Eighteen months ago this week our family received a shocking
diagnosis: our oldest child had Type 1 Diabetes (T1D). We have
no family history of diabetes, so we hardly knew where to begin
in dealing with this chronic condition. The most important news
is that our boy is doing great: now almost 9, he's showing lots
of maturity around managing his condition and he's got great
estimated A1C numbers that show we're working together well to
control his blood sugar. But this isn't a post about that.
Through the last 18 months, the support of the community —
really various communities — of our son, our family, and my wife
and me has been extraordinary. From knowing virtually nothing
about this disease to wrapping our heads, arms, and heart all
the way around it literally took a village. This post is a
little bit about that village.
I've never personally been good at asking for help. Forever
independent and sometimes even contrarian just to make a point
or extend a discussion that I believe is worth challenging, it's
not natural for me to ask others to solve my problems. Our son's
health was too important to follow that predisposition, so we
immediately turned to our friends. About a week after his
diagnosis, it was my birthday, and we decided to discuss openly
on Facebook with our friends about our T1D diagnosis and run a
fundraiser for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF)
to celebrate my birthday in a new way (and to finally dogfood an
amazing fundraising product my former colleagues at FB built!)
Through the generosity of our friends, we raised about $17,000
and matched it ourselves for a total of $34,000. But what was
even more important was the outreach of friends, and soon
thereafter, new friends at the JDRF. We were on the receiving
end of that thing I habitually shy away from: help.
Now looking back, one category of help that was most valuable
was introductions. All the different communities I've been a
part of over the years had people reaching out with their
stories and offers of connections to others knowledgeable about
T1D or affected by diabetes. Fueled by the increased efficiency
of a CoVID-19-dictated video-conferencing-first mindset, I took
virtually every meeting offered. And those new friends and
acquaintances made more introductions. And so on and so on.
Having spent over four years helping Mark and the team at
Facebook build that world-changing phenomenon, I was
particularly interested by the structure of the interpersonal
connections I was making. I wanted to see what that personal
networking looked like, so over the last month, I did some
archaeology over GMail and FB Messenger and other introductions
made and recorded who introduced us to whom. Then I created the
below diagram where each person I met or knew is an oval with an
arrow line pointing to the person they introduced me to. Here's
the diagram after de-identifying the people:
