Every chronic illness, disease and disability carries with it misunderstandings. Too often society paints disability as a personal failing. A person with chronic pain in her legs, who is not paralyzed but chooses to use a wheelchair, may be seen as weak or lazy.

I’ve found my fatness compounds this phenomenon. My body is visibly off kilter, a symbol for lethargy, lack of self-regulation, ill health, indolence. Combine this with the misbelief that there is a cure for diabetes — that cure being willpower — and everyone is suddenly an expert on how to fix me. It’d be impossible not to internalize that I am to blame. There is the issue of my blackness, too, which many, because of unconscious bias, interpret as inherently lazy, deviant, sick, unclean.

I’ve always known my body needed transforming — or that other people thought it did. I was teased and rejected for my body throughout my years in school. I wasn’t fat as a child, but I was big. Extraordinarily tall for my age (4-foot-11 in the first grade) and broad-shouldered, I might have excelled at contact sports but I wasn’t built for the ballet I longed to do. I saw the attention my grandmother lavished on my skinny cousin contrasted against the frustration she expressed shopping for clothes that fit me. My mother was thankfully kind and nonjudgmental, but when I visited my father over the summers, he put me on grueling diets, including one where I couldn’t eat solid foods before midday.

I had started dieting at the age of 6. My mother briefly explained calories to me because it had come up in an unrelated conversation. The next time I ate a slice of bread, I immediately got on our family treadmill until the number on the monitor denoting calories burned matched the number of calories per slice on the package. In later years, I’d secretly drink sample bottles of perfume to try to make myself vomit.

Today, when I do manage to control my diabetes, it’s at the cost of almost every other element of my life. Every bite I ingest requires a complex algorithm, calculating ratios of carb to fat to sugar to insulin to the amount of walking I’ve done. Even when my math is perfect, my sugars rebel. I often fall into dangerous lows (a side effect of taking too much insulin, which sends blood sugar plummeting). I eat an apple to bring my sugar up, and suddenly it’s too high again.

Low-carbohydrate diets barely work for me. Even the sugar in a serving of broccoli sends my sugars to uncomfortable highs. I get anxious at parties, at restaurants out with family. Meat, potentially one of the diabetic’s safest foods, is often slathered in sugary barbecue sauce or honey glaze.

I weep into my partner’s arms when I realize that this level of control is not sustainable. She’s been with me since I first got the diagnosis, and after the grief passed, she asked me, “What do you need me to do?” I know she’s concerned about my longevity, but she doesn’t put that concern before my need for a companion who’s not overly invested in my every food choice.