I keep thinking about my father’s suicide, partly because of Christmas. I spent Christmas with him when I was a kid during my elementary school years and into my early adolescence. I have good memories of Christmas with him. Although now that I’m almost 40, he’s dead, and I’ve had a lot of time and distance to consider things in retrospect, I’ve been having this underlying sense of anger, like it’s leaking out the cracks of my good memories, not exactly ruining them, but definitely leaving a lingering sourness.

Of course, the main reason he’s on my mind is because the anniversary of his death is in three weeks. I want to go to Texas, but I’m not sure I can work it out. I went for the one year anniversary, but I didn’t go last year. I intended to, but I had some kind of cold type illness. Driving solo, halfway across the country and back, is therapeutic, but tedious, and at the last minute, I decided I wasn’t feeling up to it.

I go back and forth in my mind about should I go or shouldn’t I. When I go, I visit the grave, I take a flower arrangement, I remember the funeral, and how if I’d only come to Texas two days earlier, maybe he’d still be alive. If only, if only, if only. When I go to the grave, I always have this sense that I should talk to him. I certainly like the idea that he can hear me and is getting something from what I say, but you know I’m not a spiritual kind of person, so I don’t really think anyone or anything is listening, and I feel like a dipshit. I might as well go talk to a tree or a plate of hot wings. I never have a sense of resolution, and I suppose resolution isn’t possible. As people told me in the days and weeks that followed his death, there is no going back to what I knew. It’s a new normal that happens to be an open-ended void of inconclusion, which apparently isn’t a word, but should be.

Then there’s all the recent gun talk, so that’s got me thinking about him. It rubs me the wrong way when people talk about mentally ill people being violent towards others as if that’s the norm. Obviously and tragically, that happens, but people with mental illness are infinitely more likely to be violent towards themselves. I know it’s morbid, but I’m a visual person, and my mind reflexively fills with images of him shooting himself, a bullet in his head, blood all over his shower, him slumped in a heap. He lived for a couple of hours. He called 911 right before he did it so the police would come. Then the ambulance came, they took him to the hospital, they tried to save him.

He loved guns. He had a bunch of them. He hunted. He probably belonged to the NRA, or at least supported them. Then he used one to kill himself. It was a small gun, a handgun. I don’t know if it was a pistol. Can pistols and handguns be the same thing? I don’t know. I don’t need to know, so if you know, don’t tell me. It wasn’t registered. I think it was old, or at least old enough that it was acquired before registering guns was a thing. My aunt has it. She wanted it, like a souvenir. That seems weird to me, but under the circumstances, I accept it. She’s a lunatic gun freak who thinks everyone should have an arsenal. I hate guns. I think they’re stupid. I don’t understand anyone’s obsession with guns and weapons. Collect cuckoo clocks. Collect model cars. Collect fucking paperweights. I wish guns didn’t exist.

My father actually did collect model cars, but that wasn’t satisfying enough to give up his fondness for guns. He was a little OCD about collecting NASCAR shit. We have multiple boxes of everything from limited edition NASCAR model cars that are supposedly worth some kind of money to a collection of empty Kellogg’s cereal boxes with NASCAR people on them that as far as we’ve been able to figure out, aren’t worth the cereal that once filled them. All of his stuff tortures me. It takes up space, so much of it has no meaning to me other than that it meant something to him, and because I had such a negligible connection to him for most of the last 25 years of his life, it’s all I have. It makes me mad too. I can’t think about all his hobbies and interests, and all the time and money he devoted to his hobbies – cars, flying airplanes, scuba diving, guns, fishing and boats – without being reminded of his choice to spend his time and money on that shit instead of having some kind of better, more meaningful relationship with me.

I’m reluctant to post about any of this. It’s depressing. No one wants to talk about it with me, no one knows what to say, and if I talk about it, then people feel obligated to say or do something. Plus, I feel like a whiner. I want to talk about it occasionally, like now, but there isn’t anyone I want to talk to. I don’t want to whine to people I know. I don’t want to talk to people I don’t know, like on a forum for survivors of suicide. I tried that, and it wasn’t for me. As I mentioned, talking to his grave isn’t the answer, although that won’t stop me from saying something the next time I’m there, mostly just to confirm that it doesn’t work. I started to post on Facebook, and I decided I’d regret posting. So I’m posting here. I never post here anymore, so I don’t think anyone reads. That’s consoling I guess… I don’t fucking know.

WEGO Health has initiated the Diabetes InfoGaps Program, which includes a survey about “missing” diabetes topics as a way to identify and then generate information and thoughtful discussion about subjects that people feel haven’t had a fair share of the spotlight. I encourage you to go take it – speak up, be heard!

I started to take the survey, and one of the possible responses, body image, got my wheels spinning. Do you ever think about body image and diabetes? I think about it sometimes because I’m intrigued by the relationship between the two, at least partly because I was pathologically plagued with body image issues for most of my teens into my early 30’s. Body image concerns are common in people with physical conditions, but since diabetes is an invisible disease, I think its relationship to body image is more easily discounted than it might be for someone with a more obvious physical ailment.

So what is body image anyway? I went looking for a good definition for my own clarification. After perusing some websites on the matter, I decided I liked the National Eating Disorder Association’s definition most because it conveys depth of meaning beyond stating “how you see your body and its appearance”, and it helped me think more specifically about the relationship between my experience with diabetes and my body image. According to NEDA, body image is:

• How you see yourself when you look in the mirror or when you picture yourself in your mind.
• What you believe about your own appearance (including your memories, assumptions, and generalizations).
• How you feel about your body, including your height, shape, and weight.
• How you sense and control your body as you move. How you feel in your body, not just about your body.

Painting by Norman Rockwell

For most of my life, the visual clues that I have diabetes have been practically negligible. These days, I wear my pump on my hip, clipped to my pants pocket. I think it’s an unsightly lump inside my pocket or elsewhere under my clothes, so wearing it on the outside has become my preference. On the rare occasion I wear a dress, I have contraptions to wear it under my dress on my thigh, but in lieu of seeing my pump, you can see me fishing it out from under my dress, usually in the most unladylike of fashions, so either way, there’s no hiding it. Besides my pump, the other visual reminders of my disease are gnarly, calloused fingertips, and on the rare occasion I wear a swimsuit, an infusion set and cgm sensor, plus dot-to-dot scars on my abdomen, hips, butt and the sides of my legs. None of that adds up to anything glaringly obvious though, so a quick glance in the mirror shows that I look “normal”.

Picturing myself in my mind is another story because I have a vivid, admittedly morbid imagination. I worry about the possibilities of what diabetes could do to rob me of looking “normal”. How would I look if I was sick from nephropathy, having to go to dialysis several times a week? How would I look if I was blind? What if I had a toe, foot, or leg amputated? I hope those things never happen, but when I think about body image and diabetes, my mind inevitably goes there. Body image is an amorphous thing that changes with time and age, and in the case of diabetes, disease status and complications.

Sometimes, in my mind, and certainly in the mirror, I see myself as this “normal” shell, and I imagine everything inside me rotting. I know it’s not the most optimistic perspective, but for me, that’s what diabetes is and that’s what it does. It rots my body slowly from the inside. Maybe complications will change my appearance, and the rotting will become apparent on the outside, but it’s the damage that I can’t see that scares me more. I feel like a tree infested with insects that gnaw on everything inside that allows me to blossom and spread my roots. One day, the diabetes insects won’t have anything more to feed on, and I’ll just topple over, a dead, diseased tree, bark intact, but the pulp rotted to dust.

Like that rotting tree, with diabetes, appearances are deceiving. In my world, that’s as much a truth as gravity and the cold, refreshing delight of a Diet Coke. I knew from a young age that there was something amiss between my outward appearance and what was happening inside my body. I believe that disconnect became a foundation for the food and body image problems I developed as a teen. Was I a normal, healthy kid or was I a diseased, sick kid, was I fat or was I thin, was I hungry or was I full? How could I feel at ease in a body that didn’t make sense? Even today, I grapple to reconcile my ongoing conflicting experience of myself, looking, sometimes feeling perfectly normal and healthy, but knowing the physiological toll my disease is taking, and sometimes feeling its effects.

To my credit, I’m more comfortable with my body now, both the aspects I like and those features I’ve come to accept as is. Diabetes might be an invisible disease, but I refuse to hide it, and that’s bolstered my body image more than anything I might do to enhance my appearance, although I’m not completely immune to superficial cosmetic woes. I dye my mousy brown and increasingly gray hair a saucy shade of red. I make an effort to walk the dogs so I’m not a total blob. I will always be a little bummed about not having a nice rack, if for no other reason than because there are tons of really cute tops and dresses out there that I literally can’t wear because they need boobs to keep them in place. There is a bright side to not having an hourglass figure though, and instead of lamenting what I don’t have, I try to make the best of what I’ve got.

My feelings about my body are more than skin deep though. They have to be since every other thought is about predicting the internal ups and downs of things and constantly asking myself what I would do at this moment if I was a pancreas. As someone with diabetes, my body image is not just what size jeans I wear, how big or not big my boobs or my tummy or the flab on the back of my arms are. My body image is partly reflected in what I do to enhance the curb appeal, but what good is prettying up the outside if the walls, floors and roof are about to collapse?

How exactly does one have a good body image under these circumstances? The always temporary illusion of control, or the weighty reality that the illusion is as good as it gets. There are moments when it’s really hard to love my body because I often feel like I have no control over it, and I actually lose control when my BG is low enough. My body image is never going to be blemish free, whether it’s the scars from the past, or fresh bruises from trying to navigate through life in a malfunctioning body. I do what I can to counter that by fostering the best body image I can. I monitor my automatic thoughts, and try to focus on the positive ones while dismissing the negative ones. I don’t read women’s magazines or watch shows like America’s Next Top Model because I think they’re all garbage designed to make women feel like they’re not good enough, aesthetically or otherwise. I have a husband whose words and actions indicate he kind of digs me. I wear clothes and shoes I like that fit and are comfortable. I manage my diabetes as well as I can, and that’s made a world of difference for me. I try. I really do. The effort is worth it, but it is effort nonetheless to love a diseased body.

Reverb 10 Prompt: One Word. Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?

Haunted, Courtesy of Webster's

Haunt•ed [hawn-tid, hahn-] –adjective
1. inhabited or frequented by ghosts: a haunted castle.
2. preoccupied, as with an emotion, memory, or idea; obsessed: His haunted imagination gave him no peace.
3. disturbed; distressed; worried: Haunted by doubt he again turned to law books on the subject. (source: dictionary.com)

2010 started brightly, filled with promise and potential, and it did prove to offer many wonderful moments that I don’t want to discount because they were the things that pulled me through. A fabulous 37th birthday party, Jason and I visiting his mom in South Carolina, the ADA Conference, the Roche Summit, Children with Diabetes Friends for Life, 4th of July with my parents, BlogHer with my awesome roomie, Karen, Diabetes Art Day, George’s 20th D-Anniversary weekend which included some much enjoyed time with Sara and her mom, the art therapy conference in Sacramento, and various parties and events with my friends throughout the year.

Unfortunately, when I think about 2010 years from now, those are not likely to be the things that surface from my memory into consciousness first. Only 11 days into 2010, the year became dark when I received word that my father, with whom I hadn’t spoken in five years, had committed suicide. I’ve spent this year trying to deal with it. When it hasn’t been at the top of my agenda, it’s been on the back burner of my mind, constantly with me.

If you could ask the 10-year old version of me if I had a good relationship with him, I would say yes, because I was a kid and didn’t know any better. I have a lot of good memories from the time I spent with him as a child, which I’m glad to have, but as I grew up and my idolization faded to realization, I recognized that our relationship was structurally unsound, and his investment in parenting me had always been half-hearted. My job this year has been to clean up his estate, and find some peace for myself. The former is done, but the latter is a work in progress. In the therapy world, I have what’s called, “complicated grief”, complicated because my father and I were estranged, so after sitting on the idea for months, I finally decided to see a therapist to help heal some of the wounds, both those that are a result of his suicide, and all the old ones that have reopened.

I would never describe myself as a believer in ghosts and the supernatural, but I would never describe myself as an ardent disbeliever either. Much like my position on religion and all things spiritual, I am undecided. All of that aside, I remain haunted by him, my memories, and my unanswered questions. The feeling of being in his house, going through his things, sitting on his furniture, sifting through drawers, cabinets, boxes and closets stays with me. The knowledge that the closest I ever got to knowing him was in the wake of his self-inflicted death sticks with me like residue I can’t rub away. I don’t understand why he seemed to have given up on me, but in the few years preceding his death, I had stopped trying to establish a relationship with him. Now the regret that I didn’t make one more effort has relentlessly followed me.

A presence that can’t be seen, that doesn’t have the shape and form and properties of people and things in the physical world stays with me. It makes itself known with a thought, a smell, a sighting, a sound, a feeling, but I’ve been unable thus far to put it to rest. It’s my hope that I can eventually appease and console it since time and experience weather the sharp edges of painful life events. It’s a slow process though. I look forward to whatever partial resolution I can achieve in the future, but this year, these weeks leading up to the first anniversary, my memories, my regrets, the aspects of me that unmistakably reveal that I am my father’s daughter, remain haunted.

Imagination, Courtesy of Webster's

im•ag•i•na•tion [ih-maj-uh-ney-shuh n] –noun
1. the faculty of imagining, or of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses.
2. the action or process of forming such images or concepts.
3. the faculty of producing ideal creations consistent with reality, as in literature, as distinct from the power of creating illustrative or decorative imagery. Compare fancy ( def. 2 ) .
4. the product of imagining; a conception or mental creation, often a baseless or fanciful one.
5. ability to face and resolve difficulties; resourcefulness: a job that requires imagination.
6. Psychology. the power of reproducing images stored in the memory under the suggestion of associated images (reproductive imagination) or of recombining former experiences in the creation of new images directed at a specific goal or aiding in the solution of problems (creative imagination).
7. (in Kantian epistemology) synthesis of data from the sensory manifold into objects by means of the categories.
8. Archaic. a plan, scheme, or plot. (source: dictionary.com)

There are a lot of things I lack: grace, organizational skills, and athleticism, for example. Imagination is not one of them though. While my imagination does not always work in my favor, like when a scary TV show or ruminations about diabetes complications get stuck in my head and freak me out, most of the time it’s a treasured gift that I’m grateful to have. Without it, I probably wouldn’t be much of an artist, but beyond that, it’s the reason I can think outside the box and problem solve when called to do so. It helps me write, it helps me help others, it helps me see diabetes as something more than doom and gloom.

It’s with me always, but in 2011, I hope it will shine brightly, lighting my way for plans and projects, some that are on the table, and others of which I’ve yet to conceive. I know it will be my guide as I aspire to make Diabetes Art Day bigger and better in the year to come. I know it will be my muse as I continue to pursue my own art-making. Through it, I will see new ways to bring art to you, both online, and possibly in person. 2010 has been a challenging year, but I hope 2011 brings less tragedy and more promise and energy to channel my imagination into constructive, productive outlets. I’m imagining great things to come.

I’m lame because I never posted anything about the BlogHer conference other than the vagina post, but in case you didn’t know, Karen and I were roomies. I adore Karen, and if there’s ever another opportunity to be roomies with her again, I’d jump at the chance because she’s just awesome, and getting to spend lots of time with her made the difference between a good trip and an uber-fabulous trip. Three days and three nights of hanging with Karen meant lots of good discussions about everything from missing our respective hubbies and critters, to the magic of Target, to more serious topics. Amongst all the conversation, I talked to her about my father’s suicide and all the related fall-out. Actually, I think I more accurately talked at her.

I don’t ever really talk about it, so there was rambling word vomit aplenty on my part, and friend that she is, she was a very good listener. One of the things that has preoccupied me all these months, and one of the concerns I expressed to her was whether or not to write about it here, and if so, how to do that. I’m struggling with this now as much as ever because I haven’t found a solution that feels right.

I know there are plenty of people who would graciously listen to me if I wanted to talk about it, but I typically don’t because I feel like such an ominous abyss of doom and gloom when I do. I know there are some people who will graciously read if I write about it here, but given the choice, I think most people would just assume not read about it. I joined an online forum for survivors of suicide, but I’m feeling very ambivalent about it now. The members of the forum are all survivors, so it seemed like a good idea, but now that I’ve tried reading some of it, I find it too depressing. I know how dumb it sounds for me to say that a suicide survivor forum is depressing, as if it would be something other than that, but I guess I didn’t really give much thought to what to expect. I had looked into a local support group, but haven’t been, and feel even less inclined to go now that I’ve tried the online forum. Having not warmed up to any of those options, I feel like the other obvious options are: (a) wait because time heals all wounds, or (b) find a therapist.

Right after I returned from Texas following the funeral, I went to see a therapist. I’m a therapist so I believe in therapy, and I know people go to see therapists to deal with these kinds of issues, so it seemed like a logical thing to do. I purposefully sought one who specialized in grief counseling because that too seemed logical. I talked her ear off, telling her all the details about my relationship with him, or lack thereof, and the circumstances of his death. I’m sure the visit had some value, because I got to tell someone the story in its entirety, but I didn’t care for her. Since this was last January or February, I don’t remember what exactly I didn’t like about her, but mostly I hated that her office was yellow and decorated with a thousand different birdhouses.

Birdhouses aside though, I knew I was trying too hard to tidy up an inherently messy situation. Talking to a therapist to resolve my feelings when I was only beginning to deal with the estate issues wouldn’t have been terribly productive. I knew I wouldn’t achieve any sense of closure as long as I was knee-deep in papers that needed to be notarized, death certificates that had to be faxed, a house to sell, and a mountain of belongings to sort. I decided it was too soon, and not terribly practical to begin a course of therapy, so I put the idea on hold.

My other reservation about starting therapy is that I’ve spent so much of my life in therapy already. My years in therapy truly helped me heal a lot of painful hurts, but prior to my father’s death, I felt like I was finished being a therapy client. A lot of the time I spent in therapy was trying to resolve issues related to my father, our perennial disconnection, and his persistent disinterest in me. A few years ago, I came to accept that he wasn’t willing to invest the effort, and I decided that being responsible for facilitating that relationship was no longer a job I wanted. So I quit, and hoped the day would come when he’d have a revelation that he wanted to be a part of my life.

It was hardly a solution, I know. Instead, it was a holding pattern that was more tolerable than trying to figure out who he wanted me to be so I could try to become that person so that he’d want to know me, which is what I’d been doing since I was a little girl. When I was about 30-years old, I had an epiphany that I was never going to be that person, so it was a matter of him accepting me for who I had become. The wounds of a relationship that had been in disrepair for so long were there, but freeing myself from the obligation to fix it allowed them to heal as much as I thought they could given the circumstances. His death has reopened those wounds though, and suicide has been the metaphorical salt.

I’ve tried to limit my posts about it, but on occasions such as this, I feel like I’m displaying the wounds in all their raw, ugly ooziness, and I can’t imagine anyone wanting to be witness to this, anymore than I was able to read the posts on the suicide survivor forum. They’re the kind of wounds that need air though, and I think hiding them under bandages all the time isn’t good for them. Waving oozy wounds around haphazardly isn’t a good idea either though. When, where, to whom do I let them get some circulation to encourage healing? I don’t know the answers. I’m too ambivalent about therapy at this point to commit to it, so for the moment, here I am because I don’t have a better place.

I am healthy, and that’s how I want others to see and think of me. It’s true that I have diabetes, but I do my best to manage it. It’s true that I have depression, but I take medication so you’d never know that to look at me or talk to me. I grudgingly accept that technically having those diagnoses doesn’t make me the poster child for healthy human beings, however, I believe that my perception of myself as healthy is a better indicator of health than my medical expenditures or diagnostic codes.

I haven’t always thought of myself in this way. In fact, for most of my life, I thought of myself as inherently broken beyond repair. I saw myself as different from the people around me because I had a disease, a disease that plagued my inner world far worse than it could ever plague my body. That plague manifested itself in many unfortunate ways, most notably in the eating disorder I had for so long.

It’s been my personal experience that a lot of people don’t understand eating disorders. Some look at the disease, anorexia, and dismiss it with a flippant, “Those people just need to eat!” Similarly, it makes my heart seize every time I read comments about diabetics who restrict their insulin to lose weight. “Pfft, they just need to take their insulin!” It’s not a matter of “just” doing something so simple though. The eating disorder always serves a purpose, and identifying the purpose is a key to recovery.

My eating disorder served many purposes over the years. It allowed me to punish my body for betraying me by not functioning the way it was supposed to function. It made it easier to push people away from me, and prevent them from knowing the whole me, the diabetic me. Most significantly though, it served as proof that I was broken and couldn’t be fixed. Diabetes wasn’t going anywhere, and certainly confirmed this errant belief about myself, but this more external expression of being ill made it evident that being healthy was outside of the realm of possibilities for me. I needed my eating disorder to maintain my fundamental beliefs about who I was, and as a result of being diagnosed with diabetes, my fundamental belief was that I was sick and there was no cure to fix me.

I can’t tell you when exactly the notion that I might be something other than a sick person first entered my mind, but eventually, thanks to a lot of therapy, I started to conceive of myself as something other than broken. It took time, years really, for this notion to take root and grow, for me to believe that I could be a healthy person even with diabetes. After 18 years of having an eating disorder, the old belief gave way, and today, I see my transformation into someone who is bursting with health as one of my greatest personal accomplishments.

Because I value being healthy, because it hasn’t always been like this, and because it wasn’t really all that long ago that I believed differently, I experience some discomfort looking back at the person I was, and even more anxiety-provoking, it is with great reluctance that I point to it for you to see. I deliberated whether or not to write this, I cringe at the prospect of reminding you that I was so different from what I am today. I cringe at the prospect of you thinking of me as someone less than able to encourage or lead others toward health. I cringe at the prospect of reminding myself how unwell I once was.

However, there are few voices that raise awareness of diabetes and eating disorders, and sadly, even fewer voices of recovery. To my knowledge, there are no statistics about recovery from diabulimia, but I know it’s a persistent illness, similar to all eating disorders. I can only guess that the more severe and longstanding the case, the more the chances of recovery diminish. Thus, as hesitant as I am to raise my hand and remind you of my 18-year history of misusing my insulin, and binging and purging, I feel like doing so might somehow in some way help someone who needs it. Diabulimia is an illness that can feel as irreversible and incurable as diabetes, so knowing someone who truly recovered counts.

Today marks five years of being eating disorder free for me. Five years of recovery doesn’t sound like much compared to almost twenty years of struggling with food and my body, but if I have anything to do with it, five years will become ten, and ten will become twenty, and who know how far I can get now that I’m healthy.