Tomorrow I'm 50.
There's so many thoughts and emotions going through me right now I just don't know where to begin. I've been too sick to be out drinking and celebrating, but I'm sort of glad now as it's provided clarity to the whole turning 50 experience. It's been a very long, rough, (and of course dramatic darlings) journey to at last get to this point. I know this blog is about HIV, but HIV was rather a late arrival on the scene; I've often described it as the icing on the shit cake. I wished I'd have started this blog many years earlier (although we're talking pre-internet for some of it) as it's been vital these last couple of years in helping me to sort out my thoughts and feelings, and move forward with some kind of clear head in it all.
Am often asked by people who contact me through the blog, like WTF happened in your life to end up so hurt and all like you are? The blog itself is also a recent arrival on the scene, although the dramatic tragedies have continued unabated after it's inception. I'm not generally eager to share any of what went on pre-blog as there's just so much of it that I'd be raving on for ages. But someone asked recently in an email, and I did manage to fit some of the pre-blog dramatics all into a single paragraph in my reply, albeit a long one:
OK a very brief summary of my shit. You may be surprised to know that I was married until 2006. We were together for 17 years, and our daughter is now 21. My wife was chronically ill for most of that 17 years and eventually died in 2006 after a long slow decline. I was of course the primary carer. It was bloody hard, to watch someone slowly die like that. We had some huge arguments and it was a very stormy relationship very often, but in the end none of that mattered. Just that we loved each other. I was there when she died, I knew she'd hung on overnight so I could be with her. Of course our daughter took it very badly, and the first Christmas after her death decided to drop everything in Sydney and go and live in the country with some idiot 18 year old she'd gotten to know on the internet, full of anger and hatred for me. She'd only just turned 16 so there was nothing I could do. So yeah, that hurt more than my wife dying. Ripped my heart out that one. I've never celebrated Christmas since. Anyway after a while my daughter moved back in with me about a year later after her relationship with the country fuckwit collapsed. It didn't work out though as we constantly fought, she was 18 and a total little shit. Through all of this I had a very good online friend in America who we got to know each other very closely. For a bit we even thought of taking the relationship further, but by that time I was exploring my sexuality other side of the fence, and we just stayed very good friends. Her husband was dying like my wife, and she supported me while my wife died whilst I supported her when her husband died only a few months later (right around Christmas). But alas they have no support services at all in America for people like her. Unlike me she had no grief counselling, no financial assistance, no friends, nothing. She did try the poor thing, but long story short 2 years later she ended up in a caravan park facing eviction in a couple of days. She was open with me about it, and decided that she wasn't going to do homelessness, and killed herself on the day before the sheriffs would have come to chuck her out. I rang briefly a few hours before and we both said goodbye to each other. I miss her friendship, but I understand how she was feeling and there was nothing I could do from here. It was what she wanted. That was Australia day 2009. Two weeks later my daughter and I had an enormous argument here at home and I hit her a couple of times lightly in the arm. She went to the local police station and had me charged with common assault, and the cops came and arrested me later at 1am in the morning. I booted her out the next day. One month after that, I was diagnosed with HIV. For the next 6 months I was very close to suicide, and very nearly did it. I was put on a very high dose of antidepressants (which I'm still on today) and was seeing both a psychologist and psychiatrist at Albion St Centre, who diagnosed me with Post Traumatic Stress. There's more of course, but it sort of connects with the beginning of the blog from there.
I should keep that paragraph somewhere I think. Just copy and paste next time I get asked! Looking at it all in one place like that sort of does my head in. And of course you can add acute kidney failure and near death to that, along with financial near bankruptcy, and on and on.
But hey, here I am, still here. I'm not sure how, but I am. Have said before my GP is of the opinion that I'm like a cat with nine lives, although I dunno which one I'm up to. Indeed, I seem to be un-killable. Perhaps one of the reasons suicide became less of an option/attraction? It'd be just my luck that I'd jump off a tall building and fuckin survive! When I was diagnosed with HIV I instantly thought "Thank fuck, a way out of this world", and then they told me it wasn't a death sentence anymore. WTF? And that I no longer had HepC as my body had cleared it on it's own. WTF?
I seems like nothing I did self destructing made much of a dent. All those drugs over the decades. All that alcohol. The depression. Living on the edge, putting myself in all kinds of danger. How the hell I survived all of that is surely one of the great paradoxes of the universe. Against all odds, I have survived.
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