I’m Mara. Registered Nurse, mum in Queensland, Australia, and the reason this blog is called Imperfectly Type 1 instead of something with “journey” in the title: I was diagnosed with Type 1 two weeks before turning 13, and what nobody tells you is that the diagnosis is the easy part. There’s no journey, no arc, just maths that never stops, everyone becoming an armchair expert on your pancreas, and getting better at hiding how hard it still is instead of it ever getting easier. I also have ADHD, diagnosed as an adult, which explains a lot of decisions made between 2021 and now.
I work in primary care nursing, so I spend my days managing other people’s chronic conditions, then come home and manage my own. There’s no separation between “at work” me and “at home” me. It’s the same brain, just aimed at different spreadsheets.
Outside of work there’s my partner, our daughters Miss 5 and Miss 3 (soon to be 4), and a camper trailer that gets used more than it probably should as I am often found to want to run away.
This blog covers all of it in one place: health, family, food, travel, the odd rant about vision appointments, because splitting my life into separate content buckets was never going to be honest. Diabetes doesn’t take a day off when we’re at the park, and neither does ADHD, so neither does this blog. Expect recipe reviews that admit when the recipe didn’t work. Expect posts about places we’ve taken the kids that don’t pretend the day went smoothly. Expect blood sugar chaos mentioned in the same sentence as school lunches, because that’s how it actually happens.
If you’re a mum managing a chronic illness and a brain that won’t sit still, you’ll probably recognise a lot of this. I’m not here to inspire anyone. I’m here because writing it down is cheaper than therapy and more useful than pretending I’ve got it figured out.