I have Type 1 diabetes—T1D. I was diagnosed when I was 11.

I am now 18. In the past seven years I have lived my life as I wanted to live it, with T1D. Not as a T1D. Not as a glucose-normal. Just as me.

Diabetes does not define me. It does not limit me. It is simply a part of me.

Every day I work hard to manage my T1D. As a teen boy, I find that my T1D is different from that of adults, and that of teen girls.

But there are no resources for us teens. Adult T1Ds face slightly different conditions. What they write does not always or often apply to us. What endocrinologists write about T1D does not always or often apply to us either. And scientific papers do not speak for us, or with our voices either.

What I would have wanted to have when I was growing up T1D was access to the writings of another teen with T1D, who had just gone through what I was going through. Not endocrinologists, or adult T1Ds, but someone like me. Someone who is trying really hard to manage his condition, and who faces my own daily challenges and problems. Someone smart and with a scientific spirit. Someone who has already thought through the problems that I see every day. Someone who works as hard as I do to manage his T1D. Someone who does not feel limited by T1D, and who is interested in living every day like a glucose-normal— just working harder at it, that’s all.

I never found this resource. So, this ongoing book is my life as a T1D, for other teens who are going through it after me, and for their parents and siblings. Hopefully they will find some of what I was hoping to find as I was (as I am) going through it.

Here is where to start.