Hi Meela, I'm about the same age and have been in a similar kind of position.
My HbA1cs have been too high so I'm on a mission to get the figure down.
I think it's a good idea to keep things simple.
I was awful. Take a look at some questions and see my answers which tell you how i'd let things slip
1. Is your monitoring good? - do you write all your results down?
2. Do you regularly review how you're doing?
3. Do you test regularly? once or twice each day say?
4. Do you have a fairly regular routine or does every day feel different?
5. Do you have a habit of letting your diabetes take second place or worse?
6. Roughly how good is your carb counting? do you carb count for easy things but still make quite rough guesses here and there?
7. How good is your understanding of how much insulin you need at different times?
Until recently my answers would be:
1. awful. i would never monitor results. they would just be left on my monitor and forgotten
2. no. i would think about things but very little i learned had relevance because every day was so very different
3. ok but sometimes I could go two days without a test and I'd not learn anything from doing the test other than to find out whether I was too high or too low at that moment
4. i had a terrible routine. my sleep was all over the place and i was always rushing around or working long hours and having meals at odd times
5. i'd often let things get in the way of my type 1. i'd eat then forget to inject far too often.
6. I'd gone on a carb counting course and whilst i knew the theory, applying it felt like too much effort (considering points 1 to 5 above were all over the place this is probably not surprising!)
7. i went for a long time not knowing what the effects of not taking my long term would be. i was told i should always take it but it took 15 years for someone to correctly explain that i must take it otherwise my body will start to poison me.
I've got better lately by slowly fixing the basics.
Working on trying to get a better routine. Not having every day completely different to the last.
I've been recording my results writing them onto my computer once a week.
Spending a bit of time figuring out what the numbers are telling me.
One of the most important things I did was to set myself a 30 day test. To give myself 30 days to produce a better set of results than the previous month.
This was really helpful. If you say you're going to get better forever it becomes overwhelming. However, you say just 30 days and you think, "yeah, even i can do that".
Also, another big thing was to not let disappointments hold me back. After the 1st week i had really good figures but then the second week i started to slip. usually i'd give up at this point but instead i kept going. I thought i'l try and make the 30 days. i did and my results have been much better than the previous month's wayward results.
For the full story and some random other **** (like a scary photo of me) see the blog i started to invigorate myself into keeping up the good work
http://from-infinity.blogspot.com/
Good luck with getting back on the right.
All the best
Ed