Project Diabetes365

October 11, 2007

A flickr mail showed up saying I had a new contact, it was someone I didn’t know…I follow through the links on their profile and I end up on the Diabetes 365 group page.

This is a group for diabetes-related pictures that you take as a 365-day project.

Basic rules: You must post a daily picture by the end of each week. Number each one consecutively and tag them with ‘diabetes365′.

Each daily photo should show some aspect of daily living with diabetes and help explain what it’s like to live with diabetes every day of the year.

Let’s try and show the world how Diabetes is something that we work at and live with all year round.

I thought to myself, I can do that, I can show the world what I live with all year round…(I have to be honest here, there are some day when I wished I hadn’t thought that because I’d much rather that my diabetes stayed invisible.) And so, I began project diabetes 365 or D365 as some of us call it. And because I had some pictures that I had been taking, my first day of Diabetes365 began on October 6th 2007 with my pump being drowned in sweat.

February 09, 2008

I made it 4 months before the images stopped getting posted here on my website. Day 127 saw my dog chewing on my tubing and that was the day that RideToRemedy saw project Diabetes365.

I did however continue to take pictures, although uploading them and labeling them came in unevenly spaced out spurts. I took 278 photos in that first year, I was so close and yet so far from completing a year worth of showing the world what diabetes in my life looked like.

Many people began the project, few people finished, among the finishers, Kerri of SixUntilMe, Sarah at Moments Of Wonderful, and Kathryn, Aubrey, and Liz (if there were others I’m really not aware of them).

New people are just starting the project. People familiar with the project have picked up where they left off in attempts to finish it, and me, I’ve started over.

January 2, 2009

I sat down to write down my goals for the year, among them: I want to restart and finish the diabetes365 photo a day project. The night before, I had taken my first photo of the 2009 year.

February 1, 2009

A first month review of my goals for the year showed that I had made it through January with a photo posted for every day.

March 1, 2009

A second month review of my goals showed that I had made it through February with a photo posted for every day.

Present Day

There was a fair amount that came out of this project when I started it last year, there was bonding in the diabetes community that I really don’t seek anywhere else (among many others, the big name sites include Diabetes Daily, Tu Diabetes, and DiabetesFriends). I could see other people’s pictures and what was going on in their lives with diabetes, and the project as a whole was touching other people’s lives.

It’s died in a way, there’s not nearly as many active participants, not nearly as many people viewing and commenting on the photos. The community about it has been lost (in my opinion of course).

This is my call, to all the viewers that read RideToRemedy that have diabetes to get involved in the diabetes365 project. It’s a fun project. It’s enjoyable. No matter what type of diabetes you have, you can share it with the world. If you’re a reader that started the project and had to stop for whatever reason, I urge you to pick up where you left off, you’re missed. Just because you didn’t finish in a year doesn’t mean that you can’t finish, and it doesn’t mean that you have to start over to finish. And to the ones that haven’t begun, if you haven’t begun because you think you can’t do a picture a day, I dare you to try…sure, at some point, you may drop off, what’s important is that you pick up and start again

Just for fun, I’ll throw out the theme I’m working on this week, it’s feelings. How do I feel about diabetes, how does diabetes make me feel.

Last night, I photographed and wrote about how I feel that diabetes oftentimes overshadows my life.

It’s fun, sometimes taking the pictures is a rather exciting project. But I’ll admit, sometimes getting a picture taken for a day can feel burdensome, but you just have to push through it, great things can come from it