Today marks the beginning of the 4th Annual College Diabetes Week! This week is hosted by my friends at the College Diabetes Network as a part of National Diabetes Awareness Month. They encourage people within the diabetes community to get involved and follow along throughout the week, whether you’re still in college or not! Stay tuned with the week’s activities by following the hashtag #CDW17 across various social media platforms. They will also be posting updates on their blog, so be sure to check that out, as well!

Throughout College Diabetes Week, I’ll be posting blogs that respond to prompts provided by the CDN. We’ll start with the Monday prompt:

Post a selfie or a picture of day-to-day life living with diabetes in college!

I may not be a college student anymore, but I still live an active lifestyle with diabetes. I felt that this image summed up my daily life with T1D fairly well:

This is an image of my PDM (Personal Diabetes Manager), with the “confidence reminder” menu open. Confidence is a major component of diabetes care. You have to be confident in your abilities to carb count, inject insulin, and respond appropriately to certain situations. You have to be confident in yourself and trust that you can take the best possible care of yourself. Some days that confidence is there, but others it’s not. And both are okay. Unlike the “confidence reminder” option, diabetes isn’t something that you can choose to turn on or off. Daily life with diabetes is constantly trying, and confidence levels will vary.

This is why I chose to visually represent confidence in my snapshot of my life with diabetes.