Nearing the end of our regular Friday “life with diabetes” video series from filmmaker Jenny MacKenzie, we bring you a clip that dives into a very personal issue for those who’ve grown up with diabetes and lived with it throughout their childhood and teen years.
The topic: finding the ongoing motivation necessary to keep doing what we’re supposed to, whether it’s checking our blood sugars or counting carbs or even taking insulin. In this clip, one teen talks about how he sometimes “just doesn’t do it… and that’s my own fault.”
Mike says that listening to this young man talk about his D-management gaps, dealing with his mom’s “lecturing” about testing, and just the overall blame game and fear of complications brought back many memories from his own teen years: “I think I’ve said everything he did at some point in my own life!”
Check out the video -
Episode 15: Motivating Yourself
Have you faced these struggles? How so, and what helped motivate you or your child to do better?
This video was the first 3/4 of my life with Diabetes! I had a combination of things going on: doctors/educators not trusting how much information I could handle so not knowing everything that I needed to know, parents being overbearing without really understanding or helping, being a brat
I grew to have fears of my blood sugar numbers because I felt guilty, like if a number was high it was my fault and I was a failure.Which led me to try and ignore my disease, and the vicious cycle continued. When the CDE (or was she an endo?) in the video said “I don’t understand why you don’t…” that was exactly right! Other people DON”T understand. Teenagers generally feel misunderstood anyway, but adding a chronic illness and everyone telling you what you should do when they aren’t living it is hard to take. Not to say that attitude is the right way to handle it, but as a teen that is how I felt. Sometimes, not doing what I should was the only control I felt I had over the dang disease. A few years ago (when I was 22), I ended up seeing a behavioral specialist which got me halfway where I needed to be. I had to come the rest of the way on my own. I took a good long break to get people off my back and had to come to it in my own time when I was ready to face it. I really had to force everyone to give me space and do a fair bit of growing up. I now have the best CDE I have ever had (seriously, this guy deserves an award) and I feel more empowered and in control than I have ever felt.