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...

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           

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.