Diabetic Journal Now on Amazon
What We Forget When We are Trying to Take Care of Ourselves.
I drink my coffee, put on my reading glasses and tell myself, I’ll remember that. And then, of course, life happens.
It could be a number I meant to write down, a question I wanted to ask at my next appointment, a medication change, or even something as simple as remembering how I felt on a particular day. We convince ourselves that we’ll remember these things because they seem important enough in the moment. But our minds are already carrying grocery lists, work responsibilities, family obligations, appointments, bills, conversations and all the other pieces of life that require our attention. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, taking care of ourselves can become another thing we’re trying to remember.
I’ve come to realize that there is a difference between becoming consumed with your health and simply paying attention to yourself. I don’t believe caring for yourself should feel like you are constantly being graded. Some days will be better than others. Some numbers will make you proud, while others may make you stop and ask questions. There will be weeks when you do everything you intended to do and others when life completely rearranges the plan. That isn’t failure. That is simply the reality of being human while also trying to take care of a human body.
What can be helpful, though, is having a record of your own experience.
When we write things down, we aren’t relying on memory to tell the entire story. A number becomes more than a number when you can also remember what you ate, whether you moved your body that day, how you were feeling, what medication you were taking or what else was happening in your life. Individually, those details may not seem particularly significant, but over time they can begin to tell a much larger story.
And sometimes that story isn’t about discovering what you’re doing wrong. Sometimes it allows you to finally see what you’re doing right.
That is something I think we overlook when we talk about tracking our health. We tend to associate tracking with correction: finding the problem, identifying the mistake, figuring out what needs to change. But keeping a record also gives us the opportunity to recognize progress, and progress isn’t always dramatic enough for us to notice while we’re living through it.
Sometimes progress is hidden inside a collection of very ordinary days.
That realization is part of what led me to create the runONthoughts Diabetic Journal. It began with a very practical need: I wanted one place for the information I was already trying to keep track of. I wanted my numbers, medications, food, activity, appointments, goals and thoughts to live together instead of existing on scattered pieces of paper, in my phone, somewhere in my memory or in the familiar category of I know I wrote that down somewhere.
As I created the journal, however, I began to see it as something more than a place to record information. It became a way of documenting my own participation in my health.
There is something empowering about being able to walk into an appointment with information instead of trying to reconstruct the last several weeks from memory. There is also something encouraging about being able to look backward and recognize a change that may have been too gradual to see while it was happening.
You may look back and realize that you’ve been moving more. Maybe you’ve become more consistent with your medication. Maybe you’ve started drinking more water, made a few different food choices or simply become more aware of how certain things affect you. None of those changes have to be enormous to matter.
Sometimes you look back and realize, I’ve actually been doing better than I thought.
We spend so much time noticing the places where we believe we have fallen short that we can easily miss the evidence that we are growing, learning and taking better care of ourselves.
So maybe we don’t need to remember everything. Maybe part of caring for ourselves is giving our minds permission to put some of it down; literally. Write it down, keep it somewhere you can return to and allow yourself to see the story that develops over time.
Your numbers. Your notes. Your progress. All in one place.
Because your health story deserves more than guesswork, and your progress deserves to be noticed, even when it happens quietly.
YOU deserve YOU today.
— Marchelle
Come think with me and become a thought·thinker.
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