Nothing to See Here. Everything is Normal

I’m writing this while my body is crashing.

A T1D hypo. Low blood sugar. Dangerously low.

The kind where your hands start to shake. Your vision goes dark at the edges. Your thoughts don’t quite land where they should. And it feels like the ground beneath you has quietly disappeared.

Like you’re falling. Not fast. But endlessly.

This is Type 1 diabetes. Not the lifestyle kind people talk about.

The autoimmune kind. The one where your own body looks at your pancreas and says,

“Yeah… we’re done with you.”

And switches it off.

No insulin. No control. Just a constant balancing act between too high and too low.

Between functioning. And danger.

So I stumble to the cupboard. Again.

That same sickly, chemical-tasting glucose drink. Somewhere between washing up liquid and syrup tasting.

I swallow it. Not because I want to. Because I have to.

Because if I don’t, I don’t stay conscious. That simple.

This is what resilience looks like. Not heroic. Not cinematic. Just… necessary.

And this is the part no one tells you. Even when it’s “well managed”, it still takes its toll.

Constant mental health pressure. Nerve damage. Burning pain. Weakened ligaments and tendons.

The kind of quiet, ongoing damage that doesn’t make headlines, but never really leaves you alone.

Fun, right?

At almost the exact same moment, my friend Josh is running to a mamad with his wife and kids. Again. Messaging me to tell me they’re safe and clinging onto sanity.

And not just Josh. Millions of Israelis.

Mid-conversation. Mid-meal. Mid-Shabbat. Mid-life.

Sirens cut through the air and everything stops.

Run. Wait. Listen. Hope.

And somehow, this is normal too.

That’s the part people don’t understand.

People look at Israelis. At Jews. At the word resilience and they admire it. Celebrate it. Romanticise it.

But here’s the truth. We don’t want it. We don’t want to be tough. We don’t want to be resilient.

I don’t want to live my life on a tightrope of glucose and insulin.

One miscalculation away from collapsing on the floor or drifting somewhere I might not come back from.

And Israelis – my people – don’t want to live on a different kind of tightrope.

Where every school run comes with a silent question: Are the kids close enough to a shelter?

Close enough to be “safe”?

That’s not normal. That’s completely insane. But we’ve normalised it. Because the alternative means falling apart.

We don’t want to send our kids to the army. We don’t want them learning how to take cover, before they’ve figured out who they are.

We don’t want their childhood measured in seconds to safety.

And I don’t want this either.

I don’t want to stagger to the cupboard again and again, to force down sugar just to stay conscious. Just so I can paint my daughter’s bedroom.

Or calculate another dose of insulin just to eat a piece of matzah without risking blindness. Or worse.

This isn’t strength.

This is survival.

What we want is simple.

We want normal. Quiet. Hummus. Falafel. Couscous.

We want to sit with our friends and neighbours. Play sheshbesh. Kick the football with our kids. Argue about nonsense. Laugh too loud and watch our kids run free.

No sirens. No shelters. No calculations. No needles. No fear.

Just life.

But until that day comes, we will keep going.

Because we have to. Because somewhere deep inside us, there’s a voice that refuses to go quiet.

Sometimes it sounds like Judah Maccabee. Sometimes it sounds like our grandparents. Sometimes, it just sounds like us.

Tired. Determined. Still here.

We don’t want to be strong.

But we are. And maybe, just maybe, that quiet, stubborn, unbreakable ability to keep going is our secret. Our light.

The same light that’s been burning for thousands of years. Like the flames of Chanukah.

Not because it’s easy. But because it refuses to disappear. It refuses to fade into darkness… and so do we.