There are four days left in 2011. There are seven left in my eleventh year of knowingly being HIV+. My condition, at least for as long as I have been absolutely aware of it, is as old as the years of this century. I guess in some ways that makes me a century baby.
Even though I was born in 1966, my life has had many defining moments. We moved around a lot so I won't list those or else I'd be writing for days.
Somewhere about 1967/8 I had my first broken bone. It was a femur. I'm told I slipped part way out of a swing & got my leg caught. I know I had to be in traction for a while.
I started school earlier than most because of how my birthday fell. When most kids were six during kindergarten, I didn't turn six until first grade. I was always playing catch up. I didn't turn sixteen until my junior year & eighteen when I was a freshmen in college.
With my family, we just kept moving & my parents kept fighting & drinking, or vice verse. Before I was eight, I was far more bold. I could dive pretty well & swim like a fish. I'd jump off of anything. That year my parents got a divorce. It was definitely the right thing to do for them & us kids. Still, it jarred part of me, that never quite got back. I never dived without tensing up again, I hate the feeling of falling & I've never swam as well since. I got very angry & part of that anger is still with me today. It doesn't burn as hot as it did back then, but it's there.
Then the cycle of my mother's many men/husbands began. My first step-dad was actually a nice guy. Too nice for her sake, he wouldn't fight with her & she soon divorced him. None of the others were worth the pine boxes they are or will be buried in. This was the norm until I was thirteen.
By now I had lived with various relatives, been dumped on baby-sitters for weeks at a time & left with my older sister. But one day when I was thirteen. I realized something, she had ditched us. She was gone. I had watched her kids for years, cleaned her house, did what I could to survive her & then she just left without so much as a good-bye.
From then until my later teens, I bounced from relatives, foster homes, juvenile centers, group homes, living on my own, jail & even a place for juveniles with "special" problems. In other words if they can't push your square peg through enough round wholes, they call you a loon.
At seventeen I ran away to college of all places. I shouldn't have gone. I could handle the academics, hell I got a Ph.D., but I wasn't there to learn. I was just hiding. Trying to survive. In college I stayed until I had my doctorate. I made some friends along the way, nearly all are gone now.
I lived in Tulsa, OK for a while after school. It didn't go so well. The economy for the academic arena was already falling to pieces & no needed another sociologist. My bright future dimmed pretty damned quick. Shortly, I found myself moving to help a friend whose mother had just passed. Turns out, he didn't really want help, he just didn't want to be alone.
I found myself stuck in a tiny town of mostly unfriendly people. In about 1999, I noticed I hadn't been feeling well. It went away, then it came back, then it went away & came back worse. I had been sexually active for years, but I played "safe". I hadn't been active in a while. Did I mention the town was full of unfriendly & mostly unattractive people? I had been tested three months out from my last encounter, then six, even nine. I was fairly certain I wasn't +. HAH!!!
The last part of 1999, I couldn't do anything. I was wasting away, I could barely eat or move. I sleep all the time. I had night sweats. There's a lot of this time I simply can't recall, because I was just too out of it. But I can remember, I was freezing. I didn't have insurance & had to rely on a free clinic for anything & they were none too helpful. Finally, my friends took me to an ER & there I stayed in an ER room for the next eight hours, cold, tired & thirsty.
From 2000 until now, I have known I was +. I didn't expect to be here today. I thought I'd be dead by now. Another surprise, I'm still here. How very Yvonne De Carlo of me. I wound up in the hospital once over a reaction to Retrovir (AZT). I begged charities for drugs & fought with the HDAP program. I eventually got on disability. It seem things were looking up, again hah!
In relatively short order, my then roommate bailed to go live with a boyfriend he'd had for about six months. I lived in the house alone for a while before my current roomie moved in & we eventually left that place, because the former roommate let it go back to the bank, even though we were making his payments. We wound up in a shitty trailer. Then it got interesting. Over the course of the next few years, my roomie lost her job & wound up on disability as well.
Life was not easy & it only got rougher for her. She was treated like crap during the disability process. I thought they were just trying to outlast me, but they were hell-bent on humiliating her. Things settled some after she was on it, but the $ issue was always there. In the next few years, she lost both her mother & grandmother. We now live in the grandmother's house, paying rent (upkeep) to her uncle. She's making plans to get her off of disability. I know that she will give it all she can.
For me, my father finally turned up back in my life, be it mostly by phone. He's in Texas, where's he's supposed to be sober going to AA meetings. I don't trust it. It may not be fair to him, but he set the situation up for me not to trust it. My mother passed this last year & all I could feel was relief that the woman couldn't cause me any more chaos. The rest of my family is scattered to the winds. I talk to my older sister every couple of months or so, but it feels like we're just going through the motions. Neither one of us, really know anything about the other any more. We're related, but we're not family. At this point in my life, I have a my roomie, some cats & a few people I chat with online. For me, that's life.
That's that edited cliff notes of my life. These are some of the defining moments. I really hope 2012 is a good year for everyone. The rough years are getting a little hard to handle. Some people would say that you just have to let go of all this stuff & move on with your life. One question, if people like me let go of all the crap that defined us, then who are we? Who would we be?
Cya
