FEAR eats the soul

I don’t talk about my HIV to my friends in London. They don’t know at all. Even though they do know I work ‘in Aids’. I’d need to prepare them with so much information. It’s not that

I’m afraid I’d lose them as friends, but I’d lose respect and I’d lose confidence. They might pity me; I don’t want that.
HIV does knock the confidence out of you when you have a relationship with an HIV negative person. You can end up always struggling with the worries like ‘is he doing me a favour?’ and then you try and give more than you should.”

Susan Cole, who writes for PN, worries about her children being stigmatised:
“I’ve been fortunate in not actually facing any personal stigma about my HIV status. Not yet at least. I do have some fears about stigma, primarily relating to my two children who are eight and 10, and do not yet know about my positive status. I’m concerned that they may face some discrimation from their classmates and be stigmatised, based on the ignorance and misconceptions about the virus in the general public and the often savage

cruelty of other children. I do plan to tell them about my HIV status, but the time never seems right. I would of course hate for them to hear about it from a different, perhaps malicious, source. I have been doing some groundwork - they know quite a bit about the virus and are accepting of friends of mine who are openly positive. I feel more needs to be done to educate children about the virus beyond the scare tactics of prevention”.

Some of the names have been changed in this article.
To join the debate on stigma, log onto NAT’s website: www:areyouprejudiced.org