Diabetes Blog – Happy-Medium.net

Today, Happy Medium turns 6. Today, I turn 56 years old. And yes, even though I’m not close to retirement, I’m at least doing the math.

Another Blogabirthday is here.

The 788 blog posts I’ve shared, including this one, have meant so much. This website has given me an extended chance to speak about subjects that have been very important to me.

Okay, there have been recipes and vacation recollections I’ve shared too, but I keep coming back to the main purpose of this blog: To connect, to share my thoughts, to serve as a platform for learning and sharing what I’ve learned. Also, to serve as a personal journal of sorts, so people reading this after I’m gone can see what it was like living with diabetes in the mid 20-teens.

It can’t all be seriousness and clinical thinking though. If that’s what this was about, I think I would have lost my inspiration for it a long time ago. While posts have been a little less frequent in the past year, they’ve still been regular, and that brings me to this thought:

I really, really like writing here. If you write a blog too, you might have a sense of this, but if you don’t, I don’t know if there’s a way to describe how blissful I feel every time I sit down to write something. It never seems like a chore.

This is one of the only places in my life (maybe the only place in my life) where no one can tell me what to say or how to say it. Every time I think about that, I almost get chills thinking of how absolutely free that makes me feel.

There are still many of us writing out our thoughts, educating others, and chronicling our lives online. I’m not unique. I think if you were to ask all of us for a memorable moment from blogging or other social media activism, my guess is we’d all recall something that had a direct impact on the life of one individual.

Readership at Happy Medium has gone up and down and up again over the years. I don’t pay too much attention to the stats. What I pay attention to is when I can express something that makes someone feel better, either physically or emotionally. That makes me want to come back to the keyboard and do the same for someone else, because no one should have to feel like they’re alone living with diabetes.

It’s as true as when I wrote this almost five years ago:

“If you’re only reaching one person, that one person is the most important person in the world… Your story is the most important one in the world to the person moved by it. Don’t let down the one person who needs to hear you.”

Whether you make that connection online or off, this is what makes the Diabetes Community special. Share your story. Use your freedom. Never take it for granted.