“Rainy days and Mondays always get me down, but this would go down as the worst in history.”

When I created the piece Diagnostic, it had been a few years into my diagnosis and I was trying to find the beauty in being HIV positive, but I was latched on to the stigma. I had heard the horror stories of the 90s where people were dying left and right. I had already predestined my fate, but I had some hard lessons to learn along the way. Let me take you back to where it all began.

The summer I was diagnosed was the first summer that I decided not to work summer school or any summer camp. I was a classroom teacher about to move into a new role teaching 10th grade English at a high school. I was excited, nervous and also very scared to be changing districts and working with all new people. That summer, I decided to volunteer with MS AIDS in Action, a non-profit organization lobbying to help fight and end the stigma associated with HIV and helping to provide funding for research. It was work that I felt needed to be done as a member of the LGBT community, so I was happy to help. Our National testing day event was coming up and I had just gotten out of a relationship several months prior. I was courting someone new and I hadn’t been tested in a while, so I decided what better way to put my money where my mouth was. I told my friend I was going to get tested, and literally uttered the words, “if I’m positive, I’m probably gonna drive off into a ditch somewhere,’ as if my monogamy had made me immune from contracting HIV. I had stigmatized it just as much as everyone else, as some whore disease that people get when they sleep around. I left my apartment confidently making my HIV test a stop on my list of errands that I could just check off. I literally gave it no additional thought. I walked into the clinic just super calm, and waited for my turn. He took the swab and ran around my cheek while I waited for the result, playing on my phone. The initial test was positive.

My heart sank. I didn’t know what to do. I had to go to another clinic to get a confirmatory blood test which also came back positive. There were needle pricks. There was a discussion of sexual history. There was more blood work. There was a panic attack and raised blood pressure. There were phone calls and profanity. I had to be rushed to the hospital because they thought I was having a stroke. I went to the ER and my best friend met me there. I was still in shock. She sat with me as I took it all in and waited for my blood pressure to go down.

After being released from the hospital, I remember going home and not knowing what to do. I sat in my room and wailed for hours. There were so many tears. I felt so abandoned. Everything seemed to be crashing down at once. I cried for every myth I’d been told. I cried for every stigma I had heard. I cried believing that the rest of my life would be a continual perpetuation of all the horrible things I was told about HIV. I cried because it felt like the end, and I really wanted it to be, and tried several times to make it that way. The next few days, weeks, months, and years were an absolute roller coaster. There were frequent doctor visits, and time taken off from work. The transition to my new job made my HIV a pre-existing condition and my insurance didn’t cover a lot of my doctor visits, so I was racking up bills. There was workplace discrimination. I made the decision to seek employment in the Maryland/DC/Virginia area, so that I would have access to better care, find an opportunity to make more money, and have a better quality of life.

The lessons I’ve learned:

Health and Wellness

My mental health deteriorated drastically after my initial diagnosis. There were multiple suicide attempts, feeling of worthlessness, and loss of hope. Every time I got a slight cough or headache, I would wonder if this was the one to take me out. It was extremely morbid. Because my mental health was declining, I was not taking care of my body. I initially refused retrovirals, and skipped doctor’s appointments. At one point, I got so much contradictory information from doctors that I ditched my whole team and decided that I would let the chips fall where they may. Things took a horrible turn when I was hospitalized for mental health issues, after a failed attempt to take my life on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. My immunity was declining and I felt like I was wasting away in more ways than one, until I had to be hospitalized for C-Diff. I made a promise to myself to seek help and get comprehensive care. I started retrovirals and within 3 months was back to undetectable status. Without making the decision to care for my whole self, I’m 100% sure that I would have let myself go. When I started this blog, I wanted to focus on the importance of doing the work to improve my mental health, and I watched everything else fall into place. HIV taught me the true meaning of positivity. It taught me how to holistically think about wellness and how to care for myself in ways that I didn’t know were necessary. My care team is top tier and though I’m walking into a new job, they have taught me what I need to look for in comprehensive health care. You are as well as you allow yourself to be and I want to be well and healthy for as long as I possibly can.

Advocacy and Education

It’s super important to understand that the ideas we learned from the stigmatization of HIV are ingrained in us in ways that we don’t always see. They became my silent side effects that made more impact than the actual virus. I had to educate myself very thoroughly to understand what was happening to me and what it all meant. There are so many things that people still don’t know about what a positive diagnosis means. I donate regularly to organizations that support HIV research. I want to do more to lobby against the criminalization of HIV. In so many states, it is a felony to not disclose your status even when you are undetectable and there is no possibility of transmission. With sex work already being criminalized, and the lack of access to proper care and testing, there are people who are positive and just don’t know, but this omission can land them in prison, allowing the other person to seek compensatory damages, even if they don’t contract the virus or had no chance of contracting it. HIV being stigmatized in this way led me to view my body as damaged goods, and sex as a criminal act. Sex always felt forbidden and stopped being so enjoyable. When we support and uphold these ideas, we support a system that allows the stigmas to continue. Learn as much as you can. Odds are, someone you know is HIV positive, and whether they ever tell you, they carry the weight of all these things, day in and day out.

Love and Dating

Knowing and understanding your status is essential, but you also have to determine how and when you will share this information with potential partners. Dating is already hard, but living with HIV has taught me that not everyone is comfortable or educated enough to date someone with HIV. I remember the day I found out. I remember telling the person that I was seeing at the time that I was positive. Things had been going well, and in that moment, he paused, and said very few words. I’m sure he didn’t know what to say. Shortly after, I never heard from him again. That feeling of shame and abandonment is something that I carry to this day because I know at any point, when I disclose, it could happen again. At the end of the day, I had to learn to take control of how I see my value. I couldn’t let it lie in the hands of other people, and I had to do the work of making sure I believed that I was worthy of love. I had to find people who I could love on and who would love on me regardless of this “thing” that I had let define me for so long. It is a continuous journey that we travel on, and I haven’t reached my destination, but I’m grateful to still be traveling.

To be honest, I never thought I’d see this day. From day one, I had already conditioned my mind to believe that people with HIV didn’t live long and death was looming around every corner. I had to reprogram myself to choose life and not let a virus be the thing that decided my fate. Ten years later, I finally got what everyone else was trying to get me to see. It’s been an incredible journey filled with ups, down, highs, lows, and everything in between, and I’m not sayin HIV is the best thing that happened to me, but it taught me so much, and I refused to let it destroy me.

Cause now I see beauty in each waking moment

And snatch joy at every possible opportunity

Embracing myself

And the fact of the matter is.

I’ve never been so positive in my life

It hasn’t always been easy to choose joy. Every day hasn’t been sunshine and rainbows. Some days have been darker than others, but I’m so grateful to have a life filled with so much love. Know your status. Seek the care you need. Live the life you deserve. Full of light, laughter and love. Do what you can to help end the stigma. Until next time my friends. Heal. Grow. Repeat. All 2021