There is a person I know who likes to ask me repeatedly whether I’m okay, and variations thereof – have I eaten? Is everything fine? Am I feeling alright? And so on.

I do not suspect these questions are because I look particularly un-okay, or hungry, or malnourished, unwell or not-alright.

Yesterday the question the person landed on was whether I had eaten?

Not when, not how, not breakfast, not yet today, simply, had I eaten, which is a question I would ask a woman never and a question I would ask a person with diabetes who is not in obvious distress, also, never.

This person is well-meaning and if it was the case that I had actually not eaten, for whatever reason (intermittent fasting, lack of hunger, labwork, too busy, disordered eating, none of your business), the question would not be helpful. Also, it is a question that, as a person with diabetes, is not and has never been helpful, because there are valid medical reasons and reasons otherwise to eat, and not eat, according to my own timings, that people who do not inhabit my body are not skilled in deciphering. Also, it is a question that no woman ever will hear and take particularly kindly to if, like me, you have spent your adult life undoing the era of Kate Moss that defined your teenage years.

Have you eaten? The tone is that of a helicopter mother hovering over homework, only that I am an adult, and she is also not my mother.

Receiving questions like that of this well-meaning person is a textbook experience of living with diabetes. The moment your body has a visible sign of illness (say, an insulin pump), or the moment someone finds out about your health condition, it is suddenly up for commentary by people who know very little about it. Every person with diabetes has heard the story of someone’s grandparent and then this tragic XYZ thing happened. These stories are neither helpful nor in any way directly applicable to the people onto which they are imposed, just a relic of the well-wishing commentator’s real but very finite experience.

Not only are well-wishing commentators usually not medical experts in your or any health condition (and when we are talking about doctors, still, they do not have the full story, and can only help with the limited tools they have), well-wishing commentators have not thought for a moment that the person who should be speaking, informing, educating, telling, directing and maybe even assuming, in fact, is not them, but rather, the person that has been charged with listening.

People living with illness, I want the speaker to be you.

When I was diagnosed, I was 18, and my parents had the tremendous instinct and sense to never ask me this question, or any other questions that could be perceived as micro-managing my own taking of responsibility for my health condition (though, it would be understandable for a parent to wonder and tempting to ask – have you checked your blood sugar? Are you low? And so on). The difference is that I am now 23 years into having diabetes and for the most part a competent and functional adult who has kept my body alive and well without external inquiry as to my eating choices.

Of course, this well-wisher with an annoying question probably did not know that her question was annoying. You only know what you know.

And so I force a smile and explain how much I’ve got this.

I was for a moment tempted to really get into it: do you want to know my half-marathon time? Or what it was like to skydive? Or travel around South America? Or move to Paris? Or do you prefer the full marathon time? Or how I had two unmedicated labors and kept a beautiful blood glucose throughout, or maybe you want to know how I managed eating for my recent colonoscopy? Her question, I wanted her to know, was absurd.

I was tempted but I didn’t get into any of this. Once upon a time, I would have.

Now I know. I do not need to justify how much I have done to prove I can be competent and have diabetes at the same time. I don’t have to have done any of the above to have diabetes and still be competent at the same time.

So “I’ve got this” felt like mostly enough.

Because I’ve got this was not satisfactory to the helicopter, she insisted, as if she had just heard a toddler assuring her, I’ve got this, behind the wheel of a car.

The well-wisher goes on to tell me a version of a story I have already heard: something about a relative who had diabetes who [INSERT STORY]. Choose from an infinitude of irrelevant anecdotes which I will not perpetuate here.

Because the problem with these anecdotes, which may very well be true and deeply impactful for the person telling them, is that they perpetuate for others a story that does not apply to the case at hand. This perpetuated story is irrelevant but also can be impactful, such that it can feel limiting to the person listening and then tasked with living alongside a chronic illness.

Doom narratives can cause harm, create doubts, drive fear, and lead to a perspective on illness that is absolutely divorced from the embodied reality of it. Also, all of the relevant supposed risks a well-intentioned person is trying to mitigate in sharing these doom tales are for legal reasons transmitted at diagnosis and reinforced at medical appointments. Also they can be found on the internet.

The problem with these anecdotes is that they perpetuate and reinforce a narrative of living with a chronic health condition as a state lacking agency and responsibility – agency for matters relating to self and responsibility for body and health. If anything, living with diabetes has done the contrary for me, and I would suspect for many others living with a health condition.

To be tasked with the invisible, unpaid and unsolicited hard work of caring for your not-fully-functional-body behind-the-scenes so that it can operate alongside other bodies who simply operate on autopilot has been one of the most, if not the most, significant assumptions of personal responsibility in my life. I don’t let go for a day.

To perpetuate narratives of doomsday illness is a reflection not of the reality of illness itself, but of a healthy-bodied person’s inability to believe that people with health conditions can function fully, reliably and sensibly in the face of their health condition. The reality of my life with diabetes has again proven this to be to be far from the case.

In Portuguese the expression nao leve a mal means something along the lines of “don’t take it the wrong way,” and this is what the well-meaning person told me when she first asked about my eating and when I first told her she doesn’t have to ask that, and sort-of-smiled, but not really.

This well-intentioned person continues to ask and helicopter, and I still have to see her, and I, in the end, don’t take it the wrong way.

In fact, in fact, I don’t take it at all.

Leave the comments that won’t help you at the feet of the people who feel the need to make them. They are not, actually, about you, but rather, about other people’s insecurities, biases, unsubstantiated opinions, compulsions and fears. None of these have anything to do with you and your health and if applicable your health condition.

As an all-time favorite psychotherapist would encourage me to do, add some sense of humor to it. I’m not very good at it, but the advice is sound.

People living with a health condition of any kind, I want to hear from you. Directly.

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I am all ears.