Mushroom and Roses

Today makes 18 years for me as a Type I diabetic and my first blogging experience as a diablogger. So I'd like to introduce my blog.

There’s this species of mushroom, Armillaria mellea, that scientists kept finding growing along the northwestern seaboard back in the late 90s - mostly in Oregon. Anyway, they continually dug up the honey-colored stalks and killed them, hoping to save the trees from root rot in the national forests, but the growths would come back, again and again. What they finally discovered was that it was one giant fungus – growing under the state, spanning for over a thousand football fields and weighing in at over a hundred tons – and what they had thought were multiple occurrences were really just parts of this überfungus rearing its ugly honeyed head up above the surface of the ground.

So what I've always wondered is, when a climactic, traumatic, personality-forming event happens to you when you’re still a little, little child, is there any part of your adult form that is untouched by that? You can work to pull and dig and uproot piece by piece of your rotten core as it pokes out into your visible psyche, but what if we're made of it – the hurt, these events, the guilt, your baggage – what if your whole soul is just one spongey fungus? How far back do you have to go before you're at the beginning, before you went down that path? Who would you have been without that trauma?

And it's described many parts of my life, from abuse to bad relationships to...*drum roll please*...diabetes. Kerri's "Six Until Me" back-story reminds me of my troubled relationship with diabetes over the years and this analogy I've gone back to in multiple circumstances. The question "who would I be without diabetes?" is not a valid question. I am the only me that's ever been and that me comes with diabetes mellitus - the honey-sugared syndrome. I don't get to pull off the stalks for a day. It's underneath. Deep, deep, deep within.

As for the roses, that's another post. :)