Saturday, May 19, 2012
I'm not sure why I haven't blogged more -I feel more comfortable Tweeting about my daily feelings, activities etc than sitting down and writing a blog about how I'm feeling or what I'm up to...idk. Tweeting is easier. Anyway, I think about writing more here, but I've yet to get into it. I will soon. I'll let it be known now that I've been busy with my mom -her illness has seemed to override mine. I guess that's life. I've also been irritable -so fucking irritable lately. My routine has been off and I'm trying to get it back to a normal setting, but it's a struggle. Yep, my life is a struggle. Blah!
Thursday, April 26, 2012
RiseUpToHIV: Join the Campaign to trend #HIV #AIDS and #IAC on ...
RiseUpToHIV: Join the Campaign to trend #HIV #AIDS and #IAC on ...: April 26th, 2012 ** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ** Never before has the hashtag #HIV or #AIDS trended on Twitter, not even on World AIDS Da...
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
A Letter To My HIV
Dear HIV,
I never really knew much about you, except from what I read
in a few books and saw in some movies once in a blue moon. I may have known you indirectly, through a
college mentor who knew many who were living with you and who had died because
of you, but I didn’t know you directly. I am an educated person and therefore
supposedly knew better than to associate with you, well that’s how I felt. I felt like I was better than you. I tried to stay away from you as much as possible
throughout my life in and outside the gay community. Even when I worked for The Resale Shop of Howard
Brown Health Center, The Brown Elephant, in Chicago
the summers of 1998 and 1999, I still tried to keep you away from me. Now, I got to know more about you during those
two summers at The Brown Elephant and I even met you through a few of my
coworkers, but I still tried to keep you away from me. I could have cared less to know you and hoped
that I would never run into you again. I
once decided to get tested for you in 1999 and my tests results came back
negative, which was great, because I didn’t know you and decided never to get
to know you personally. In my mind, if I
were ever to become positive, I would become a statistic, and I wasn’t about to
become a fucking statistic!
I kept you from my thoughts for many years, never wanting
you to penetrate any part of my mind or body.
Little did I know that someday, you would come live with me.All the times I got sick from 2006 to 2010, I had no idea
that you were already living in me. I
thought my bouts with sickness were all drug related. You see, I am a former drug addict and my drug
of choice was meth. I had no idea that
by using it, I could make you want to live with me even more, let alone screw
up my mind into thinking that I could do anything without repercussion. You see, I was always careful about practicing
safe sex, except for those rare few times when I don’t know what I was thinking. In my mind, I was still keeping you away from
me; I truly believed that you would never ever live with me!
So, why am I writing
to you now –now that I know that you’re currently living within me? Even now, a year and-a-half later after I
found out I had AIDS, I still struggle with what to say about you –what to tell
you. You came into my life at a time
when I was struggling to clean myself up and I hated you for making things
worse for me. This is how I found out
that you were positively living inside me.
The doctor on call in the ER briskly walked into my room and sat down in
a chair next to my bed. A few seconds
later he said, “That test you wanted to know about, well, it’s positive.” He then stood up, looked at my mother, who
was sitting in a chair on the other side of my bed, and walked out of the
room. It all lasted about twenty seconds;
the worst twenty seconds of my life.
I’ll be honest, I ranted and raved and cried for an hour trying to
explain to myself and to my mother who was sitting with me what it all meant. I was fucking HIV positive! I truly believed my life was over and that I
may die in the same hospital my father had passed away in a few years
earlier. My thoughts ran to those first
images of AIDS patients dying. My
knowledge about you was based on everything I had read about or seen in the
movies decades before. I thought HIV and
AIDS was a death sentence. I whole
heartedly admit that I was very naïve about you. I had kept you out of my thoughts for so long
and veered away from anything about you that I still believed that by having
you inside me, it meant I was going to die a horrible death sooner than later.
You, HIV, had been
living with me a very long time –long enough to have almost depleted my immune
system. Later I would find out that my
CD4 count was a 2 at diagnosis and my viral load was nearly at one million. You caused an opportunistic infection to
develop in my lungs and it nearly killed me; however, HIV, I somehow got the
strength to not give-up. I fought back,
and I’m still fighting back to this day!
I struggle with you daily, but it’s a struggle that I take serious and
am willing to fully attack. You cause
aches in my body daily and I take quite a few pills to control the pain and the
spread of you within my body. Some days
are harder than others, and sometimes it’s not even evident in my appearance
how difficult it is having you live with me.
However, I can tell you that it’s oh so easy for me to hate you. I fucking hate you HIV! I hate you more than anything else in the
world! I’m not sure if I’ll ever fully come
to terms with having you live inside me, but in order for me to be able to move
on and live a full and rewarding rest of my life, I must eventually accept you
as a part of me and dump the shame I carry for ever letting you get inside me. I hope in time that the shame will diminish
and that I’ll move closer to an acceptance of you in my life. I may hate you forever, but I’m in the
process of learning to take the hate and turn it into something positive. I could write on and on about you HIV and how
much I wish we had never met. This letter has the possibility of never ending,
but I’ll end it with a quote I once read in a magazine many years ago. I’m not sure who wrote it, but here it goes, “Discard
pain, dismiss guilt, dispose garbage and recycle dreams.”
Insincerely,
Mitchell C. Knapp
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
My First Time Blogging
Today I decided to start a blog. I'm not sure how it will be and go, but it's a start for me to share my life with AIDS. I feel like I need to advocate more for myself as well as others and sharing my experience in a blog is a good beginning. Hopefully, I'll get in a habit of posting regularly. More soon.
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