Dr Ashley Ng

When I was diagnosed with diabetes, my world crashed around me. I went through a period where I was angry with life. It wasn’t fair that I was the one diagnosed with diabetes, especially when others around me were abusing their bodies with drugs and alcohol. I was jealous of my friends who didn’t have to worry about how the food they ate or things they do impacted their sugar levels. They just…lived.

Those few years, I felt like I was wallowing in this sinkhole or wading through muck. It really wasn’t until I found my people – other people with diabetes that my mindset started to shift. Seeing them live their lives and do amazing things despite diabetes gave me a sense of hope. It also made me realise that life is too short to spend your energy being angry and upset at things you cannot control.

When I started “accepting” my diabetes, I focused on the positive changes that diabetes has had on my life. I have a really good understanding of food and exercise and its impact on my sugars and general health. I have made some amazing friendships thanks to diabetes. On top of that, I have learned some really foundational life lessons, like the importance of the way you talk about yourself and things around you. It’s a lesson I am reminding myself of at the moment.

Lately, I’ve been feeling really negative about lots of things in life. The kids have reached peak terrible twos and threenager phase. Work has been incredibly busy with little sign of easing off. The Winter bugs lived with us for a month as it picked us off one by one. Throw in a major deadline that would determine my career meant I was in real survival mode.

I started noticing this negativity in the way I would talk about things. Really I should be focusing on how insightful and curious my kids are, how much I love and thrive on the intellectual stimulation from my work, and how excited I am to be putting together this application and how much it means to me to have everyone suppoting me to get it done.

However, I think there is a fine balance to this before it reeks of toxic positivity. It’s okay and perfectly normal to feel angry, despair and sadness when something bad happens. All those negative feelings around life being difficult and exhausting are real. Things aren’t always rainbows and butterflies, which is what social media can sometimes only portray.

So if you’re feeling sad, angry, frustrated, burnt-out, exhausted and alone, I am right there with you. I’ve read that a good strategy to overcome this slump is to give yourself time and permission to wallow in these bad feelings. After however long you’ve set for this, start focusing on moving forward. Whether that looks like breaking down a big task into smaller more manageable ones, or debriefing with someone, or focusing on prioritising self-care, we need to find ways to progress. The last thing we want is to play victim and allow things like diabetes to dictate our lives. We need to take charge and show them who’s boss.