I am the type of person who always has “a plan”.

On second thought, that may be an understatement. I’m the type of person who always NEEDS TO HAVE a plan.

I always need to know the date, time, location, and what to expect during my length of stay when it comes to anything in life: a night out with friends, a quick trip to the grocery store, a vacation.

I always need to know what the plan is for dinner…and breakfast, and lunch, and snacks…every single day.

I always need to know what my options are should a plan not go according to my carefully thought out course of action; in other words, I take a great deal of comfort in having a Plan B…and a Plan C, Plan D…

The bottom line is, I think that my obsession with planning has a lot to do with how my diabetes has turned me into an absolute control freak over the years.

Let me explain: Try as I might, I will never have complete control over my diabetes. This has been a difficult reality for me to accept, but it’s the truth, and I know that nobody can ever truly control diabetes. It has a mind of its own sometimes, and the best that we can do is react accordingly to the curve balls it throws.

Since I won’t ever have control over this major, major thing in my life, I think this has triggered me to feel compelled to control everything else in my life…even things beyond my control. And yes, it’s as maddening as it sounds.

It affects myself and everyone close to me.

It is the reason why I worry so much and waste a lot of brain space on things that I shouldn’t.

And it’s something that, though I’ve come to terms with it, I would like to change because the rational part of me knows that it’s not healthy to maintain the unrealistic expectation that I can control everything that happens in my life. If I can accept things like random pod failures and unexplained high blood sugars, then shouldn’t I also be able to accept that other random things can just happen in life, such as a pipe bursting in my apartment or the car I’m driving getting a sudden flat tire?

The more rigid version of myself that existed a year ago would’ve absolutely panicked and melted down in the face of those scenarios, but the type of person I’m trying to be now actually recently handled both of those unpredictable events with a lot more coolness and calmness than I ever could have imagined.

So I guess what I’m getting at here, in a very long-winded way, is that my diabetes may have turned me into an obsessive planner control freak…but I’m just beginning to discover my ability to let go a little more and not let my diabetes affect my thinking and reactions to many other things that happen in life.