The balance between high blood sugar and high grades
By: Jessa Wouters
Tags: Motivation, Twenties, Diabetes, Disease, Student Life

Become a student they say, it’ll be fun they say. Well, I’ll see you and I’ll raise you one, let’s add some diabetes to the mix. I’m 21 years old, majoring in Communications, and have had diabetes since I was 10 years old. Elina Keirse, one of my closest friends, 22 years old, majoring in Biochemistry and diabetic since she was 1,5 years old. Elina was so amazing to help me with this little insight piece of what it is like to be in your twenties, living from deadline to deadline and on top of it all having to deal with a chronic disease.

Jessa Wouters & Elina Keirse, Bruges 02/24/21

Starting I do want to say that I didn’t write this piece to get sympathy. That’s not my goal, I hope I can give some relatability. Listening to Elina’s answers felt so easing because I could find myself a lot in them. Hopefully, it achieves the same for you, the readers. Next to that, I wanted to give some good old, heartfelt motivation.

Describing a life with diabetes is difficult to explain to someone who doesn’t have diabetes. I mean obviously, you can explain the science behind it and practices, those are simply facts. However, describing the feeling, it’s difficult to find the right explanation for it. You can’t express it.

This is one of the biggest reasons why Elina and I are such close friends, we get each other very easily. Diabetes is a disease that can make you feel alone unless you have a fellow ‘diabuddy’ as I like to call her. This doesn’t mean that we see ourselves as different, not at all even! We want nothing more than to be treated like anyone else and to be seen as normal human beings.

Elina says that having a life with diabetes means living to the fullest while being just that little bit more careful than people without the disease. Something she says that I thought was very inspiring is that our lives are like a process of accepting our limits and listening to our bodies. This doesn’t just apply to us, it’s like this for every person. We all have that something that has a very powerful limit, and you must find it first before you know what it is. For some people it is the amount of stress you can handle, the amount of sleep deprivation, etc. for us it’s the amount of physical effort.

There are a lot of presumes of diabetes. The number one, biggest frustration and pet peeve that both Elina and I (and I’m sure any other diabetic person) have is the assumption “you can’t eat sugar”. Sugar is not our kryptonite; we won’t die from eating it nor will we get sicker from eating it. We both have had judgmental looks whenever we ate something sugary or fatty.

BBC Three

Are we perfect diabetic people, God no! But wanting to do everything perfectly will just make it worse (and that counts for any part of life). It’s demanding enough as it is. Like Elina says, I know what I’m doing and how to adjust my insulin to my behavior. Trust the process.

It can be very overwhelming at times. You try so hard to regulate your blood sugar and keep it stable. Sometimes it just doesn’t want to work with you. You do the same thing as always and everything gets messed up.

You feel like you’re failing yourself because your blood sugar has a very big impact on the amount of energy that you have. If you can’t control it, you don’t have energy. Then you just start blaming yourself for not being able to do whatever it is that you want to or were doing.

Elina Keirse & Jessa Wouters, Damme 08/23/20

It’s like school is pressuring you to succeed and now your own body is pressuring you to be better as well. However, with school you have so much more control over certain things, with this, you just have to endure it more from time to time.

I feel like everyone has that one thing that they must let go of and just sit through it. That one thing, big or small, that can give you so much extra stress and can instantly make you feel like a failure. However, you must keep reminding yourself that you’re still the one that’s in control of the play and pause button. Okay, it can force you to a pause. But you decide to play it again. As long as you don’t press the stop button.