{"id":48911,"date":"2018-04-18T11:44:27","date_gmt":"2018-04-18T15:44:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=48911"},"modified":"2018-04-18T11:44:27","modified_gmt":"2018-04-18T15:44:27","slug":"unicorn-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=48911","title":{"rendered":"Unicorn Hope"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I pricked my finger the other day, mindlessly, as I have done roughly 21,900 other times since I was 14, squeezed a drop of blood from my fingertip, and coaxed it onto the edge of a test strip, that golden siphon. <em>3, 2, 1. <\/em>This routine, <em>prick-squeeze-coax,<\/em>so engrained I could do it with my eyes closed, and have.<\/p>\n<p><em>Beep <\/em>and result: <em>100. <\/em>My blood sugar is 100 mg\/dL.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-48916 lazyload\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" data-src=\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/BG100-pic-768x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"667\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Suddenly I\u2019m awake, embodied. My blood sugar is perfection, that elusive ideal. <em>100.<\/em>\u00a0A+. I\u2019ve worked very hard to <em>not <\/em>\u00a0equate my glucose levels to school grades\u2014no passing, no failing. I believe this is vital, to keep walking through the highs and lows of our days. And yet, let\u2019s just say hypothetically\u2026 if this <em>were<\/em>a grade, I would get all the points. Bright and shimmering star stickers running through my veins. Rainbow-skied chest expansion, this 100. To see it on the glucometer, however fleeting, is a note straight to the heart, saying:<em>Hey, we\u2019re okay. <\/em>It provides the most brilliant deep breath. <em>We are more than okay. We\u2019re golden, we glow. <\/em><\/p>\n<p>I love the diabetes online community (DOC), and participate actively with my blog and my blog\u2019s Instagram account. Like most social media trends, I don\u2019t know when or how this became \u201ca thing,\u201d but one of my favorite posts to see people share is a smiling picture of themselves holding their glucose meter or CGM, giving us a glimpse of this cause for celebration\u2014that 100. \u00a0Unicorn that she is: mystical, fleeting, and pure.<\/p>\n<p>This is what many of us in the DOC refer to a 100mg\/dL reading as: a unicorn. I posted one of these unicorn selfies the other day, grinning and holding my glucose meter up to the camera to say <em>YAY! <\/em>and I was met with a dozen unicorn emojis from a dozen people with type 1 diabetes, who all know the planet-spanning significance of these seemingly small moments, deep in their bones. These numbers that, to most people, mean nothing. These numbers that most people\u2019s bodies just balance themselves. But not ours, for we carry the unicorn-blood inside of us, always. We\u2019re the humans waking up and going to graduate school, full-time jobs, doctor\u2019s appointments, birthday parties, book clubs, conferences, and foreign countries, while also filling in for the life-or-death job of a particularly challenged pancreas. We are magic, and carry a quiet, shimmering strength. We are lucky to be alive\u2014life itself perhaps being the ultimate unicorn. How improbable to be anything at all, and yet here we are, all language and limbs toting vials of insulin, finding words to reflect what we are living. Finding each other, too.<\/p>\n<p>A 100\u2014the unicorn\u2014is a celebration of the goodness that we can always, always find woven through the difficulty. It can be more challenging to find this perspective alone; I, for one, often need those bright-lit reminders from other T1Ds. We seek each other\u2019s community because we need the cathartic sharing of our individual and collective pain, but we also very much need the chorus of celebration, the sharing of unicorn hope, this reverberating whisper: <em>There is brightness here, and beauty. Carry on. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":309,"featured_media":48916,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1501],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v22.9 (Yoast SEO v22.9) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Unicorn Hope | ASweetLife<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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