Erica Williams Mitchell was a preteen when she was incorrectly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. It wasn’t until she was an 88-pound, 5-foot-9 college student that doctors realized the trouble with her pancreas was actually type 1 diabetes. She’s now lived more than 35 years with the chronic health condition, trial after trial, yet still finding meaning and joy in her life. These days she’s able to talk about her diabetes journey with candor-filled sorrow as a means of ensuring that younger Black women skip over some of the mistakes she said had been made early on in her experience of learning to live with the illness.
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“You can make lifestyle changes or they can be made for you,” she said. “I’m still walking, I’m still vertical. I still can see. Diabetes will try to have you. But you have diabetes. Don’t let it have you. Everybody gotta go from something, but I’ll be damned if it’s this diabetes.”