or they hope that I get well soon.  If someone has a chronic illness or even more than one chronic illness, does that impress you as kind of a strange & perhaps an insensitive thing to say/write?  I have lost track of the number of times people have asked me if my type 1 diabetes has either gone away or is all better because I have an insulin pump.  If only chronic illnesses of any kind worked that way, right?  Again, the person’s heart may be in the right place yet could they choose words with a bit more care?  We each answer that question for ourselves.  I am a profoundly sensitive person so what bothers me may not have that same affect on you because we are all after all beautiful originals.  How do you think society generally treats or views people who are either sad or depressed?  Does the word weak come to mind?  It depends right?  Does it seem like people who are sad or depressed are either treated as invisible or outcasts at times?  Don’t we each have that capacity inside us to feel sad or depressed at times?  Even grieving seems to be frowned upon after a very short amount of time from my experience.  What is that all about?  Why are so many people so afraid it seems of others who admit that they are going through a sad, difficult time?  Are people afraid that they are going to get pulled into that state too like it is something contagious?  Are people fearful that they will be pulled under the water so to speak like a drowning person reaching out frantically for help to another person.  Are others not secure in knowing that they can face struggle & can feel other people’s struggle & be stronger for it? 

Life is neither all ups nor all downs.  Maybe our lives are at times like the roller coaster graph of our blood sugars.  Many people living with diabetes will share that emotions & blood sugars have a correlation.  It can be exhausting to have really high blood sugars followed by a dive in sugars physiologically.  That is all invisible though so we can be a lot little like ducks paddling our feet like crazy underneath the water to maintain our cheerful dispositions through blood sugar roller coasters.  Perhaps you too share with me that you don’t want to be thought of as a moody person due to diabetes.  What is the answer though to how do we genuinely yet socially appropriately deal with the crashing emotions that come with diabetes at times?  We each find our own way of walking that tightrope.

You may remember when you were first diagnosed with either type 1 or another “365” health struggle that you were supplied with more health information then you could digest all at once.  It may have been a steep learning curve.  I can say that was my initial experience big time.  One of the things that I remember vividly was both being told as well as reading that there is a significant proneness of people living with diabetes to become depressed at times.  Even with my background, I took that piece of information very seriously.  My background is in the counseling field yet I am only human & while I am profoundly self aware, I know that I am not invincible or immune to this happening.  There were a lot of years that I lived my life carrying my feelings very close to the vest.  If something was bothering me, I did not share these feelings but rather dealt with them on my own.  I did that for many years  until one day I felt like I was carrying around a 500lb garbage bag that was about to explode from years of not sharing the feelings with others.  Also at times, I felt like a fake.  People would comment at times that I had a perfect life.  What does a perfect life look like?  I don’t personally know but what I did realize is that I detested that many people saw things that way.  I felt 2 dimensional.  It is difficult big time to let others help me out even to this day but I do it anyways because it is good for that person, for me & for our relationship as 3 dimensional people.  I made a decision to be “real” many, many ago but that decision was magnified after November 29, 2007.  Now people say things to me like, “I know you will understand because you have been through this or that or something similar.”  We have real heart connections.  I love that big time.  And I love the “me too” feeling that these connections bring to Dear Hearts & to me too.

I find that I have my antenna in full working order when it comes to any signs of tipping in the direction of depression.  Thankfully, so far, I have not fallen into the pit of depression.  My heart though goes out so much to others who have or are experiencing depression as a result of diabetes or another “365” health challenge.  We are not statistics yet we need to be cognizant of them & try our best to have strategies in place to not fall into the pit or at the very least have a battle buddy to throw us a life ring if we do.  That means that as a society we just may want to find a way to talk about the possibility of depression happening to ourselves or those we love.  And we had best know the signs & have a lighthouse helper to point others in the direction of help if depression finds its way into the lives of people that we know & love.  We cannot afford to be ostriches about this.   

What brought  these thoughts to my mind at this time?  Recently I was diagnosed with another chronic illness on top of type 1.  Again, the learning curve is steep regarding educating myself on this condition & how it is going to affect my life.  At the top of the list of the literature that I was handed, there was a warning that there is an increased risk especially for females with this diagnosis to become depressed.  The information package also talked about the spin off conditions that could result from this one.  Here we go again I thought to myself.  What is this the 7 year itch?  I remember being informed about other illnesses that can spin off from type 1 due to the autoimmune nature.  Just like at that time though, I choose to live my life in the present versus wringing my hands about what I may or may not get on top of these health challenges.  Okay, so I will fight this too it goes without saying.  I will not fight something not in existence though right now.  I will sure try to make the best physical choices to lower my risk but beyond that, I will not live my life daily in fear of what may or may not happen next in terms of spin off health challenges.  I will instead meet them head on with my metaphorical boxing gloves when or if they appear.  Did I cry & become sad when I learned that there is yet another health challenge to fight?  Yes I did.  And truthfully I felt 3 dimensional & real & strong after I did this.  And I spoke to a few of the lighthouses in my life about exactly what my fears are & how I am feeling & they caught my tears.  And the sky did not fall because of this.  I even said right out loud that I will watch out because I do not want this sadness to increase at any time into depression.  I believe that it will not but you better believe that my lighthouses will see the signs early on & I will not even have to utter the words, “help me” before they do that already.  The storms & rocky shores are out there for anyone.  The choppy waters can try to send us crashing into struggles that sometimes we see coming & other times we never anticipated.  That is life. 

Just like it is difficult to see our reflection during choppy waters, it can be really hard to know how to get out of sadness once we are experiencing it.  For me, it is perfectly natural to feel all emotions in life & know that they are all healthy.  I don’t need or want to run away from my feelings.  I don’t though want to stay stuck for long in sadness which could or may not lead to depression.  Thankfully, knowledge is power.  I have a full first aid kit of break through ideas & gentle antidotes for myself during struggles.  And I have a small group of profoundly trusted, genuine, compassionate loved ones that are in my life.  They are the lighthouses.  I love them beyond words.  They are there for life’s joys & I am there for their joys & we are there for one another for the sorrows, the frustrations, the laughter, and all that is in between.  We catch one another’s’ happy & sad tears.  That is an indescribable gift that I don’t take for granted on any day.

I could end by saying that I know that I am going to be okay but that sounds pretty flat.  And you know what?  I don’t want to be just okay on any day anyway.  Do you?  I want to feel everything & trust that it all means something.  My hope is to give hope to others who may be struggling.  I know how it feels to be hanging on to hope by my fingernails.  Today is better than okay.  It is better than okay because I love & am loved. I have these as the reason to fight the beast of type 1 & whatever other illnesses come along.   I want for you to also know that you love & are loved too big time. 

And I want you & I to both every day put on our imaginary boxing gloves & fight to be as joy-filled & as healthy as we can possibly be.  Add to this, my heart’s hope too is that you & I are always open to giving & receiving as much love as our hearts can possibly have & hold. 

Smiles, Saundie

May the week ahead be filled with countless present moments of joy for you.  And may you have a lighthouse person or many for sad days.  One of many websites dedicated to helping people who feel overwhelmed with potential depression is www.depressionhurts.ca   We cannot afford to be ostriches or add to the struggle though by either denying other’s struggles, labeling people as “less than” or simply doing nothing.  No matter what each one of us goes through, we are all part of the human family.  Next week’s sharing is “Clouds, Clearing & Finding a Way to Carry Our Own Lanterns.”  :D