Sugar Turned On Me

Rites of passage exist at all stages of our lives. When you’re a kid, you feel better once the training wheels come off your bike. As a teenager, you sneak out of the house for the first time or just get the keys to the car with no one in the passenger seat. As a adult, you buy your first house or get to take out your parents for a nice meal for the first time. In your job, you reach a point where the boss comes up to ask you something and you know without having to look anything up.

I feel like I passed a rite of passage as a diabetic today. I ordered unsweetened ice tea in a restaurant, intentionally, for the first time. With lemon.

Now I realize this isn’t exactly losing a baby tooth or jumping a fire or anything like that. Some people from father north may ask if tea comes any other way in eateries. Some people farther south may want to know how I could betray my South Carolinian heritage like this. But though it’s probably not big for anyone else, it’s big for me.

I’d gotten used to carrying around packets of stevia. It was no big thing to reach in my pocket, fail to find one and decide I’ll just have water. I was even looking on the bright side, namely that my meal would be two bucks cheaper. But still, it felt a bit lame, like somehow I’d been put into a special corner. “Oh no Stephen, you can’t handle beverages with flavoring in them. We must give you something more gentle.”

So today I said screw it and tried some. For the first time, I enjoyed the taste. A little sweetener wouldn’t have been superfluous but it also wasn’t required. I even got refills.

I could go all Polly Anna and say that this was a wonderful experience, an unexpected expansion of horizons and an unexpected yet simple joy. There’s an element of that, but in truth I just feel a little more like an adult again.

Finding out I was diabetic cut a lot of things out of my diet that I’d considered intrinsic to my happiness: unrestricted quantities of Oreos, french fries and most importantly sweet, sweet soft drinks. I’d resigned myself to a life as a caffeine addict, taking equal pleasure in soda and tea. I’d drink hot tea without adulteration, but cold tea came with enough sugar in it to stand up a spoon or it wasn’t worth the effort.

And now, it’s not. I have an additional choice when I go out. I have a sippable caffine source again. I’m a little more me.

And any day I can say that is a good one.

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