JM#21: Carrying the glass
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Entry #21 • March 10th, 2026 Escapism Thoughts“What petty crime could I commit to get myself 3 hots and a cot?” “What if I just kept driving west for as far as I could get before having to turn around and be back home at a reasonable hour? Maybe I could make it to Richfield, Utah…then turn around and come back.”
These were my escapism thoughts this week. I have found myself right back in the very thick of the thick hard. Just when I thought I was coming up for breath, reaching maybe some small level of normalcy, I took a “small” blow from the business. As that was starting to resolve, I then took a bigger blow from my son’s diagnosis. And now here I am again. Utterly abased. I feel laid out. Broken in a million pieces. Like I’m trying to claw my way up through some bottomless pit (please, please tell me there is a bottom) just to get my fingers over the edge…only to have someone walk by and stomp on them. And as I sit here in my own pity, I think: How much more of this can I take? The world screams at me to think of me in moments like this. Take care of yourself. Self-care this. Self-care that. But maybe that’s just it. Maybe I’m—maybe we, as a society, are—so self-absorbed that we can’t see through the muck. I’m not saying don’t take care of yourself. That’s not it. But maybe, just maybe, these moments are meant to drive us to something deeper. I just wrote about this two entries ago. About how the lonely places might be there to draw us nearer to God Himself. Maybe He’s trying to show me something more. Trying to teach me something more. It’s just so hard to sit in the middle of the muck and wait. And listen. My frail humanness cries out, I don’t want to. I’m so tired. I’m so tired of this. Please just take it from me. Take this weight. Take this burden. My knee-jerk reaction is to run. Only in an imaginative way, though. I don’t think I would actually run away. (And by run, I also mean that figuratively. Because dude, if I’m actually running, you better run too—because something is chasing me and it’s coming for both of us.) When things got really tough the other day, all I could think was, Truly, what could I do to get myself locked up in jail for a week or something? Three meals. A place to sleep. Nobody asking me questions that require solving real problems. Like…I could just chill. In fact, they’d probably take my phone and make me unreachable. Also, I am not serious, guys. This is me using humor as a coping mechanism in the middle of a heavy stress moment. The night before all of the escapism thoughts flooded in, I was in Montrose with five of my kids for basketball. We were leaving Montrose around 10:15 at night, driving straight into a snowstorm. I ran what I thought was a yellow light. Unfortunately, my guess about the size of the intersection was wildly off and it turned red long before I cleared it. When I realized there was no way I was making that light, I made the split-second decision to coast through instead of slamming on the brakes and hydroplaning my 12-passenger van through the middle of a big intersection on wet roads. Thankfully there was almost no one on the road. Almost. Just one car. Yep. Right over there. A cop. I was barely through the light when the flashing lights appeared in my rearview mirror. Awesome. As I tried to pull over immediately, my son in the front seat said, “Mom! That’s the sidewalk.” Hahahahahaha. Oh man. I was all over that sidewalk trying to pull over. All I could think was, Great. This cop is going to think I’m driving under the influence. Siiiiiigh. He came up to the window, told me why he had pulled me over (running the red, I knowwww), and asked for my license and insurance. As he went back to his car, I sat there in total defeat. My little kids were really quiet in the back of the van. Sometimes I forget how long that thing is. They couldn’t hear what was happening up front at all. All they knew was that we were stopped, there was a cop behind us, he had talked to me at the window, and now he was back at his car. After a minute or so he came back. He told me to be really careful driving into the snowstorm, take it slow, and have a good night. Just a warning. I was so relieved. Once we started pulling away, my six-year-old spoke up from the back. “Mommy, I thought he was going to arrest you.” He didn’t say it like he was scared. Just completely matter-of-fact 😂 Oh man. Poor kid. The next day, I received an email that let all the wind out of my sails. There I was, with my fingers barely hanging onto the edge of the hole I had just clawed my way out of…only to have someone come stomp on them again. All the air went out of the room. A fight I thought I had won over a complicated medical billing issue was suddenly revealed to be very much still ongoing. Turns out, the last nine months haven’t actually gotten me any closer to resolution. Only closer to the realization that what I thought was true…isn’t. (Basically, don’t have an emergency hospital stay out of state, guys). And that was the moment jail started sounding like a nice break. Ironically, the night before I had already had my chance…when the cop pulled me over in Montrose. #MissedOpportunity Anyways. The last few weeks have been an absolute rollercoaster. And I’m tired. I feel like this entry is incredibly disjointed. But that’s how my thoughts feel right now. It feels hard to make sense of anything. One moment, beautiful things are happening. The next, it feels like the walls are collapsing in on me. The constant collision of those two realities makes everything feel heavier. Complicated, all the time. I just want space to breathe. But maybe, just maybe, I need to be pressed beyond measure. Pressed to the end of myself. Do you know where you learn deep empathy? In great suffering. Maybe these circumstances can press more of me out of the way. Isn’t that the absolute opposite of modern thinking? Like I said above, everything screams, “Me, me, me. I need more time for me.” Maybe I need less of me. Maybe I need more of my Saviour. I’m not saying that we as individuals aren’t important, or that our “self” doesn’t matter. That’s not what I mean. But I do think we are massively self-absorbed. By nature, we are selfish. Perhaps selfishness is a survival mechanism. But there was One greater than all who lived and demonstrated a very different way of living. Way beyond survival. That is intriguing to me. That is worth studying and striving for. Less of me. More of Him. A song came on my playlist this week that felt like it captured exactly where I’ve been — gripping that edge with whatever stamina I have left. by Stephen Stanley
I think I lost some trust
Then my bones locked up
Now I’m barely breathing
Feels like I’m stuck in mud
And then my heart got crushed
Now it won’t stop bleeding
I shouldn’t have gone my own way
I should’ve heard what You had to say
I’ve been to dark places
I lost my foundation
I’ll scrape my knees begging for something new
Just hold on tight so I can make it through
There’s nothing else I can do
I guess I’m gonna have to trust You
Thirty thousand feet
Above the hard concrete
Now somehow I’m diving
And if I hit the ground
Looks like I’m falling down
But You call it arriving
Highs and LowsFor months it had started to feel like maybe the clouds were lifting. And then the last couple of weeks happened. Highs. Before, I would have written those words and meant what you probably assumed—the normal emotional highs and lows of life. And while that is what I meant, those words now pull me straight into the other reality we live with too. They don’t land the same way in our house anymore. “Highs” and “lows” are daily vocabulary here now. They’re not just metaphors. They’re numbers. They’re the language of life with type 1 diabetes. My son constantly navigates both high blood sugar and low blood sugar. He has to be vigilant all the time. Not because he doesn’t take care of himself—ugh, the misconception. It has nothing to do with that. It’s simply part of his everyday life. The hardest part to explain about this diagnosis is that my son has to do the work of his pancreas. Constantly. Think about that. An organ you never think about because it quietly does its job in the background. It just hums along, day after day. Until it doesn’t. And when it stops, that burden transfers to a person who now has to constantly use their mind to do the job of that silent background organ. Any time my son is going to eat anything, he has to pause and account for it. He has to “be a pancreas,” calculating and giving insulin so his body can process the food. Every. Time. It grieves me deeply for my son. And for all the other people who live with this disease. I hate that my son has had to deal with this every single day since June 2025. Every single bite of food. And that he will deal with it every day, and every bite, from here on out. I read something at the end of December that described this weight so well. I didn’t write it—it was shared in a Facebook group for parents of children with type 1 diabetes. I’m sharing it here because it puts words to something that is otherwise very hard to explain. People say Type 1 Diabetes is “manageable.”
And technically, they’re right.
It’s manageable in the way carrying a glass of water everywhere you go is manageable.
At first, it doesn’t seem like much. It’s just a glass. You adjust your grip. You learn how to hold it steady. You figure out how to move through doorways without spilling.
But here’s the part people don’t say out loud:
You never get to put it down.
Not to sleep.
Not on holidays. Not when you’re sick. Not when you’re exhausted. Not when you’re grieving.
You carry it while making dinner.
You carry it in the middle of the night. You carry it through school days, birthdays, road trips, and emergencies.
And even when you’re doing everything “right,” the water still sloshes. It spills. It surprises you. Sometimes it’s heavier than you expected. Sometimes your hand cramps from holding it so carefully for so long.
People looking from the outside see someone carrying a glass and think, That doesn’t look so bad.
They don’t feel the tension in your wrist. They don’t feel the constant awareness. They don’t feel the fear of dropping it.
They don’t see the mental math, the vigilance, the recalculations—the moments when you wonder how much longer you can hold it steady, and then do it anyway.
Yes, it’s manageable.
But manageable doesn’t mean easy. Manageable doesn’t mean light. Manageable doesn’t mean you don’t get tired.
It means you adapt.
You strengthen muscles you didn’t know you had. You learn balance the hard way.
And you keep going—not because it stops being heavy, but because you love the person you’re carrying it for more than you hate the weight.
So when someone says, “At least it’s manageable,” I want them to understand:
Acknowledging the weight doesn’t diminish strength. It honors it.
Because carrying something every minute of every day—even something “manageable”—still changes you.
Carrying the GlassThis past weekend my son had a tournament basketball game. He’s one of the starters on his team and plays a lot during the games. He practices a lot on his own time at home, constantly working on his shot. And it shows when he plays. His team came out on fire in the first quarter, and so did he. He stole the ball three times and made a layup off each one. The crowd went wild every time. It was thrilling to watch him pick the ball right out of the other team’s hands, unsuspecting, then take it down the court and finish the shot. It was so fun to watch him in his element. But even as I sat there, proud and excited for him, I felt a heaviness. Because while everyone else just saw a kid stealing the ball and making his shots, I knew he was still carrying that glass of water. He couldn’t set it down to play the game. He had to keep carrying it on the court. No one else could see that glass. They just saw him playing basketball. But I saw it. And it broke me inside. Because he never gets to set it down. After halftime, he didn’t go back onto the court with his teammates like he “should” have. Instead, he asked his coach to bench him. His sugar was high. There’s that word again: high. When his numbers go over 200, he feels it. He feels gross. Trying to push through and play while feeling like that is hard, so he sits it out. He gives himself insulin to try to bring the numbers down to his target range (70–180). But nothing is instant. He has to wait for the insulin to work and see if it brings him back to a comfortable range. You might be wondering what made it high. Was it something he ate before the game? If only it were that simple. The adrenaline of competition, the intensity of the cardio, the excitement of the moment—those things can all push blood sugar up. For those of us with a working pancreas, the body quietly adjusts in the background. We never even notice. But my son’s pancreas doesn’t do that job anymore. So he has to try to anticipate it. Plan for it. Time things the best he can. And even then, it’s still a guess. He also doesn’t want to give himself too much insulin either, because then the numbers can swing the other direction—into the lows. And lows are the scarier side. Cognitive function can be affected, and things can become frightening very quickly for someone with Type 1 diabetes—and the people around them. So he sat on the bench the entire third quarter. Finally, partway through the fourth quarter, he told the coach he was ready to go back in, even though his numbers weren’t quite where they should be yet. He was still over 200, but he didn’t want to miss the rest of his last game. So back in he went. And I could see it. I could see the struggle out there on the court. He couldn’t pull things together the same way he had in the first quarter, because he was fighting his own body at that moment. He was holding a glass that was sloshing everywhere. But he wanted to play so badly that he just dealt with the mess and kept going. And I thought about my silly joke earlier in the week about committing a petty crime just to get a break. The truth is, I could set my burdens down for a moment if I really wanted to. My son can’t. It NEVER goes AWAY. But he still laces up his shoes and walks onto the court anyway. And since he has to carry that glass every day… I will keep showing up too. —Just Me[gan] If you regularly enjoy this email series, would you please share it? Forward it. Whisper about it over coffee. I’d be grateful. ❤️
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