Saturday, August 19, 2006

early days

I got an email from a guy who wants to link this blog to a HIV site. It is the first time I get a response to this blog (admittedly, I have only published the address once). He also said he couldn't comment for some reason; strange.

I have been thinking then that I should post some earlier stuff, since this blog is less than 2 months old. I don't want to put on "a public face". I don't want to try to appear something or somebody that I am not. I am not (yet, and maybe will never be) any kind of HIV activist. I am more preoccupied with my expanding waistline, and not all my problems are HIV-related.

I look back to the months since my diagnosis. So much has happened since. When Z left me, and the whole ordeal, so much pain, having to navigate Dutch beaurocracy, switching my meds, growing up, my embarassing relationship with E, my love for P and our relationship, breaking my arm... my counts going from 77/20,000 to 300/undetecteble to 200/undetecteble to 230/undetecteble. My fears, hopes, dreams, reemerging addictions, anxieties, happiness... so much, and yet when I sit here at my parents' house (they went to see the new Almodovar, and I am too embarassed to join them, a bulky 30-something year old single daughter; my friend R who is younger than me just gave birth to her second child and called me from the hospital, I was able to simultenously feel my joy for her and my tinge of fear and remorse and regret that my life may never lead me that way) it seems that so little has happened. I am still me with all my annoying hang-ups and griviences, and yet on some level a better me has emerged.

The very early days, that terrible week that I went to the freezing Netherlands, with my counts still incredibly low, no health insurance at the time, and Z refusing to continue our relationship (and to think that I was about to move in with him), I wrote about that when it happened, and it appears in the "stuff I wrote 6 months ago post". I won't go back to that now. I am not on high (or is it dry?) enough ground to go there yet. But I decided to include my correspondence with D, a man who contacted me through the poz.com HIV-dating sites in the very early days. I don't have his permission, so I will include only my own emails, and edit out anything that would reveal his (quite upmarket) identity.

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