Today is the last day of the Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge, and the prompt is to describe my HAWMC experience in one word. My word is obsessive. While – as I mentioned yesterday – I enjoy writing, and having a daily prompt makes the process a lot easier in some ways, I found myself quite obsessed with getting a blog post written for each day of the month. This can be a bit much on top of everything else that’s going on. I am impressed with people like Seth Godin, who do this all year long!
Anyway, being obsessed about writing blog posts reminds me about how easy it is to obsess about other things in our lives. With diabetes, we can find ourselves obsessing about numbers or food or exercise. By obsessing, I mean hyper-focusing or thinking about one or a combination of these things all the time. It can distract us and cause us to lose productivity in other parts of our lives. And can also lead to diabetes distress.
Sometimes such obsessive patterns can lead to throwing in the towel or giving up on diabetes management for a day, a week, or even a long time. I’m constantly saying and writing that “it’s all about balance.” For me, balance means not being obsessed and not being apathetic, but living somewhere in the middle. Paying attention to diabetes, respecting it, so to speak, but not letting it take over my life. I think this is how I avoid distress.
I’m not sure how, exactly, I came to not obsess about diabetes (and this was not always the case), and trust me, there are certainly other areas that I stress, obsess and distress about! But every morning I get to start over and strive for balance once again.