Recently, I was talking with a good friend who has a daughter with a serious medical issue that has significant impacts on her speech and learning. We were discussing the frustration it causes when the world insists on defining the life of a child by way of the things they can't or won't do - outright ignoring the possibility and potential a child has.

The conversation made me realize how fortunate I have been to have parents who always, and consistently, refused to define my personhood based on the things that diabetes could prevent me from doing. Since I was a child, I've known that many people have laid out for the two of them the things I shouldn't, couldn't, or wouldn't do, based on my having diabetes. Laid out the things that diabetes could deal me that would leave me sick or dead. Not having children, not pursuing athletics, not making it through school without spending too much time in the nurse's office, facing challenges in the workplace because of lows or highs, dying from a seizure or in my bed from a low bloodsugar, failing at the day-to-day management and succumbing to complications at a young age.

I'm sure that those lists scared them. I'm sure that there were moments when they thought doctors who predicted my dying from an insulin reaction or suffering serious complications with my eyes and nerves and kidneys before my fortieth birthday might just be right. But they were brave. And they made me brave. They believed that I would make it, they believed that I could be anything I chose. And that belief was like some kind of beacon for me. Because it made me know my many options, made me know that my life was boundless, that my potential was limitless. It made me know, that though my disease required me to adapt at times, and could really get in the way, and sometimes threatened my life, it would not be the thing that kept me from being amazing.

The fact is that I haven't had children, and I'm not the medal-winning olympic swimmer I wanted to be for sometime as a child. But diabetes had nothing to do with my not doing those things. And I've made it almost thirty years, through hard work and (yes) a little luck, having not succumbed to a low bloodsugar and living well and without complications. I've become a successful writer and professional fundraiser with a career that's blossoming. I sing and dance and celebrate and laugh and make others laugh and love.

And I thank my parents for all of it, I thank their confidence in me - their belief in my potential, for leaving the gloom and doom predictions of doctors and others in pieces at my feet.

Some might say that's the job of parents, but I disagree. I believe that parents have to FIGHT to have that kind of confidence in the face of terrible odds and bleak pronouncements, just the way we have to fight to keep our illnesses in control, to manage and adjust as best we can in what is often an overwhelmingly challenging world.

Parents willing to fight. Well, they make all the difference.