I admit to being a little sensitive.  My feelings get hurt pretty easily and I cry at things that aren't that sad sometimes.

But it wasn't always that way.  When I was a kid, I was pretty tough.   I took the abuse that comes with having been a huge tomboy that liked to play with the boys, wore coke-bottled glasses, and could most-often be found searching thrift stores for the strangest attire I could find and my mother could afford.  I was bulletproof.  I guess having endured brothers who called me Pukeface for years, as if it were my name.

I was called four-eyed, and ugly, and weird.  I asked my mother for the brightest pink glasses we could get, I looked in the mirror and thought I was kind of cute, and I did my best to dress as weirdly as I could.  Yes, my poor mother tried to convince me that the blue and green of my catholic school knee socks, tights, and sweaters, shouldn't be electric blue and neon green, but I didn't listen.  I liked me just like me. 

Having diabetes was just another opportunity for people to make fun.  There was a boy in grade school that called me "sugar-girl" and told people I got diabetes from eating cake and swore up and down that if you touched me, it might rub off.  He also told people that my feet could fall off any day and that my kid's knees were probably going to explode.  Back then, when I was nine, I told him ugly people said ugly things because it made them feel better and I wandered on my merry way, kicking his ass on the football field and tripping him in our fourth grade classroom.

I think it all started to change right around seventh or eighth grade.  Young adulthood seemed to rocket me into a new and much more difficult world.  It wasn't that the insults got meaner so much, as it was that they seemed to matter more.  As if my place in the world was much more dependent on the things that other people thought of me.  I never quite found, in high school, a crowd to really run with all of the time.  I sort of floated on the fringes of the drama club, and the band geeks, and the smart kids, and the burnouts.  But around that time, I realized that sometimes it actually hurt when someone called names, pointed out that I didn't dress like anyone else, or implied that my diabetes was somehow my fault.  Maybe I sensed that somehow who I was wasn't good enough to fit into anything - and for a kid at that age - that's not recognized as a thing of beauty.

In high school, my diabetes often frustrated me.  Not because it prevented me from doing things - just because it made me different.  "Who's the druggy with the syringes?"  "Ew.  Your finger is bleeding."  Worse yet, the whispers, "She's so thin because she's sick."  "She's so fat because she's sick."  "She got diabetes because she eats too much."  Even though I still thought I was pretty cool, it became obvious in short order that that was an opinion not shared by most of my classmates.

I suppose that being a teenager isn't easy for anyone.  I remember recognizing that even those kids that seemed so popular were sometimes kind of sad.  I remember in English class freshman year, we had to write an essay about something that defined us and share it.  I got the essay of a popular jock classmate, who didn't seem to have a care in the world.  It was about how his father had died the year before and about how much he missed him and about how his mother was his definition of strength and beauty.  It couldn't have been more clear to me that as hard as my life was, there were harder stories lurking in the hearts, whispering in the ears of classmates that seemed to have it all.

As I grew older, I seemed to settle back in to really liking my own self.  Liking that I'm "eccentric" or "quirky."  But I never quite grew back into the toughness I had at nine when I could tell someone, with confidence, that they were a small, mean person and walk away.  And I wish I had found that again.

It's something I could use.  When trying to maintain patience with a world that still doesn't seem to have a real place for me.  When working through difficult times.  When trying to educate people about diabetes - what it means - the real challenges it presents - and the myths that exist around it.  

A few times in my professional life, I've heard whispers about something I've said or done or about how someone feels or thinks about my diabetes management or my hyper-viligance with bloodsugar testing ("honestly, she tests her blood like 10 times a day, is she trying to get attention?") If only I could respond to those whispers as I would have at nine, with a fine f-you!  Followed by a game of football where I outpace the boys.  

I'm making a promise to myself to try to get back there to those days.  To be patient with myself as I re-learn what came so naturally back then - to let things roll, and to prove myself - not to the world - but to myself.  I think I'm capable.  And I want to get there.  I want to fight the whispers with strength instead of letting them bring my tears.