I am now blogging at The Chronic Scholar. See you there!

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it has been a while since i wrote last.
can i just chalk it up to graduate school?
working at 18 credits at once is just as challenging as i expected.

because my life is academia right now, i wanted to share a past essay. i wrote it during undergrad and have found new meaning in the topic of discussion.

as i read and brew over disability studies, what disability is and what part i have in the conversation, i see more and more of a connection my religious studies degree.

one reason why we take to religion is because it helps us make sense of the reality we experience. religion gives us meaning, and in some cases, hope. for the purpose of this post, religion gave me a new lens to set disability identity against.

and the contemplation continues…

My Nuclear Family

My mother, Mary, and father, Richard, brought me into existence in 1990, three years after bringing my sister, Brittany. We were born into a legacy -albeit a newly formed one- that would, in many respects, define who we were and how we walked in the world. The dynamic relationships within my family have worked to mold each of us as individuals, but also redefine the public and private notion of what it means to be a ‘Gabel’. We have all been essential in creating each other, ourselves, and our collective. This essay borrows from the concept of Indra’s net explored by Francis H. Cook to illustrate the fundamental nature of the interdependent dynamic relationships that have formed our individual and collective identities.

The jewel net of Indra, sometimes referred to as ‘Indra’s net’, is a metaphor for a concept of interdependent identity. The metaphor presents an image of a net of reflective jewels. Each of the jewels captures a reflection of all other jewels, which also each contain an image of all others, so that when one looks at any single jewel, one sees every jewel. The jewels here represent all things in the universe. Thus this model suggests that all components of reality are not only dependent on, but also made up of all other components, so that no one component can exist alone. It also suggests that each component is essential to the unitary whole, hence with even one component missing, the whole wouldn’t be complete. According to this model, as Cook says, “nothing exists truly in and of itself, but requires everything to be what it is” (220). Further, Cook asserts that within this model is a concept of codependent origination. This means that not only is each component defined by its co-components, but also each can be said to have given rise to all of the others. In Cook’s own words, “each is at once the cause for the whole and is caused by the whole, and what is called existence is a vast body made up of an infinity of individuals all sustaining each other and defining each other” (219). Perhaps it is apparent then, that a contemporary example or application of the concepts of interdependent identity and co-dependent origination is a nuclear family. A nuclear family consists of a mother, father, and their children living in a house separate from any extended family. It is a notion of family that is prevalent in the United States and other ‘western’ countries and is often referred to as the ‘immediate’ family.

The members of my family have similar mannerisms and dispositions, and share the same sense of humor. We learn from one another in every aspect of life. When I spend time with my sister, I in some way get to see my mother and father, because she reflects their personalities. The same goes for my mom and dad, if I am with one of them, it feels like I am with all of them.

But it is not just our personalities and the identities associated with those that fit the model presented by Indra’s net, it is also our symbiotic relationships. When something happens to one of us, it happens to all of us. We all feel it, we all react and adapt to it. For example, when I was eleven, I was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. Because it wasn’t genetic in my case, it was wholly unexpected. After my diagnosis, my parents took on the disease themselves. They began holding fundraising events to raise money for The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and began advocating for diabetes awareness. When I was diagnosed, it was as if we were all suddenly ‘diabetic’. We took it on as one. We learned together, we struggled together.

Being an individual is a requirement in this society. Making clear your distinctive identity, as if to prove some unique self apart from family, friends, or any other being has become paramount to success and prestige. But I would agree with Cook when he argues that, “the part and the whole in this sense are one and the same thing, for what we identify as a part is merely an abstraction from a unitary whole” (221). Without the whole, there cannot exist the parts that make it up, therefore, individuals can never be wholly independent. Further, Cook argues, “to insist that it is only a part is to fall into a fallacious view of the whole as an independent and subsisting entity to which parts belong” (220). So, not only do the individual components depend entirely on the unitary whole, but also the unitary whole depends entirely on the individual components. Therefore, neither the whole nor the components can exist on their own.

This concept is a bit tricky to apply to people because the world clearly does not cease to exist if one person dies, if one component can no longer perform their function. I would argue, however, that some parts of the world do suffer at the loss of an individual; and that they not only suffer from heartache but also from loss of potential to grow from that component. That is to say, when an individual dies, other individuals who would have been impacted by said individual are robbed of their opportunity to grow. Before I was diagnosed with diabetes, I was on the brink of death. Had my doctor not figured it out when he did, had I died, my parents and sister would be entirely different people. Their collective identity, their whole, would have been privately and publically transformed in an entirely different way. Being a ‘Gabel’ would carry a radically altered meaning. We are a family of individual components who depend on each other and our collective whole for personal growth and identity. We represent each other, reflect each other, and sustain each other; we act as one. My family is a jewel net. As Cook says, “ It is not just that “we are all in it” together. We all are it, rising or falling as one living body” (229).

References:
Cook, Francis H. “The Jewel Net of Indra.” Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy. Ed. J. Baird. Callicott and Roger T. Ames. Albany: State University of New York, 1989. 213-30. Print

i tend to have high hopes for conferences,
and i’m no statistician, but roughly 90% of the time, those high hopes are met or surpassed.

this week i’m in new orleans for #aade15 – american association of diabetes educators national conference 2015. my attendance here is all thanks to the diabetes hands foundation‘s diabetes advocates program. DHF offered fantastic scholarships for this summer’s conference line-up. if you missed some of the conferences and are looking for summary, don’t miss everybody talks – DHF’s brand new podcast covering topics related to diabetes. plus, the hosts are pretty baller.

i have been anxiously awaiting this week’s festivities as it will be my first time attending a conference as a graduate student.

[dusts off shoulder]

pride aside,
whether or not my role at #aade15 will change has been weighing heavily on my mind.

will my lens be different?
i’ve thus far attended conferences solely as a representative of diabetes hands foundation,
or as an individual patient advocate.
now, i’m looking for what metrics researchers are measuring, whether their studies are problem or emotion focused, and how well their findings translate into clinical practice.

should my lens be different?
am i a patient first and a researcher second while here,
or the other way around?
perhaps there is a way i can fuse both hats?

half professional, half lived-experience?

if there is a way to fuse the two, i’ll find it this week.

here are some of the sessions i’ve got high apple pie in the sky hopes about:

Patient Advocacy Across the Ages: Navigating Diabetes Management Challenges at School, on the Job, and in Other Aspects of Daily Life

Thriving, Not Just Surviving: Empowering Patients with Type 1 Diabetes

Transitioning Ideas into Action: Applying Evidence Based Practice to Your Next Innovative Diabetes Project

this is my dad and i’m so proud of all the work he put in.
if i can dance around that well when i’m his age (cough cough, 61),
i’ll be happy as a whale in a kelp storm!

dear author of the above postsecret,

i’ve rewritten the first line of this letter so many times, this nothing of a sentence will simply have to do. hi. my name is heather and i have been living with diabetes for thirteen years; not sure how much time from diagnosis to now i have spent pretending i didn’t have this damned disease. diabetes is the pits and many blame us for it. nothing helps us try to self manage better than being told we deserve what we got, huh?-(insert aggressive wink to denote sarcasm here). living with diabetes can be soul sucking and when we pretend it isn’t, the soul-suckage seems to increase exponentially.

i’m not writing you this letter because i have seen the light and am on the other side of the invisibility cloak, because i’m not. in many ways i’m right in there with you. hiding. pretending. for now and perhaps the rest of my life i will experience health tribulations that lead me to mask diabetes, removing its face, voice, and presence completely. i might be an expert in pretending i have a better handle on my diabetes than i actually do.

when i read your secret, the first thing i wanted to do was reach out and hug you. mostly because i would want a hug myself, but also because hugs happen a lot here. here… in the diabetes online community – affectionately called the #doc. the DOC is where i found the courage to come out from under the diabetes invisibility cloak for the first time.

i’m guessing from your submission to postsecret, that you too find comfort in the anonymity of the internet. the web is loaded with opportunities to purge painfully repressed emotions. i’ve taken advantage of those resources before as well. i did reach a point, however, when purging wasn’t quite enough.

when i read your secret, the second thing i wanted to do was lead you to all of the beautiful people living with diabetes right here on the internet who have experienced life under the diabetes cloak. most of us here have gone through periods of hiding our diabetes from strangers, from our friends, and from ourselves. because of these people, who show humility and courage exactly like you did in that postsecret card, the diabetes that has been my tantalizing struggle transformed from a ‘mine’ to an ‘ours’.

so now, even when i’m nestled tightly under the diabetes cloak, i’m in there with company, with friends, with family.

i’m not writing this letter asking you stop pretending you don’t have diabetes.
i’m writing this letter asking you to give up on pretending alone.
look around you and find that the cloak is actually an expansive tent, filled with individuals under their own cloaks – feeling isolated, blamed, ashamed, burnt out.
let my friends be your friends
and allow diabetes to be more than just yours.

diabetes, dear author, is ours.
if we have to pretend, let us do it together.

hoping you find us near you,

Heather the diabetic.

did you ever keep a journal?
write a paper in high school or college?

have you ever left it long enough to semi-forget that you even wrote it to begin with?

if you have, how did you feel about the way a younger you reflected upon the world?

reading through some of my earliest posts on this blog… which mike lawson inspired me to create by the way… was a whole great big mess of emotion.

in part, i wondered how any one was ever able to comprehend my writing.
so jumpy and wordy and odd.
in… another part… i felt proud to have documented such detailed memories.

overall, my favorite post is one that i wrote two christmases ago, about an annual gift of candy that didn’t stop coming even after i was diagnosed with diabetes.

it meant a lot to me that my family didn’t let diabetes change tradition.

and even now when i read it, i get choked up with gratitude for my darling aunt donna.

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today’s topic:

Click for the Favorites and Motivations – Saturday 5/16 Link List.
If you have been blogging for a while, what is your favorite sentence or blogpost that you have ever written? Is it diabetes related or just life related? If you are a new blogger and don’t have a favorite yet, tell us what motivated you to start sharing your story by writing a blog? (Thank you Laddie of Test Guess and Go for suggesting this topic.)