I Feel Better Than I Did Five Years Ago

Last Updated on September 2, 2026 by Alyssa

I haven’t posted in over a month, and here’s the real reason: I needed rest.

I’ve been working hard at Midlife T1D for almost a year now. That means putting in my day job hours which sometimes even overflows into my evenings. Then, after work, I’d catch up with my husband for a bit, eat dinner, and go put in a few more hours on this blog and everything behind it.

Month after month of that pattern, on top of everything else pulling at me, and I finally hit the realization: I needed a pause. Not because I want to stop building MidLife T1D, but because I realized that rest is just as important.

I don’t ever want to get to a place where I dread working on Midlife T1D. And I could feel myself getting burning the candle at both ends until there wasn’t much candle left.

So I paused. I spent time with friends. I picked art back up, something I’d shoved aside for almost a year. And some days, I just did nothing. On purpose.

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That’s not a sustainable system long-term either, if I’m honest. But it’s an honest one, and I’d rather tell you the real reason than disappear quietly and reappear like nothing happened. After all, I’ve learned in that in midlife all of the hormone changes paired with the challenges of living with type 1 diabetes is a recipe for the perfect storm.

So, I made a decision that it was time to rest. Not forever, but long enough to give my mind and body the rest it needed. reThat time away reminded me that so much creativity and ideas flood in when you take time to do absolutely nothing. During this time, it also gave me space for something else, too, a conversation with a friend that’s been sitting with me since.

A friend asked me a question that stopped me.

She’s just starting the process with my functional medicine practitioner — the bloodwork, the “let’s see what your hormones are actually doing,” the whole thing. She asked if all the trial and error has been worth it.

I didn’t even have to think about my answer.

Five years ago, I was dealing with deep fatigue that flattened me for a few days every single month. My mind felt foggy more often than sharp. I had to talk myself into workouts I used to crave.

Today, that version of me is gone. 

I have real energy. My mind feels clear. I crave my workouts instead of dreading them. And I’m not exaggerating when I say I feel better now than I did five, even eight, years ago, which sounds backwards for someone getting older with a chronic illness, and maybe I sound a little smug saying it out loud, but it’s true, so I’m saying it anyway.

Here’s what actually changed recently:

I added a testosterone cream to my morning routine, and it’s a little wild how quickly it seemed to help my energy. On top of that, after months of working on it, my thyroid levels are finally climbing back to where they should be — a magnesium supplement I’d added for sleep had been interfering with my thyroid medication without my realizing it, which tanked my levels for a while. My magnesium post has more on that supplement specifically, but the short version is: magnesium and thyroid meds don’t always play nice, and it took a while to connect that dot.

And then there was the progesterone. At the end of last year, we increased my dose, and it ended up adding to some real cyclical fatigue on top of everything else. Once we walked it back, that piece resolved too.

Three separate threads, all tangled together, all finally sorted out roughly at the same time. That’s the part that gets me, how much these systems talk to each other. Thyroid, hormones, sleep, blood sugar. Fix one thing in isolation and you can accidentally throw off another. It’s not tidy. It’s not a straight line. But it works, eventually, if you keep pulling on it.

I want to be honest about the part that isn’t fixed yet.

Sleep. Still not there. I fall asleep fast, but I’m waking up between 2 and 4am most nights, sometimes for thirty minutes, sometimes for two hours plus. I recently tried a supplement called AdrenVive, and here’s the strange plot twist: it hasn’t touched the middle-of-the-night waking, but it has completely settled the wave of anxiety I used to get for no reason in the second half of my cycle. Even-keeled, calm, peaceful, genuinely one of the better trades I didn’t know I was making.

I’m writing the sleep piece separately because it deserves its own space, not a paragraph at the bottom of this one.

Here’s the mindset that’s actually made the difference, more than any single supplement:

There’s no magic bullet. There’s no one approach that works for every body. What worked for me isn’t a prescription for you, your hormones, your T1D, your stress load, your resources are all different from mine.

But staying curious instead of chasing a quick fix? Being patient enough to try something, decide it wasn’t right, and try the next thing without treating that as failure? That mindset is what actually stacked up into a big change. Not any one drop or dose. The willingness to keep going.

I wouldn’t be feeling this good if I hadn’t stayed patient enough to figure it out one piece at a time.

If you’re in the middle of your own trial and error right now; the appointment that felt underwhelming, the supplement that helped one thing and not another, the dose that needs walking back – I see you. This part is slow. It’s supposed to be.

You are not alone in it, and you’re not doing it wrong just because it isn’t instant.

More soon on the sleep piece. I’ll keep you posted.