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Tuesday, July 17, 2018

On A Transformative Experience


As I sit here, I struggle to express my thoughts in prose. I worry that my ability to use the English language to express myself is a failure which infuriates me but also drives home the point about the relationships I made this past week. You see, there is stark contrast between my ability to use language to express myself and the level of comradery that is felt between those who live a shared experience with t1d. The barriers that language fails to overcome are conquered by a shared experience that has no bounds. What follows is my feeble attempt to express my feelings in writing when language cannot reasonably illustrate the human experience.


I feel like in your life, there are those collections of moments that will inevitably become transformative experiences. As far as I can tell, it is these experiences that define my life. They make life worth living and make it a truly unique experience. Their differences separate us in the same moment that they draw use in closer. Trying to explain how I feel to others after events like these often becomes an experience of exulansis in and of itself which frustrates me to no end. Sometimes you know during these experiences that they will have a lasting impact on you, but most often it doesn’t hit you until after the fact. I honestly think that I can count the number of truly transformative experiences that I have had on one hand. For me, these experiences tend to come with a myriad of emotions that I often can’t make sense of in my mind let alone put into words. Despite my best efforts, I end up leaving these experiences sad due to their eventual and inevitable ending, all the while fully believing in not crying because it is over but being happy because it happened (putting adages into practice is a life long struggle for me). These are things you think of when you lie down to sleep at night or are alone with yourself in your airplane seat on the way home while listening to one of those songs that lets you slide deep into thought. When the world bustles around you but you feel more alone because you are so wrapped up in your own thoughts, emotions and experiences. When you sit at home and are just so grateful for that experience and know that your life after will never be the same as your life before. There is nothing more special in life than knowing that you have been changed by others in the most magical of ways.

This past week I had the immense privilege of traveling down to Orlando (yes Orlando in July, no I did not melt) for the Children With Diabetes Friends For Life Conference. The week was a complete whirlwind of activities and adventures. From spending some time running around with a bunch of 7 year olds to running between rides at Animal Kingdom, I returned to Utah both physically and mentally exhausted in all of the best possible ways. I am still trying to debrief.


 Now, I am not saying that I am glad I have diabetes, but I will say that I am glad for all the people that type 1 has brought into my life. In truth, diabetes has given me more than I ever could have imagined. I have opportunity to share my experience with people all over the world and meet so many unique and beautiful individuals. I can’t ever know if I would be the same person without diabetes as I am with it, but I do know that I would not be the same person had I not met all of the wonderful people who make up the diabetes communities that I am a part of. It is a really strange thing to meet a group of people and immediately feel like you have known them forever. It is even stranger when you immediately feel comfortable showing them all of your flaws and somehow know that you won’t be judged for them. As a person who fears the feeling of monachopsis, being at ease among others you have barely just met is welcomed whole heartedly. I can attest with certainty that this past week was one of the truly transformative experiences of my lifetime and I would not give that up for the world (even if diabetes comes with it).



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