It all started about five years ago.
I had no idea.
What’s Gluten?
What’s Celiac Disease?
What does it do?
Is she going to be okay?
It was like the Olympics going on in my head; organized chaos.
How can something so prevalent not be seen?
How could my dearest Aunt Sandy go through her whole life not knowing she had such a pernicious disease? She landed herself in the hospital in dire need of a blood transfusion. Something was killing her but doctors couldn’t seem to figure it out. Until, one of them did. That’s how my family found out about Celiac Disease and gluten.
My Aunt told stories of symptoms and warning sings in order to raise awareness with her own close circle. Eventually, my mom experimented to see if cutting out gluten would solved her problems. It did. She tried pushing it onto my family, they refused. She tried pushing it onto me, I just ran to the package of Oreos. I wasn’t going to change my life for a hypothesis.
In 7th grade weird, unexplainable things started happening to me. My mother insisted further that I give no gluten a chance. For the sake of my dear mother, I agreed. It was going pretty well until I went to school on Monday. Oreos, Goldfish, and people who think they know you better than yourself everywhere. They didn’t support this strange new thing. They thought it was just one of Jay’s things! They didn’t know that I was searching for a culprit to my problem—and I wasn’t about to tell them. I had enough.
I couldn’t take another better-than-you scoff. I succumbed the Oreos. I found every reason I could to prove my mom wrong. Things got worse. I started getting pains. They grew. They got worse. There were there all the time. I hid it. It didn’t like hiding. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t concentrate. Finally, I told my parents. They tried to help, but the pain fought on. Junior Year, I was diagnosed.

The doctor’s words took ahold of my life. A sudden weight appeared in my chest and crawled to every inch of my body pounding against my tear ducts and exploding in my head. It fueled me to run faster away from my problem, but the truth was there and I was left babbling in angst and confusion. How could I give up something that’s been a part of my life for so long? Once I tasted the forbidden Oreos, how could I every eat anything else?! It was only the beginning.

How would I tell people? They wouldn’t understand. I thought it was a choice. I can go gluten free, or slowly kill my insides and eventually, when my body couldn’t take it anymore, go gluten free. I choose option number two. It was my way of buying more time to run and give me a chance to say goodbye to my beloved Oreos. Plus, I wouldn’t have to explain to anyone why yesterday I was enjoying cookies with them, but today, cookies are the mark of the devil.

This continued for months. Then, my best friend found out. She was pretty convincing. I decided to give it another shot! It was problematic. I continued holding fast to my dirty secret. But, If someone brought pizza or cookies to a gathering I would grab one, as to not stand out from the crowd. Telling people wasn’t an option. Reliving 7th grade wasn’t going to happen.

Senior year came along and my mom uprooted my life and moved me 780 miles away from anyone I’d ever known. Alas! This is my chance! These people don’t know me and I don’t know them, so why do I care if they look at me weird for eating different food? I went on a tour of the high school and one of the administrators raved on about the extensive food selection. I went to my first day of school enthralled about this new life and the options I had. As I walked into the cafeteria and looked around my body went numb. It was a Celiac’s worst nightmare. It was all an extensive food selection of things that could kill me! I was left standing there with an option, starve or eat.

“What’s eating gluten once going to hurt?” I told myself. I grabbed a slice of pizza and it just went down from there. All of my hard work was thrown far away. For what? So that I wouldn’t be the odd one eating food that looked and tasted like cardboard? I didn’t feel like I had any other option. Everything everywhere was contaminated with gluten. At one point I noticed that this school, my old school, and every other school in the nation has high respect and awareness for peanut allergies, and none for the Celiacs.
Something seemed very off with this bias. Are our lives not as important as other people’s lives? Where’s our areas, classrooms and lunchrooms prohibiting gluten? Do we have to have a certain degree of life threating-ness in order to have some awareness? Celiac Disease kills too. There are people like me out there who react to gluten by just being in the same room. Do I have to go into anaphylactic shock to prove it?! Something needs to be done.
It incenses me by the disrespect that Celiacs get from society whether it be blatant unawareness, denial, petty beliefs, or straight-up refusal to help out the members of the community the same way they help others with debilitating allergies. I want equal food rights! I want to be able to go anywhere to eat and not have to worry about it possibly being my last. I want people to be informed about an increasingly more common disease in our society. Almost everyone has heard of Celiac Disease or Gluten Intolerance. So, why am I still stuck paying for gluten-free food that costs twice as much as gluten-full foods? Why is it that Celiacs and I get sentenced to a couple shelves of food choices while the rest of the world has aisles of choices?! I want to be open about the thing that makes me who I am without dealing with the scorn of the misinformed. It’s not a fat diet. It’s a life sentence.
Every day I wake up; and I make the choice. I choose health over indulgence. I choose the emotional pain of changing my dreams, and my life, over the physical pain. Pain is prevalent in everyone’s lives. We’re all in it together or what’s the point? What’s the point in success if you never helped someone else out along the way? Inform yourselves about the things that seem grey so you can contribute to making the world a place you’re proud to live in. Take a shot. If you miss, take another shot until you get a bulls-eye.