The last few months, I’ve been reading more about the enneagram. Did I lose you there? Haha. It’s a very popular subject at the moment (in particular where I live in Nashville.) It’s more than the enneagram though. I went back and redid other personality tests and rescored myself in those places, too. I’ve also spent time praying about myelf… who I am, what I love, the traits I have. I mean, what better source to fully understand who you are than your Creator.
I am a dreamer and an adventurer. I am the happiest in an open outdoor space full of trees and mountains and fresh air. For years, I have poured my heart into advocacy, awareness and fundraising for type 1 diabetes. As I’ve met parents and families through this work, I have grown even more thankful for my mother and for my family. This holiday season, my mother said something to me that impacted me profoundly.
She said when I was born, she had a fear for my life. Call it a gut reaction, or maybe a premonition. She thinks it was a providential whisper from the Lord to prepare her heart. She said she thought she was going to lose me early. I didn’t know how to respond to these words, and I probed further.
“I don’t know what it was, Victoria, but I just had this sense that something was going to happen to you—something bad—and I was afraid I would lose you early,” she said.
Over the years, as I grew from an infant to a young girl, happy and healthy, she said the fear subsided and she didn’t think about it much. But when I was 11 years old, I got sick, and what I didn’t know at the time, is that those feelings she had at my birth came flooding back. Then we learned my type 1 diabetes diagnosis. As upset as she was, she was relieved, too. She felt like this was the thing that had sat on her heart for so many years.
I think that feeling is why she and my father viewed diabetes through the lens they did. To my family, it was a difficult and challenging season, but it wasn’t going to deter us and it wasn’t going to limit me. And so began my journey as a fighter.