I say it, but I don't believe it.
Deep in my heart of hearts, I don't believe that there's absolutely nothing I could have done to prevent my diabetes diagnosis. I've been up and down the scale enough times in my life -- though only rarely into the not-overweight/obese zone -- that it shouldn't surprise anyone that my metabolism got messed up somewhere along the way. And I grew up understanding that I was required to be perfect -- perfect weight, super-intelligent, super-successful business-wise, and so on. While part of this was tied to being the older of two daughters (Dad moaned so much about being "the last of the Bells" that, in retrospect, I think he made it happen), part of it was the era in which I came of age. Women were starting to make inroads in the workplace -- the first women graduates of West Point and Annapolis graduated a year or two before I entered university -- but many were still fighting housewife-secretary stereotypes, and we were indoctrinated that in order to succeed in a world of men, we had to be better than the men whose jobs we would be usurping.
We had to be perfect.
Any endeavour in which I failed to grab the brass ring -- high school valedictory (ranked 4th), university academics (barely graduated), varsity sports (never earned my letter), and gaining a job afterwards -- were because I wasn't perfect enough to succeed, because I didn't come from a home with enough money to have gotten a driver's license and a car, because I didn't have the grades (or the focus, or the money) to go on to graduate school... and because I was not at a perfect weight for my height.
When my office-mate was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in the late 1990's, others of our co-workers reinforced the belief that it was because he was overweight. A significant post-diagnosis weight drop seemed only to confirm that belief... so when I was diagnosed, part of my public face of denial was because I knew people would say she did it to herself.
And because I have failed to maintain the weight loss (I've gained back sixty-five of the ninety pounds I'd lost), and because I've been back on blood pressure medications since 2006, I've failed.
On the other hand, since I've been able to control my diabetes with diet and exercise (when I'm paying attention to controlling it -- which attention has been spotty at times), I'm not even sure type 2 diabetes is the correct diagnosis. I mean, the human body can operate safely with less than 20% of its beta cells working? There's really that much redundancy? If the world had that much redundancy, we'd have more than half of it living in poverty with no way to find a job or make a living or have as much as the average homeless person living in the streets of any American city.
Oh, that's right. It does. It's one reason why Western economies are failing and will not be able to get up. Those 80% are beginning to command more than scraps and crumbs. It's one more reason we have to be perfect and overdriven to survive. It's not that medical care doesn't exist, it's that it has lower priority than food and shelter and perfect Darwinist selection of the fittest.
An adversarial colleague of mine dressed me down yesterday (not without reason) for something I'd done, saying that when she saw me, she didn't see "the intelligent girl who graduated from MIT or the woman who fought her way to health", only my behavior in her presence. She doesn't realize that I don't see that woman, either. I know there's an existential reality in which she exists. But just like I don't see a fifty-something, grey-haired could-be-someone's-granny in my self-image, I don't see a Renaissance woman of many interests with a deep understanding of their underlying issues and principles. While it's certainly my insecurities that drive me to learn, to interact, and to have others validate that learning, my mind always sees someone who has failed to make it to the top, someone who's fallen off her game and can't get back up, someone who is not qualified to do anything but write and complain and draw word images that make as much sense to the average person on the street as a paper on the biochemical structure of specific genes.
I see someone who is fighting for her right to survive, one failed warrior against an ocean of others.
And any failure to survive is, was, and will be, my fault.
