Diabetes,

Usually, at some point in life, we get to decide which people and which things we want to keep around. With you, I never had that choice. At five years old, I couldn’t understand what the word “forever” really meant. I couldn’t have known that you would stay by my side for the rest of my life, almost like a third parent I never asked for.

You were there when I started school, when I sat my exams, and when I graduated. You followed me through puberty and challenged me in my relationships and friendships. You were there on every holiday and every school trip. You sent me to the hospital more than once and woke my parents from their sleep countless times throughout the night. You shaped—and damaged—my relationship with food and with my own body. And eventually, at 26 years old, you took a part of my body from me.

I never chose you, but you chose me. And ever since then, there has been an “us.”

Sometimes I wonder how many moments would have been different—not only for me, but for the people in my life—if you could have simply disappeared for a few hours. Maybe the emergency doctor wouldn’t have had to come in the middle of the night while we were on holiday after I lost consciousness from a severe low. Maybe my mother wouldn’t have had to come with me on a school trip. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to stop again and again while playing tennis just to eat glucose tablets and wait for my body to let me continue.

I could have sat my exams without the added pressure of constantly keeping an eye on my glucose levels, and maybe my grades wouldn’t have suffered because of it. I could have stayed over at my friends’ houses without complications or gone to clubs and bars without carrying a huge bag filled with glucose tablets, a glucose meter and pump supplies.

I just wanted to be a girl who could walk into PE without having to switch her pump into exercise mode. I wanted to eat without having to sit there waiting until I was allowed to start while everyone else was already halfway finished.

I just wanted to be Cindy.

But you are a responsibility I have to carry around the clock, and there is simply no break from you. For so much of my life, I was made to feel that I was “different,” and eventually, I started rejecting the very part of myself that made me different.

You placed yourself between me and food. I stopped seeing a meal simply as nourishment; instead, I saw numbers, carbohydrates, calculations and insulin. I learned how to control things from a very young age—and by the time I was 18, I had turned that control against myself.

I knew what high blood sugar could do to my body. But sometimes, there is an entire world between knowing what you should do and being mentally capable of doing it.

For a long time, complications were something abstract in my mind. Until suddenly, the consequences were no longer just numbers on a screen or an HbA1c on a lab report. They became visible on my body when an infection meant that part of my big toe had to be amputated.

Maybe that was your harshest way of teaching me that my body does have limits—and that those limits deserve to be respected.

I just wish you could have taught me that lesson more gently.

And yet, somehow, you also managed to do something I never expected—something I will always be grateful to you for.

What started partly out of defiance and partly as a way to motivate myself ended up changing so much. I wanted to create more visibility for my condition, so I started sharing my sensor changes on social media. Through that, I began connecting with other people with diabetes in a way I never had before.

For the first time, I didn’t feel “different.”

We could talk about things that might sound dramatic to people without diabetes, but to us were simply everyday life. And I remember thinking:

You know this too. You actually FEEL this too.

After all those years of making me feel different, suddenly I found myself somewhere I belonged because of you.

Today, because of you, I get to meet people, build friendships, attend events, experience so many incredible things and be part of a community that the five-year-old girl I once was didn’t even know existed.

Maybe somewhere, a little girl with diabetes will see one of my videos and realize a few years earlier than I did that she isn’t alone with her thoughts, her fears, her worries or her anger. Maybe she will understand that a bad glucose reading doesn’t automatically mean a lack of discipline—and that it is okay to ask for help.

I will never thank you for coming into my life.

You have taken too much from me and from the people I love for that.

But I am grateful for the people I have found along the way. And I will always be grateful that you taught me that life doesn’t have to be perfect to be a damn beautiful one.

And maybe today, I can be the person for someone else that I needed back then.

That is why I share my story. My very far from perfect story—somewhere between an eating disorder, a full-time job, a little dog, my amputation, a lot of fear and shame, but also an enormous love for life that you will never be able to take away from me.

So yes, you will be with me “forever.”

I understand that now.

But for the first time, I also understand that I don’t have to spend forever fighting you.

You are a part of me.

But you are not me.

So I guess, in the end, I curse you for being here.

But somehow, I also have to thank you for being here.