‘RESIST
THE DARTH SIDE’A girl I know thinks she’s HIV positive. Distraught, she is waiting for her test results right now, convinced that if they come back as positive her charmed life will be destroyed. It will mean the end of love and laughter, the end of hope and good times.
She will enter the clinic as sparkly Anakin Skywalker and leave through the back door an embittered Darth Vader, glowering with rage and self-loathing, light-sabre of pestilence at hand, ready to infect anyone that comes near her.
I don’t think she’ll believe me if I say I fancy myself as a Princess Leah, too busy with fancy hairdos and chainmail bikinis to worry about a potential sticky ending. Why should being HIV positive mean you have to turn your back on fun and frivolity?
I’d be lying if I said I’ve never wallowed in the painful pathos of my diagnosis. In the early days, I was consumed with dread and despair, dragging my wretched carcass around, waiting to die. I waited and waited...and then I got bored. It gets boring crying yourself to sleep every night, turning your back on people and life.
Then I thought for a while that I might re-invent myself as a Mother Teresa figure, selflessly dedicating my life to others and meditation and bland vegetarian meals. But that got boring very quickly.
So here I am, as vain and shallow and self-obsessed as I ever was - and so what? Why should being HIV positive mean that we have to change? Of course I’m not the person I was four years ago, but hopefully I’ve grown (not necessarily towards the path of enlightenment), through not vegetating in a stationary life and not because I happened to get diagnosed with a virus.
Other things that have happened in my life have certainly had a more traumatic impact. I’ll never forget the look in my first ex-husband’s face as he told me, while I breastfed my baby, that he’d met someone else and didn’t love me anymore (that didn’t turn out too badly really - I lost two stone and he lost most of his hair!). I’ll never forget the look on my grandmother’s face as I watched her die. I don’t remember the face of the nurse who told me I was positive, only the absurdity of her stating, before telling me my diagnosis, that the good news was that I didn’t have syphilis! Phew!
Just because I’m HIV positive, it doesn’t mean that I’m a ‘victim’. Being a victim would suggest that I have been passively made to suffer, that the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have rained down upon my innocent blameless self. Oh please! I was aware of Aids when, blinded by lust for a large American cock, I chose to have unprotected sex. No one is to blame for that apart from me, so how could I be a victim? I certainly don’t deserve, or for that matter, would ever desire, anyone’s pity. Please don’t feel sorry for me, I’m just fine thanks, in fact I’m fucking remarkable, phenomenal, extraordinary (in my own little private universe at least).
Being
HIV positive doesn’t stop me doing the things I did before (except perhaps
having unprotected sex, but who likes waking up in a pool of semen?). I still
drink copious amounts of £8.50 cocktails, resulting in pink projectile
vomit the next morning. I still blow my income on shoes and restaurants, with
no assets or pension plans or savings. My choices may not be good or the right
ones, but they are my choices. I’m sure it could all end in tears, but
I’m determined to have fun until then.
I’m blessed in my friends and family, especially my two extraordinary sons. Of course there are aspects of my life that I’m not entirely happy with, but there is no one I would want to change places with. I love my life.
Being HIV positive does not define me; I am so much more than a carrier of a virus. Anyone who says that it should limit my enjoyment of life, or change me in some sombre way, can fuck right off.
