On body

From the very first moment when I was diagnosed with diabetes type 1 I knew that there is no other such a psychedelic illness in the world.

I don’t mean there is no worse, no more painful or no more disturbing illness. But
I bet you have never met such a two-faced, cunning and tricky liar as diabetes is.

I got it as my 20th birthday present, 6 years ago. If you’d ask me wether it had affected me or not I would say it did turn my life upside down and it did not change anything at all at the same time. The second part would be a lie. But then I’d bite my tongue. It did not only change everything. It shaped my early adulthood.

Anyways, from the very first day, I tried to take the most of it and make this tiny drama as funny as possible for me. The day they diagnosed me I played a trick on my then-boyfriend, who came to visit me in the hospital. Poker-faced I told him that from now on sex is forbidden (we were just 20 and, apparently, stupid enough so that I could get away with such an absurd lie). He believed and I will never forget the view of his shocked face.

The very same day my grandma visited me and gave me the most beautiful ring which, since then, I never took off. I like to think of that day as of the day I got the ring, not of my diabetes’ anniversary. I actually remember very well the moment she gave it to me and I remember the hospital room smelling of my birthday flowers. Maybe, if it hadn’t been for diabetes, I would have immediately forgotten it.

After the hospital treatment I tried very hard not to stop being a party girl. I liked shocking people when I was doing injections on my waist in the clubs. I made stories, which often enabled me to distinguish idiots right away. It doesn’t take
a doctor to tell that insulin pen is no new-generation-easily-applicable drug. Yet many men got trapped and I didn’t have to make an effort figuring out whether his brain was worth a minute of attention.

To demonstrate how little I cared, I kept joking that my diabetes made me so cool as Red Hot Chili Pepper’s ‘Blood Sugar Sex Magik’ is. Just with more sex, I added sometimes, trying to be funny. A perfect pretext to start discussion on Frusciante, or at music at least. On anything safer than the intricacies of glucose’s fluctuations which might have been my concern at that moment.

When I had to make decision whether I wanted my first insulin pump I couldn’t stop crying. I wasn’t happy, I was terrified that this little machine would have to always be there. Injection pen can be always put in the bag and nobody will notice. With pump, no matter how small and comfortable it is, people start asking you.
I cannot wear some of my tight dresses anymore, simply because they look ridiculous with the little quadrangular thing around your waist. Now it makes me laugh but 3 years ago it was a real drama.

You can actually tell a lot about a man’s personality only observing his relationship with your insulin pump. It’s a bit like seeing someone meeting your pet. I hate to say it but, yes, it is a kind of a test. In the end this is my little electronic pancreas, my organ, integral part of my body.

With a little electronic device at my waist I kept on trying. And I’ve became
a curious case during many airport check-ins. Sometimes I explained that this is
a device designed just for me so I could play Snake or feed my Tamagochi whenever
I want. Or I tried to convince some friends I can surf the internet right from it. Soon
I stopped feeling sad when somebody asked me ‘But do you REALLY have to wear it ALL THE TIME? The answer I give is half-true or true, depending on who asks and on my mood.

The first is ‘yes, I take it off only when I take a shower’.

The second is ‘yes, I take it off only when I take a shower. Or when I have sex’.
Because I know that this is what the question is about.

These are the cool parts. The exposed parts. The parts I’ve been exercising through years. Why then is diabetes such a psychedelic cheater?

I hate boredom. And diabetes is extremely boring. There is a lot of counting, lot of self-control and almost invisible and not really rewarding results. This is the psychedelic part. The part I’ve never expected even my closest friends to understand, although some of them wanted to.

Because you don’t want to bore anobody with your stories. With how terribly sleepy you feel today because your glycaemia is too high this time and you can’t help it. How you cannot concentrate on your work. How you urgently have to measure your sugar level. Yes, this is a glucometer. Your grandma uses the same? Wow, how great is that!

There is nothing cool about being ill, right? You don’t want to annoy anyone or spoil a party refusing drinking. I was always paranoid about questions. Because people often don’t know how to react and they fall into disturbing silence as if diabetes was a death sentence. Or they immediately become overprotective. Like it happens with every existing stereotype, it’s a result of lack of information and I don’t blame anyone for that. Yet, many times instead of being calm and simply explain what diabetes T1 actually is, I childishly and aggressively did my leave-me-alone-who-do-you-think-you-are part.

But mostly you don’t want people to see you weak. Nobody is concerned about providing you coca cola at 3 a.m. in the middle of the club because you’ve just got your hypoglycaemia. You don’t want to be seen devouring snickers in the dirty toilet, all trembling and sweating like an animal, praying that the sugar level will rise and you can go back to your date.

There is nothing cool about all this and I am the person who, as far as I remember, was always trying very hard to be cool.

So I found my solution, the stupidest one. I denied it. I decided that one day I will die anyway but I want to try it all, being diabetic or not. I was never very careful person but I became really reckless one. As if there were a choice to make: diabetes with all its boredom and unattractiveness versus me. It was a 100% imaginary choice, yet I made it. I chose myself.

And then we have the whole list of possible complications which I didn’t even dare to think about, not to say to listen about. I became deaf to all the warnings. I got disconnected when somebody, including my doctor, opened one’s mouth to talk about it (I’ve arrived to the point she didn’t want to talk with me anymore at all).
I am young, attractive, strong and I can have anything or anyone I want, I thought. My body is supposed to reflect it and until it did, I kept on repeating to myself that there was nothing to worry about.

But finally also my own body told me to stop. I ended up in a hospital, partly because of my own foolishness. My foolishness to treat it like a trophy, an object of desire, a decoration. Which it isn’t. It is mine, first of all, and only I can judge it. Period. Secondly, it has to be able to give me what I need. Like enabling me to travel. To have an energy to love my job. To be able to concentrate on studying, to grow up, to discover. Whatever it is, sex is just one of its functions. Not the primal one.

We live in a distorted reality where the division into healthy and beautiful vs. unhealthy and ugly is overwhelmingly omnipresent. I became a victim of that division and I hope I will never fall into that trap again.

I could not understand that also a person with an unhealthy or not totally healthy body has a right to feel beautiful. Me included. But I want to believe it so that
I won’t have to make a choice between me and my diabetes again. I want to feel interesting and beautiful with my little insulin pump and my glucometer. With my little daily boring routines. With the moments of physical weakness.

I want to feel that there is no contradiction. I want to blur the lines that exist inside of my head. I’ve created the limits myself by believing that imperfection equals weakness. But it is a lie. If there is anything that can make our existence more authentic, it is our vulnerability. And it takes guts to admit it.

Plus, being perfect is terribly boring.

You are a hypocritical liar, but I have no choice but to see through you. Sit down, let’s talk. Want some coffee?

On life

20151110_154138 — kopia

Death is so sure of its victory that it gives you an advantage… The whole life.

I’ve been passing this wall everyday on my way back home in Teruel. I had a lot of time to think about it.

Yes, it is ‘on life’, not ‘on death.’ Because I will continue to exercise my right to see that the glass is half full, not half empty.

On beauty

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I crossed out the words ‘mental disability’ and ‘incapacity’ from my dictionary. There is nothing about ‘dis-‘, ‘in-‘ or ‘un-‘ among the people I met. It’s like having blue eyes or brown eyes. Both are beautiful. No mater of which colour are yours, you can be equally cute and annoying at times.

And my, blue eyes, are full of tears only thinking that in 4 days I have to leave and, just like that, stop seeing them everyday.

And there is no altrusim here, no sacrifice. In fact it is sheer egoism because I need them much more than they need me. I am lost without them and I really doubt if
I would manage to feel whole again. Because, if I ever felt something at least close to wholeness in my life, it was now.

It was supposed to be something new, an opportunity to finally improve the language, travel around Spain and do something useful. And I did it all, but I would have never thought I would change. And, inside, I did. Even though my rationalism doesn’t allow me to believe in enlightenments or Big Bangs.

But how is it possible not to get hit by a meteorite when you are being kissed, hugged, told that you are being loved and necessary every single day? How can you not get addicted to the most beautiful, sincere and smiles in the world? It’s like discovering that there is another kind of love, incomparable to anything you had known before. I stopped counting the moments when I wanted to cry out of pure gratefulness that I had an opportunity to be a part of something so deep and so eyes-opening on everyday terms. Because it was an enormous privilege. To look closely at what we all know under and euphemistic adjectives like ‘special’ and ‘extraordinary’. And find out that there are so many different shades, layers and incarnations of beauty that your mind couldn’t embrace all of them even if it wanted to.

And what I also discovered is that I feel inferior. It’s a beautiful feeling full of admiration and certainty that there are plenty of things we should learn. Because we forgot too much when we grew up. We forgot to talk and smile to dogs. We forgot how to enjoy the sound of leaves under our feet and listen to the river. How to hug without sexual connotations. How to show affection. How to sing and dance together when we are bored. How to help one another and be able to ask for help. Even how to hate each other sometimes sincerely. How to laugh. I’ve never laughed so much in my life. And how to redefine our sense of physical beauty and see the real one. Because it is there and hides in the faces of the people you would never expect to.

I am probably the first one to overanalyse and complicate everything. But there is much more simplicity in the world than we think. This is an enormous discovery for a person like me who has a special power to cry over every relationship-related failure, feeling useless about 20 times a day and rethink the sense of her own existence.

I guess I found my definition of beauty. Maybe that’s not a Big Bang but still it’s something.

On grandmas

My friend once told me that each orgasm she has has a colour. It was a long time ago but I still remember it. Maybe because I love colours and I love orgasms. And it surprised me because I do associate so many things with colours , but never that.

One of the things I associate with colours are cities. Białystok, is green, Warsaw is grey, Cagliari is yellow. Amsterdam is red, Barcelona is blue, Valencia is violet, Istanbul is pink and Rome is black.

Teruel is brown. And brown can be ambiguous and disgusting (you don’t have to thank me for that highly sophisticated remark), but Teruel’s brown is a clear brown, maybe a bit reddish, a joyous one and it smells of wood. Its architecture is brown. Its streets, its shadows. The buildings are. The hills that surround it. Even the dogs here seem browner than anywhere else.

To those who don´t know, it’s a capital city of Teruel Province in the Spanish Comunidad of Aragón. And some years ago they launched a campaign called Teruel existe just to rise up social awareness that such a province…yeah, exists, but mostly that it needs a financial support. The proof that they were right is that it is the only province in Spain that has no railway connection to Madrid. Due to the mountains that surround it, it is also one of the coldest areas of Spain. Nobody speaks a word in English. Sounds like an extremely boring place? I love it. Not the cold maybe, but many other things.

I am lucky to accidentally end up in cute places and cute is a perfect word. Cagliari, my biggest surprise, and the most intense love up to now, is cute too. They are both like warm and cool grandmas that make you feel like home immediately. Even though Cagliari has already knitted me many more scarves and cooked a lot of soups and Teruel won’t have a chance to do that because of the lack of time.

In the morning, when there are minus zero temperatures, I almost feel like in my hometown, in the northern Poland (where my real two cute grandmas live). And it´s strange feeling after two years of living in Sardinia. It is strange sensation to be freezing again. But the evenings are the strangest. Cause it smells like winter in Poland, even though there is no snow here. But nothing resembles Poland here.

I am hysterically excited to hear Spanish everywhere. I am glad to finally be able to really use it after a long abandonment. Fall in love with it again. Will you please love me again, castellano? Because Italian says che li sto rompendo il cazzo troppo.

On tv series

In the end the most important issue is: how to avoid this overwhelmingly disgusting moment when your heart skips a bit and pain electrifies your body? Because that is how pain works: it stubs you in the back when you peacefully take your Sunday walk eating your ice-cream and you can hardly prepare for it.

Of course I do not talk about real dramas here, I wouldn’t dare to. I talk about seemingly stupid details which can ruin your day. And, of course, relationships are the area where all your paranoias suddenly go out of the closet. The range of anxieties here is much wider than number of shades of white in Ikea catalogue, you can choose from them whatever you want. When he doesn’t text you back. When she says she doesn’t care anymore. When you hear that somebody is not attracted to you anymore. Even, yes, even when ‘visualised, not responded’ occurs. All this pathetic social media slavery, running like crazy when hearing a WhatsApp notification sound. That won´t change your life, but the voice in the back of your head makes you believe it can.

I do tend to obsessively analyse my behaviour. I rethink it with a cruelty of a nazi doctor in Auschwitz experimenting on pregnant women. But I am wrong. Because, even if it ocurrs really, not only in our imagination, not being appreciated/liked/desired/taken care of enough by someone doesn´t mean a shit.

But still, even armed with this knowledge, and listening to the phrases like ‘stop overanalysing’ and ‘move on’, even then this short moment of panic will take place. And I could glorify this tiny instance and take pride in being a human or fight against it. But neurons are faster. They will always win the race. And it is also kind of humiliating because it demonstrates how dependant we are on somebody else´s judgment.

So maybe the trick is to shift focus. To look further. Or to get lost in everyday life details. To switch off thinking. Because pain won’t make you stronger. What doesn’t kill you makes you wish you were dead, I saw it written on one of the walls in Valencia and I cannot agree more.

Maybe it’s the problem of people like me who love to exaggerate, go up and down, the ones addicted to contrary emotions. Those who are the slaves of the sinusoidal ride. I just can’t understand how you can maintain a balance in such a moment. I’m so jealous of anyone who can immediately concentrate on acting, on future tasks without doubling one’s interior neurosis.

But I have developed this totally childish trick to get a bit better when I feel like shit, whether I have a real reasons (happens sometimes) or not (happens often).
I remind myself my favourite TV serie and all the absurd situations my favourite protagonist has been through. And then I think that I still like the character. And then naively I hope I could still like myself despite all.

Now, this technique is of course extremely simplified, we all know that life is no TV serie and so on. But it has one big advantage: looking at the big picture. And maybe the only analogy between real life and serie is that you are in some way obliged to enjoy the show no matter what happens.

On love

It slapped me in the face thousands time and then treated like a princess million times. It was always there praising me and kicking me down. In the end it became my weapon, my trademark, my currency. It was my armour protecting me from myself.

Being a drama queen is dangerous. A girl that loves to be in love, as one of my friends said. And what’s the difference between the girl who loves to be in love and the girl that cannot stand being alone? I really hope there is some. Though the line is thin.

I just cannot conquer love as Sia sang. I’ve had enough, I give up. I’ve been somebody’s girl, woman, bedmate, lover, baby, sex friend, crush, affair so long that I’ve forgotten where I end and somebody else begins.

But I want it all still. I want irresistible. I want Orange Crush in the morning and My Bloody Valentine’s Sometimes in the evening, I want my evenings with Toni Morrison and I want my youporn mornings. I want my face lines just mine, just for myself. I want night phone calls to my friends. I want drawing the whole day without talking to anyone.

But mostly I just want to wake up and not have anyone on my mind. Just get up for myself.

I won’t beg for anything even though I have tears in my eyes. It will all pass. I know that I can survive, I’d walk through fire to save my life.

On bipolarity

Everyday when you wake up you have a choice. You can notice little miracles around you or you can just ignore them.

I’m addicted to little miracles. To the dogs’ eyes, sound of leaves under my feet, lovely vulgar messages from my friends.

I’m so scared now. I’m so scared and so lost as never probably, but these little miracles are what keeps me alive I guess. I cry too much but I also laugh too much.

There was abundance, overflow of desires, now there is nothing. All or nothing. No way in the middle. I guess I will start anew again and there is so much beauty and so much pain in that, so much self-destruction and self-adoration. The loudest people suffer the most, some say. I’m not the loudest but when I shout it’s because I am talking to the wolves in my head to stop consuming my brain. Cause I am still alive and I might need it still.

I am so terribly tired, I am exhausted. I am so excited, so over-everything. I am too much and I am not enough. I am yours, his, mine’s. I am nobody’s. I am everybody’s.

But maybe tomorrow I will just laugh, kiss you and say it was all a joke.

Why don’t you take me seriously?