I Wouldn’t Survive a Zombie Apocalypse

Whenever I’m asked the question, “How would you survive a zombie apocalypse?”, I always answer, “I would die.”

As someone living with Type One Diabetes (or T1D, for short), it’s not easy to imagine a scenario where I survive the end of the world. How would I get access to insulin? How would my devices work under such conditions? Who would fetch me a juice box when my blood sugar eventually became low? It would be a total disaster. A disaster on top of an already horrible disaster.

Most people don’t like that answer. It’s often followed with, “Okay, pretend you don’t have diabetes.”

The premise of the question depends on a version of survival I don’t have access to.

But even without diabetes, I would probably still die. 

Mostly because I’m not a competitive person. I don’t care much about winning. It’s not that I don’t want to perform to my best ability, it’s more that the concept of winning doesn’t mean all that much to me. I prefer to lean into the experience; to be present in the activity I’m participating in. The idea of triumph has never motivated me. 

Survival, at all costs, has never felt like a moral imperative.

I learned this in high school when I joined the cross country and winter track teams my sophomore year after a failed attempt at being a cheerleader my freshman year. I was only a cheerleader because my sister (who was a senior) was the captain, and I didn’t know what other sport to go out for. I’m not the most athletically adept individual, making the options slim for me. I wasn’t going to try out for a contact sport like field hockey or lacrosse. I didn’t have the willpower to body check someone three times the size of me. 

Running felt like the safest option. It was encouraged as a solitary achievement—beat my personal best and measure my success quietly. Then, as a team, we all hoped that somehow our individual scores mismoshed into one collective win. We never won a single race in the three years I was on the team. But we had good team spirit, and no one seemed especially devastated by the losses.

Years later, I worked at a nonprofit in Boston, where during our lunch breaks, we played a game called “Who would you want on your zombie apocalypse team?”. We imagined the outbreak happening while we were at the office, and we each picked three coworkers to survive with. The athletic ones were chosen the most often, which was always funny to me because one of them was the smuggest man I knew and would jump at the first chance to abandon his team. 

I never wanted to form a hypothetical zombie-fighting team because the thought of spending the end days with any one of my coworkers seemed like a fate worse than death. Another coworker explained that he would hide in a cemetery. It’s the perfect crime, he said. All the zombies would be leaving there. To be fair, he had a point. 

I was never chosen, which I understood. I was a liability because of my diabetes

I was diagnosed with T1D during the fall of my senior year of high school, among the throes of college application season. My parents and I had mistaken the symptoms as stress because I never handled my anxiety well. We all assumed that once my college applications were submitted, I would feel better. It wasn’t until I found myself gasping for air a quarter mile into a run that I finally admitted to myself that these symptoms weren’t normal. WebMD, against all odds, agreed with me.

My life became logistical very quickly. Ratios. Numbers. Mathematical equations. Learning how to keep myself alive in a way no one else could see. It was surprising to learn how uncomfortable my chronic illness made other people. The first time I checked my blood sugar in front of friends, their faces collapsed into pity. I reassured them immediately. It’s not that big of a deal, I said, making my voice sound casual. I’m perfectly fine! 

But it altered the way I wore my illness in public. 

Even emergencies became performances. I laughed while telling the story of waking up with a blood sugar of 23—dangerously low—and army crawling out of an air mattress to reach a two-liter of Dr. Pepper and a platter of brownies. Everyone laughed with me. Humor became armor.I collected anecdotes like these as a way to make people feel better about my disease. If I found it funny, no one could pity me.

I had a friend who immediately apologized to me after confiding about a pinched nerve in their neck. It was very painful, and they were having a bout of insomnia because of it. Why are you apologizing? I remember asking. Well because what you have is so much worse, they admitted. I shouldn’t be complaining to you. I’d never thought of my life as worse. Diabetes wasn’t an identity; it was an extension of my daily reality. It reminded me of something people would often say to me when I was first diagnosed: At least it isn’t cancer. I wondered when our society became so obsessed with scaling medical conditions. T1D is not as bad as cancer but worse than a pinched nerve. Like a medicinal version of the Kinsey Scale. As if survival itself existed on a scale.t hurt to realize that as hard as I tried to minimize the realities of my illness, I would always be pitied. 

When Mattel released a Barbie with T1D—complete with an insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor—, I cried. It felt like normalization. Like permission to exist visibly. Maybe if people accepted Barbie, they would accept me? I was overjoyed that children living with the disease could see themselves in the toys they played with. Barbie represented so much more than an illness, it was a step towards inclusion.

Then I read the comments.

Why are we funding healthcare to keep these people alive?
They’re draining the economy.
They should just die.

That was the moment I understood the zombie question differently. It wasn’t just hypothetical. People didn’t think I deserved to live. That my life wasn’t as valuable as theirs because my pancreas decided to die on me.

It took me more than a decade to name my diabetes as a disability. Because it’s invisible, I felt guilty asking for accommodations. Because I could survive quietly, I thought I should. Hearing the term “invisible disability” for the first time felt like validation I hadn’t known I needed. I wasn’t weak for needing support—I was human.

Living with T1D has taught me that survival is rarely individual. Despite everything I learned about managing it alone, I eventually let people in. Family who celebrated when I started using my first insulin pump. Friends who know what to do when I’m too overwhelmed to handle a low sugar moment on my own. Doctors who acknowledge that hard days are okay. A small, imperfect village that insists on my survival even when it’s not easy.

So, who knows? Maybe I would survive a zombie apocalypse—just not the version people usually imagine.

Luckily, real life is less dramatic and far more collaborative. I’d be the person everyone plans for. Survival, as it turns out, involves snacks, backup plans, and people who don’t mind helping me stay alive.

I’m very good at that kind of apocalypse.