Humans are very good at niceties. We’re extremely talented in watering down the nastier sides of life with soft or gentle sounding names and in doing so creating ourselves a beautiful little bubble to live in. Things like dying are given names like ‘passing away’ or people talk about the deceased as ‘no longer with us’ as if they just stepped out for tea. It’s not always a bad thing and it certainly helps acclimatise our children into the wider and often harsher world. When something bad does happen though, it can be hard to pull the actual facts of the matter out of the stew of fluffy terminology. This often means that things which are actually really serious get misconstrued as harmless and benign.
Unless you’re from the South in the USA you’re unlikely to have heard the term ‘a touch of sugar’ to describe having diabetes. In that part of the country the use of the word sugar specifically to describe type two diabetes is very common and though less used today than it was in the past, it’s still fairly common. Type two diabetes is a condition which is considerately more dangerous than people are often led to believe. It’s become so common that people have almost started to see it as unimportant but in actual fact diabetes should be thought of in the same brackets as heart disease or cancer. It’s not a joke and if it’s not taken seriously it’ll kill you just as effectively as either f those other diseases will.
In the South diabetes can often be overlooked in that way. The best way of solving this problem is by actually talking about our ailments like worldly adults. It’s nice and it’s comfortable to hide behind a convenient metaphor and for the most part, go ahead and indulge yourself. If you or someone you love is affected by diabetes or a similar condition though, you don’t have the luxury of wilful blindness. You need to face the condition head on as that’s the only way that you’re ever going to beat it out of your life.
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