Nick Jonas has written an open letter about living with type 1 diabetes, 21 years after he was diagnosed at 13. Shared through Dexcom’s A Letter to Diabetes campaign, it describes the decisions that interrupt ordinary days and the frustration of feeling that he cannot always control the outcome. Jonas also writes about how meeting others with diabetes helped him feel less alone.
A look at his phone can mean something different for Nick Jonas from what it means to the people around him. In a letter about living with type 1 diabetes, he describes checking his glucose and working out what needs his attention next. It is an ordinary gesture that can carry a decision about insulin or a reminder that a day he thought he had planned can still change direction.
He addresses the letter to diabetes itself. The diagnosis came in 2005, when he was 13, and he has now lived with it for 21 years. The choice to write to it as a presence in his life gives him a way to speak about that duration. There are things he knows about it through repetition and days when that knowledge cannot give him the sense of control he would like.
What Nick Jonas brings into view is the frequency of the decisions. A person looking on may see him glance at a screen and then carry on with whatever he was doing. For Jonas, the information he sees belongs to a running conversation about how he is feeling and what the rest of the day might ask of him. His letter lets the reader stay with that part of the moment a little longer than it usually lasts in public.
He describes some days as a kind of cooperation. On others, diabetes feels like an opposing force, capable of making itself felt after he thinks he has done everything he can. Jonas uses a comparison with family to express a relationship that has room for familiarity and frustration. The comparison makes sense of why the tone of the letter can change within a few sentences. He is describing a long association that has changed with him.
Nick Jonas remembers the diagnosis as a change in what he understood by control. At 13, the future had looked different. Suddenly there were practical decisions that would have to be made day after day, even when something else demanded his attention. Looking back from adulthood, he makes room for the difficulty of that adjustment without turning it into a tidy lesson about what he gained from it.
The letter also describes the isolation he felt. There are parts of managing diabetes that other people can learn about from the outside. Talking to someone who has faced the same kind of choices offered another form of recognition. He could speak about a difficult day and be understood before explaining the whole background to it. That experience helped make it easier for him to speak publicly about his own life.
As Nick Jonas became more open about the diagnosis, the people he met changed what he wanted to do with that visibility. Advocacy gave him a way to make contact with people whose questions and feelings were familiar to him. The letter continues that work in a personal form. It tells readers how he experiences the condition and makes space for them to recognise parts of their own experience or to describe where theirs differs.
The project is part of Dexcom’s A Letter to Diabetes campaign, launched in November during Diabetes Awareness Month. The campaign invites people living with diabetes, as well as caregivers and others affected by it, to put their own experiences into words. Jonas’s contribution has that public context. The details he chooses to share, from the phone checks to the wish for more control, remain his own account.
There is a difference between being visible and being defined by what has made you visible. Nick Jonas writes that he does not want to be seen as a victim. There is room in that position for an honest description of a difficult day. What he is asking for is the chance to tell a fuller story, one in which frustration can sit alongside the routines he has learned and the people he has got to know.
Near the end he returns to the fact that the relationship has lasted 21 years. The number is a useful measure of the time since the diagnosis, and the letter fills some of that time with scenes a reader can picture. There is a screen to look at, a choice to make and the relief of being able to describe the experience to someone who already knows what it feels like. For Nick Jonas, that last possibility changed the way he could speak about the rest.
The campaign leaves the form of the reply open to the people it invites to participate. Jonas chose a letter to something he encounters every day. It gave him room to say what he has learned to do, what still makes him angry and how different it feels to talk about those things now that he knows other people recognise them.
