I knew 2025 was going to be bad. (I feel like that could be my “Once upon a time” line for this year.) We all braced for it, but we couldn’t have known how quickly everything would start to feel like it was unraveling. And that’s just the macro environment – politics, economy, foreign relations.

I did not know that 2025 was going to be bad on a personal level. Since Christmas (close enough to count as 2025), my circle of friends has been hit by the loss of four human loved ones, two and a half beloved pets (the third pet is recovering from a serious stroke), and a near successful suicide-attempt. It has only been three months.

I don’t have kids, for a lot of reasons. One of the biggest is that, with all my conditions, I just didn’t have the energy a kid would require. It wouldn’t be fair to anyone involved if I brought a child into the world without the capacity to give them the necessary attention.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have incredibly close and rewarding relationships with several kids, especially the ones in my own family. In fact, I just got back from a kid birthday trip. And to come home to the news that a school aged child had died of measles hit hard.

Guilt, shame, and fear are what I think of as the patient emotional trifecta. Shame is the stigma that often comes with our conditions. Fear is the constant state of wondering when the next shoe will drop and what your future will look like as your condition progresses. But the guilt. The guilt is more complicated.

Back when I was diagnosed, fear was a common motivator applied to patients to keep us on our recommended regimen, whether that regimen fit us or not. But even without using fear as a tool, there is a higher level of awareness of what could happen if we don’t stick closely to the “right” treatment plans. If we step off the prescribed path and we get worse, we tend to tie our worsening symptoms directly to our “misbehavior.”

Mom always said you can’t help how you feel.

This is true. Our emotions stem from our experiences, both past and present. We can channel them. We can work on how we respond to them. We can subdue them. (I don’t recommend that last one.)

But we can’t make ourselves feel happy when our ex announces their engagement to someone else if that’s not how we feel about it.

The last several days have been emotionally, um, precarious?

I have a confession to make. It’s been almost a year since I saw most of my doctors. That is the longest I’ve gone since my 1991 diabetes diagnosis.

Why?

Lack of mobility – it was a while between when my car died and I got a new one, and my chronic nausea turns into debilitating motion sickness when I am not driving. Ride shares have to be limited based on how long the trip will be, and even then, I carry saltines, water, and hard candy with me.

OK, that’s only partly true.

I didn’t really want to see any doctors after my surgeries last year, so after I cancelled a few that were scheduled during the short recovery period, I just never bothered to reschedule.

Essentially, I used surgery as an excuse to cancel reasons to leave my apartment.

I am an all-or-nothing kind of person. A lot of us are. It has its pluses and minuses. I can be very driven about the things I want to achieve. That’s good. But for the things I know are necessary but not what I want to do, I fall into Newton’s first law of motion – I am an object at rest that isn’t going to be anything but at rest. That’s not good.

The reality is that there is very little black and white in the world. Most of it is shades of gray, but I just don’t think like that. Add my tendency to have my feet on the figurative gas pedal and the brake at the same time, and you have the ideal setup for failure.

Of course, this hits the hardest for me with exercise. Because it’s me. I hate it, especially cardio, which works like magic on blood sugars. And maybe food logging, which (to paraphrase 10 Things I Hate About You) I hate with the power of a thousand suns.

This week, I spoke with a patient with a condition that is difficult in a way mine aren’t, and they made me think. They were always active, but as their condition progressed, they had to ease off some of their favorite sports because the symptoms of their condition physically shut them down. They are particularly competitive, and stepping back upset them, but they had certain things they love they just weren’t willing to give up for the condition. That was their red line.

It’s weird to write a whole post about a car, isn’t it? Although I have alluded to this before. But this car has been with me for almost my entire adult life. Maybe my entire adult life, considering I always felt I was behind my peers by a few years or ten.

In another lifetime, I worked for Honda North America. I wasn’t at a dealership. I was at their legislative affairs (lobbying) office in downtown Washington, DC. When I started, I was driving an Oldsmobile Delta 88, a real boat of a car I had “acquired” from my parents after my mom died — primarily because I had been doing all the driving while she was dying — and just sort of kept.

It used to be that every October, I would get a cold. It was like clockwork. Sometimes it was the only time I got sick. Sometimes, the littles in my family gave me a few more over the year. (I actively decided a long time ago that spending time with my littles was worth a cold now and then.)

Then COVID happened, and I didn’t get anything because I wasn’t around anyone. Or anywhere, for that matter. It was nice.

This year, it feels like my clockwork clock is missing a few gears.

Election Day

I was hiding in my shower earlier today. Before I voted. (I wait until Election Day because my polling place is in my building, and it tickles my funny bone to go in my pajamas.)

I’m happy I voted in this historic election, and I will make sure I write 2024 on my sticker before I put it away with other mementos.

I try not to pay attention to the news at all. I know nothing will be worth knowing until results start pouring in. Fielding calls from half a dozen friends and relatives all day helps.

A few hours in, I have a pit in my stomach.