This is the second in a series about my teenage years, which were spent almost entirely in a state of defiant self-destruction and non-compliance. It is the hardest part to talk about, so the posts will not be posted one right after the other. Thank you for bearing with me.
When you successfully defy the odds, it is not uncommon to become a boundary pusher. If you got away with it once, why not try again? And again? And again?
When I was first diagnosed with diabetes, I was scared enough to follow the rules for a whole six months. But the whole time, my medical team was using scare tactics and cookie-cutter treatment plans that effectively sowed the seeds of rebellion into something that would grow into something as complicated and impenetrable as the giant thorny forest outside Sleeping Beauty’s castle.
In fact, the seeds had been sewn long before that. In order to psychologically survive my recovery from meningitis, I’d had to raise defensive walls to protect myself from the staring, the rejection, the forceful loss of childhood. It might have receded if I had been able to grow up normally after regaining function. But I didn’t, and anyone who recognizes defensiveness in themselves knows that the right trigger can get you from calm to rage monster in zero seconds flat.
I wasn’t particularly aware that this was my state of mind, but I was 14. Who has self-awareness at 14? I did know that I didn’t like the regimen they had put me on. A mandatory 2500 calories/day for a fairly non-active teenager was too much, but when we protested things like the daily three glasses of milk – I don’t like milk – they refused to change anything. I didn’t like poking myself and I was so afraid of needles I needed a special automatic injector to give my injections. As an overachieving people pleaser who already had an issue with authority and knew it was possible that what a doctor thought could turn out to mean nothing, I just could not seem to get my feet under me. I was struggling. Something had to give. And because of my treatment team’s lack of flexibility and insight, when I ended up going from underweight at 90 pounds to what felt like overweight at 150 in six months, I began to associate insulin with weight gain. So, it was my treatment regimen that gave. I stopped taking the insulin that I thought would make me gain more weight. After a few weeks of not gaining weight (because I was back in starvation mode) and no consequences, I felt more like I was in control. What did they know? Why stop what was working for me?
Of course, the adults around me knew almost immediately. Labs, at least diabetes labs, don’t lie. Those stories of death of a stroke by 19 if I didn’t shape up were now threats instead of warnings. Their frustration, anger, fear, and condemnation were now pointed squarely at me, a child who was used to excellence and approval.
Those already solidly founded defensive walls began to grow higher and thicker. Every day that passed without consequence built my own anger and resentment. Every diabetes-related encounter was a brick in the defensive wall. I continued to do what I wanted and the fear that had driven me after diagnosis got squished into submission behind the stronger, more urgent emotions. It was my only teenage rebellion, but what a rebellion it was. I could not see beyond the next day or week or month. The problem, of course, is that diabetes is one of those conditions where a poor regimen can come back to bite you in the butt decades after you get tired of rebellion and surrender to a healthy regimen. But everyone gets to be young and stupid sometime.
That six months of following the rules was the crucible into which I fed all the fear and anger of my diagnosis. Combine that with the hormonal ups and downs of puberty, the existing, unaddressed residual emotions of the initial childhood trauma, and the inappropriate treatment methods of the only doctor available to treat my diabetes, and it’s no wonder I eventually settled into a “what’s the point?” mentality. But you can’t help someone who is not ready to be helped. It would be a long time before I got there.