Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Be Grateful

It can be hard to understand why we were given a disease.  I think everyone who has ever suffered for anything begs the question, "WHY ME!" Recently T1Empowerment (a group I started) had a speaker, Karli-Ann come to an event I hosted and she talked about the why me question.  Karli has Cerebral Palsy. I have been thinking about it lately, why was I given type 1 diabetes?  I watched as my sister drank a regular iced tea, thinking to myself why did diabetes choose my body and not hers? Not that I wish diabetes on any of my family members, but one must admit they question why they are the 'chosen ones' from time to time.

The more I thought about this the more my mind started to wonder why I never ask myself, "WHY DO I HAVE A WARM HOUSE TO GO TO EVERY NIGHT!"  and "WHY DO I ALWAYS HAVE FOOD IN MY FRIDGE?" We don't ask ourselves these things because it is so easy to take them for granted.  We have a standard of what we expect.  While some people grew up vacationing in adulthood, we just expect we will continue to vacation (like myself) but there are people who didn't grow up going on vacations, so something like a trip to Niagara Falls is considered a vacation - and there is nothing wrong with that. We all expect things in life, we expect that we will have a certain amount of food available, for some people it's a larger number of items than others. We expect that we will have some sort of job, whether that is something minimum wage level or higher.

When the bad things role in like an unexpected health concern or a loss of job we start to blame. We blame 'God' or whoever we believe in or blame.  We wonder how could this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this (insert here).  When in reality, the bump in the road, is merely a bump in the road compared to all the things we have been 'blessed' with.  The problem is it usually something unexpected and unusual. Something that is deemed a pain or obstacle, while we feel as though we don't deserve it - as time goes on we realize the importance the road block was. Maybe it made you stronger, maybe it introduced you to a community that supports you, or maybe it made you realize how lucky you have been to have a roof over your head and food on the table all along.

Whatever the case is, I think that asking why we were diagnosed with diabetes isn't a bad question to ask, we have to then also take the time to focus on why we have been so lucky to have other things in our lives.  We must be grateful.



Kayla

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