My body has always been unruly.  As a child, I was so skinny kids would call me Olive Oyl. Now some of you may be wondering, who the hell is “Olive Oyl.” Well, she is the wife of Popeye. Not the chicken place. The sailor man. He lives in a garbage can. He likes to go swimming with bowlegged women. Nevermind.

I have a love-hate relationship with food. But not for the reasons most would think. You see, everything I put in my mouth is a Math equation. I hate Math—especially when 2+2 should equal four, and it doesn’t. Math isn’t so simple when you are an insulin-dependent diabetic. So when my young ass, endocrinologist, asks, “are you Bolusing for the correct amounts?” and I just give them my resting bitch face and respond. “I’ve been doing this math shit since I was 10 years old.” Dont ask me that stupid question because you dont have an answer to my question. I’m obligated to come to this office twice a year for insurance. Just fill my scripts and i will see you in 6 more months. I didn’t say that BUT I’m sure my side eye did because I’m wearing a mask and can’t give my normal RBF. Signed. Filled. See you in 6 months. Guaranteed it will be someone else and my frustration will start all over again.

I have been a diabetic for 45 years. That’s a long-ass time to be thinking about food every day.

Every meal 

Every snack.

 It is what some of us do. If you want to avoid complications. But that’s another story.

It gets very frustrating.

 When I was diagnosed, It was called Juvenile diabetes. Now it’s called Type 1. 

This ain’t your Grandma’s diabetes.

 It didn’t come from eating too much sugar.

 No, I wasn’t a fat kid.

 And Yes, I can eat that.

 But to eat it first, I have to do the math.  Then once you know the math, it’s easy to dose the correct amount of insulin for each carb you eat. Each and every one. Yep, that’s what I said.

Each

One 

That is… easy if… you are not sick, there are no hidden carbs, you are not stressed, not a hormonal teen, hormonal adult, or take meds that have hidden sugars, and all is right in your world.

When I was a kid, I would hide it as much as possible—sneaking off to the nurse’s office in school to take insulin before lunch—hating it. Thinking the other kids would find out. . Your acceptable foods list, you knew the carbs if it was listed on the package, great. Easy math. But if you didn’t know how many carbs, it was a guessing game, and the math was not easy.

 Nope not in front of people

 If I couldn’t be discreet, I would eat without insulin, and my blood sugars would be sky high when I got home, and my mother would be pissed. The worse part,  passing up on something I wanted because I didn’t want anyone to see that weird kid …yeah her. She sticks needles in her stomach because her mom gave her too much sugar. When you are a kid, nobody wants to stand out. You just want to fit in and be…like everybody else. My unruly body made sure I didn’t fit in. That is until I went to summer camp.

Diabetic kids camp.

 I laugh out loud now. That’s is sooooo f**ked up to call it. But that’s what it was. 

 At camp, I was just like everyone else. We were all poking our fingers and sticking needles in our stomachs. We were all doing the math, hopefully not of the top of our heads. Thank god for the invention of insulin pumps. But that’s another story.

At camp, I found my community. We would spend our days hiding from the nurses, sneaking off into the woods not to meet with a crush but to have carbs outs. A carb out… eating contraband the candy the counselors didn’t find when they searched our luggage.

How the hell is a pack of Now and Later’s contraband. As good as that shit it.

Anyway

We would have a competition as to who could eat the most carbs without injecting insulin or letting their blood sugars drop the lowest without passing out. 

Fun times. 

The adult in me says. That was so stupid. That was our way of rebelling. 

It took a lot of growing. Now I am unashamed about my unruly diabetes. I no longer hide checking my unruly blood sugars or dosing insulin. I don’t care if my pump alarm is loud enough for other people to hear.  Nothing is as exciting as seeing someone with a CGM on their arm and the fist bumps we give one another. Or how quickly we lift the sleeve of a shirt to show off the CGM. Especially the “sugarbabies” who decorate their devices with colorful stickers and bling. It’s more… normal. They don’t have to hide.

I think I speak for everyone when I say that College should be free or at least a much cheaper price than what colleges offer. We as college students wake up early, come to class, do assignments, and then go back to work just to pay for college and try to support our lives while also trying to reach our dreams. Once we finish college, its like…well what now?? The life after college is a huge mystery because you could start working your dream job right after college or work a regular 9-5 and be miserable. Its really rare to get THAT DREAM job smack out of college. The amount of money that college students spend just to try to get that job is crazy and its never enough which puts our mental states in bad spot sometimes. The lack of sleep, eating, stress that we get from cramming exams, trying to pitch resumes, finishing assignments, and projects just isn’t worth all that money.

Who was the person who made the call to have people pay for college?? We would like to know man cause college should be free or at least a reasonable price and I’m not just talking about community college. College in general. We shouldn’t be in debt years down the line and feeling bad or regretting college because the amount of money that we owe after graduation. Gradation should be the happiest part of finishing but sometimes its not because students realize the amount of many that they owe once they’re done if they’re not on scholarships or have a real good job to pay it off in a couple of years. Moral of this story is……Stop making College stressful and overpriced! Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

Do I actually want children or do I only want children because society, culture, and family has enforced the idea I do? When I was younger this was an easy question to answer. I would have said something along the lines of: “Of course I want children. Who wouldn’t? I want 4 kids!” I thought that was what you were supposed to do when you “grow up.” You get married and then have children… easy. As I got older I realized very quickly that it was not that simple. 

First off, pregnancy and giving birth affects your body in so many ways. Pregnancies are not as simple as cravings and a round tummy. Your body has to completely transform and adjust for the baby growing in your stomach. Some of these changes are permanent. And then there are so many stigmas around women having sagging breasts, stretch marks, and their vagina stretching. As if any of that even matters. I don’t know if I am ready for my body to completely change. Also, the thought of my vagina ripping gives me chills. I will never be mentally prepared for that.  

Another aspect of having children that scares the shit out of me is somehow fucking them up. That might be a harsh way to put it, but that’s exactly how I feel. What if I don’t give it enough love and attention… or I give it too much? What if I’m too strict or I’m too lenient? How do you even raise kids? I know my parents did the best they could to raise me but I really wish they could have done a lot of things differently. I wish they could have waited to have me and my brother when they were more financially stable and their marriage wasn’t on the verge of falling apart. 

Once you have children you suddenly have to live your life for someone else. Your decisions in life now directly affect another human being. I can’t choose to suddenly move to a different country and live out a dream there because I have to consider my child that relies on me. I am so scared I am going to lose my identity. I always think about how much happier my mother would be if she didn’t spend the majority of her life raising us. She could have done so many more things. Maybe she wouldn’t have felt like she needed to be stuck in a bad marriage, and she could remarry and find actual love. 

But at the same time, I love kids. Any time I see my younger cousins I love playing with them. I love holding and cuddling babies. It’s exciting to think about taking care of a baby and having a family with the person I love. Whenever anyone asks if I want kids my answer is usually yes, but I always explain my hesitations. I know that if I ever do decide to have my own children I have to be 100% okay with everything that could possibly go wrong. 

At times my body doesn’t feel real. Could it be my routine? Or the fact that when I go about my own day, I’m forced to mask myself when I’m inside my parent’s house. Now me lacking the sense of my own body isn’t something I have considered to always be negative. Sometimes I just need the escape from everyday routine and interactions with my family at home is especially tiring. Preparing in the morning on some days, I stare a little too long at the full-length mirror by our bathroom and think to myself, “is this really me?”. I’m generally introverted, but I do like having social interaction depending on who it’s with, usually close friends.

Though the pandemic came almost two years ago, we are not yet over the lasting effects of the COVID-19 virus, so why are we as a society moving forward as if we have beaten it?

I moved into my apartment here in Baltimore a couple of weeks before the semester started. In the hardly-two-months I’ve lived here, I’ve been preoccupied with school, finding work, finding affordable groceries, and going to the gym. It was a friend’s birthday this week though so her and I hit the town on Thursday. We pre-gamed in my living room and talked about how we’d never been out without male partners, or male friends and that tonight felt both liberating and unprotected. I’m not too far from Federal Hill so we walked along the bar strip, heading in and out of bars until we found one we liked. The Charles was hosting a four-year anniversary party (which seemed pre-mature and anticlimactic to us, but maybe four years is a long time to be established in Baltimore?) in which most people were dressed in suits and spring dresses, and others showed up in VOLO jerseys and shorts. Our outfits landed us somewhere in between, but the bar wasn’t playing Wonderwall or Santeria and that seemed good enough to us.

A women in uniforms is attract, so why is a school girl uniforms apart it? do you fap to sailor moon? why is grown women wearing something for a child?

The question can also be asked, why does society allow or even encourage the display of grown women acting as if they have been perpetually trapped as a twelve year old girl.

The answer could come from several arias.

Such as society’s obsession with the stone like permanence of youthful looks. A obsession as old as time.

On the opposite side of the argument one could also point to the consumers of the school girl fetish. A assumption could be made that people who have failed to grow past their teen years and refuse to move to the adult years. Growth is one of the most important things for a persons life. Emotional, intellectual and physical are all different but are equally important, this must be stated because if these developments are ignored ones personality can regress and fail to advance. This can lead a person to idealize their “prime” aka the easiest and happiest time in their life; And so these people idealize and fetishizes the youth and innocents of a school girl.

Inconclusion, we shouldn’t include the uniform of children in sexual fantasies because things of that sort of thing can lead to the danger of immoral sexual fantasies that then can lead to something actually happening to children in real life.

There was always someone trying to tell me who I should be. I should claim my white side more than my Filipina side. I should be this person that they want me to be. Erasing a part of me that existed solely for their approval, because on the outside I didn’t “look the part”. Even though I had all of the qualities, all of the cultural traditions; the only difference was that I was American and not from the island itself. I looked in the mirror, and never accepted parts of me for the sake of having friends. I tried to change the clothes I wore, my entire style and what made me ‘me’, and despite all of the effort, it still was never enough.

When you think of a muslim what comes to your mind first? A modest woman in a hijab? A man with a beard? Sunday school, mosques, exotic foods? Men and Women within a close-knit community, with a conservative look to match their conservative morals?