A Sexy Cocktail of Type 1 Diabetes and Social Anxiety

Writing this gives me the same feeling making a phone call does. It scares the shit out of me. I’ll probably restart it multiple times, delete it, and if it makes it past all that, I will probably never want to look at it again.

I need to do this though. So, hey! Welcome to the insight into an anxious diabetic’s brain. I feel everyone has been talking about anxiety for years now and I will probably just be a voice in a crowd. A very fast talking, attempting to predict the next step in the conversation kind of crowd. 😂

I’ve had diabetes for 20 years now and I got diagnosed with high-functioning social anxiety in January of 2017. It came as a shock to me. As my dad always says, “You’re the most social person I know, how can you be anxious at something that seems so natural?” Just to be clear, I love socialising and at time I rock at it and other times I suck. I’m a worrier about anything there is to worry about: The finer details of my interactions with people; phone calls, opening emails, supermarkets, buses, applying for jobs, and the list went on and on. I was struggling to function and I’d clearly missed that email about how I should be coping.

My anxiety made having diabetes much harder and trust me when I say it’s already pretty challenging. I got to a point where I was so scared that someone would look at me that I couldn’t go for my medication. I was terrified about the doctor’s judgement that I just stopped going. Asking for help is like admitting defeat, everyone needs me to be okay. So I was going to pretend to be okay even when I wasn’t.

I discovered a skill I never knew I had, I became an exceptional liar. I lied to everyone I cared about, I convinced myself that I was protecting them more by lying. I grew into my mask. I was losing weight, taking my insulin when I wanted and I stopped taking care of myself.

No one saw behind my mask for a while until I was hospitalised when I hadn’t taken my insulin for days. I didn’t want to be here. I was an insomniac, had a no off switch anxiety brain and was becoming more and more isolated. Me being hospitalised was my cry for help. Except I didn’t want to be heard, the kind of sob when you try and muffle the sound to prevent the person laying next to you from hearing. I wanted to suffer in my own dreadful silence and just to fade away.

This chapter in my life is ultimately a testament to the people who love me. As cheesy at it sounds, people save people. My parents, my siblings, my endlessly loyal boyfriend and best friends who just got it. They taught me how to be me again, how to live through the suffering and find a way to rebuild the person who deep down I wanted to be. 6 months of CBT, a lot of emotional breakdowns (the worst of which on a public bus), and a lot of fighting my own thoughts and beliefs. I still go back to that place sometimes, I will always worry and have anxiety. Am I a bad person because of that? Hell no! I’m not weak, I am simply human. There is strength to be found in the honesty of how each of us struggle.

I’m saying all of this because it shouldn’t have taken me this long to get help. If it weren’t for my sister being the badass female that she is, I would have never had made those phone calls. How many people with anxiety can make 4 separate phone calls to a medical receptionist? I could barely be on the phone to my own mother. We need a neutral ground to talk honestly. Where being anxious is not a sign of weakness, but an acknowledgement that life is tough. We need those frank conversations even if they just end up being in our own heads or posted online.

However, anxiety is not a fad; you can’t just announce that you’ve diagnosed yourself. It doesn’t work like that. Posting stuff on my personal social media account would fill me with the kind of dread that I imagine most people only experience when jumping out of a plane. I want honest, real conversations about it. I don’t want the spotlight but genuine connections with people who need this.

If you’ve you’ve got to this point in my ramblings, I commend you. I hope it helps someone and even if it doesn’t, unloading your thoughts is a unique kind of therapy.

Kind thoughts and best wishes,

L.