In his initial post as Diabetes OC featured blogger, Christopher Snider (@iam_spartacus) writes about many personal traits which define him. At the end of the litany he states that not one of is self-identifiers is "person with diabetes", noting that it is not "the defining characteristic of my core".

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Wednesday I was stuck on nursery rhymes. Thursday, it was fairly tales. Reading the Wikipedia entry on Red Riding Hood, I followed the link to an entry on something I'd never heard of before: liminality. While Wikipedia has not nearly evolved into something rigorous enough to be considered a sole source for research, sometimes a new word or concept can shift something known and comfortable into an entirely different perspective; this is what that definition did for me.

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Fade in.

Close-up on a hand, shaking slightly as it lifts a metal cup. Pan as the camera moves to the subject's face, barely able to take a swallow of fluid without spilling it. After a half-coughed swallow, the hand half-slams the cup back on the workspace. The man shakes his head, unable to concentrate, pushes off from the workspace, and snaps at several other people as he walks briskly away.

From the second I saw the hand shake, I thought, "He's low. He's acting like he's low. Get the man some orange juice; he's about to pass out."

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Just as hyperglycemia is but the tip of the iceberg when discussing the physical ravages of diabetes, depression is but the most visible diagnosis of how diabetes affects our minds.

I'm not talking about the temporary states of anxiety or paranoia, lassitude or somnolescence, that accompany our glycemic highs and lows, but the long-term, "you should get psychological help for this" effects of living with chronic disease in general, and diabetes in particular.

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There's something that haunts every person who remembers Life Before Diagnosis. We describe it as spontaneity, carelessness, social acceptability, freedom.

What it boils down to are food and money.

For starters, diabetes robs from us the ability to "just" eat when we are hungry, not-eat when we're not, and not have to weigh, measure, and log every morsel that passes our lips. Then, it robs from us the (admittedly ill-advised) pleasures of the occasional ice-cream sundae or wolfing down half a pizza pie. And because we can't be certain of the foods that we don't prepare ourselves, it robs us of the ability to eat at friends' and relatives' homes, or even casual-dining restaurants.

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In one of my high school English classes, we had to read Samuel Beckett's play of this name. Thirty-some-odd years later, I don't remember the details, only that it centered around two men who seemed to be relatively old, penniless, and alone. They met at a particular spot each day, left each evening, and could only remember one day past and think towards one day forward. They awaited a third character, the eponymously named "Godot", who never arrived. The style was considered existentialist in that there wasn't all that much character development: what you saw was what you got. While I never read the French original, in English, "Godot" seemed a thinly-veiled metaphor for "G-d" — and since old, penniless (and possibly homeless) folk have always had the shortest from-this-point life expectancy, it made sense — at least on one level — that these two characters were waiting to die.

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