Blood Sugar Rising

(upbeat music) Hi, my name is Gretchen Carvajal. I'm a Youth Speaks alum. I'm now a poet mentor for the organization and so just yeah, I just feel real blessed to be in the building. My mother's side has diabetes. Diabetes is more and more a curse that we thought we brought to ourselves. We try to break it with a spell, a potion and a ritual. What is insulin but a potion? What is a spell but a diagnosis? We take a tiny needle and prick our finger. What is a blood sacrifice to a blood test? I moved to America in 2001. This is like peak early 2000, 2nd grade Halloween. Trick or treating was like a brand new experience for me, which was like, oh yeah, you're gonna go around and people are gonna give you free candy and I was like, what? As a seven year old coming from a third world country and getting free candy, I was like, yo, I'm so down for America right now, like this is tight. Diabetes runs in my family through my mother's side. Her mother had it, her sister had it as well, and then my mother has it too. And now my older sister has it as well. The Bigger Picture project is a collaboration between Youth Speaks and Dr. Dean Schillinger, in which we do workshops based around health and food accessibility with our young folks, with poetry. So it sounds a little like, disconnected, but it's really crazy how connected it is. Your relationship with health is also your relationship with your community. Your relationship with health is also your relationship with your family and with your body. So try to jot down any like last minute stuff you thinking of. Raise your hands in here, how many people in here know somebody with type 2 diabetes? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, out of eight, that's like what put 90 plus percent of the room, right? That's wow. How does it impact, children and young people, in a daily sense? Like is it, does it create other health issues? Is it like affect their lifespan, like? We've discovered that type 2 diabetes in a young person is more aggressive than in an older person. It's insidious and slow, progressive. So it's, it's nasty stuff. (gentle music) So we're gonna transition to like 10 minutes of writing. So what do you reach for when you're hungry, and/or what reaches for you? -

Woman

Wow. - Yeah. Anyone who'd like to share or bless us with some words? Okay, you guys are staring at me. I wanna be able to eat without second guessing. Without thinking about a smaller version of myself. Without thinking about food as a weapon or a setback. I wanna be able to be hungry and eat without feeling like I'm killing myself. My body is a landmine of insecurities. My bloodline a generation of curses. A system that nobody has been able to break. When I'm hungry, I think about the bodies of women in my life in serving and eating last. (people snapping their fingers) -

Woman

Whoa. -

Man

Wow. I really liked the line when you said food as a weapon. What did that mean to you? Yeah, like all the intersections of my identity or what like food as a weapon. As a Filipino and somebody from the East Bay who doesn't have the access, that's like a direct threat, but it's hard to grasp. Like, what does that violence look like? And it's like, it looks like my whole family having diabetes and my mom having glaucoma because of her high blood sugar, and like, it looks like this and this and this, you know. But it's like for people who don't go through that and don't have, it's like, that's not even that bad. All you have to do is like, do those minuscule choices when it's like, you literally don't have those choices sometimes. Filipino food is like so good, but it's also like, yeah, just a mix of a lot of like different struggles that we've been through. I think my family avoid talking about diabetes because they know it's a problem that they have to address. A cycle of not being concerned about your health, like, I think that's a big cycle in my family. These things could be inevitable but they are the things that are also preventable. When I think about like ending the cycle of diabetes it's always gonna be my family.