This post won’t be about HIV. At the moment my view on that is an adaption of a recent Stonewall campaign “Some people are Positive, Get over it.” 

Some of you who have read my posts here before know that I have to deal with a much more insidious and debilitating condition than HIV, and that’s depression. And I have been battling with it on a huge scale of late.

It’s quite a lonely fight, I’ll be frank with you. People want to help and try to engage to help pull you from the morass of darkness that is totally engulfing. They will ask how you are, and then get that panicked look when you begin to truthfully tell them. They tell you they know how you feel, but unless you have stood on a bridge in the rain staring at the expanse of freezing water below with a yearning so deep it is intoxicating at 11pm on a Wednesday night then quite frankly you don’t, and it’s insulting at the very least to try and pretend you do. Unless the only thing that has stopped you jumping is the fact there where eight men in high visibility working on a boat not a hundred metres from where you stood who would see you and try to save you  - then honestly you have no idea how the person feels. 

I write the above with a sense of detachment, as to make it as personal as it truly is angers me and makes me wonder why I didn’t just jump? But I didn’t. I decided to fight again, to try and escape the void that wanted to swallow me, to turn off the voices that had nothing good to say, to not listen to the words "failure" and "loser" anymore. 

And once again I find myself transported back in time and starting again on so many levels, work, personal relationships and even fitness. And it’s a challenge every minute of every day to keep just far enough ahead. 

Getting out of bed each morning is a challenge I applaud myself for beating. Putting a smile on my face and showing the world I am fine is one of the hardest things I do. Turning up for unpaid work to give myself something to do, mindful of the fact that every unpaid job gets me one step nearer to a paid one, is not only at times soul destroying but seems futile. But I do it because not to it is giving in and if I give in then I truly fear I will give up. 

So I protect myself by moving to a higher ground, a place where I superficially engage with the world, I listen to the problems of others. I cannot afford the holiday I want! I’m so tired I cannot wait for this day to be over (this one is usually the day after a big night out with people knowing they had to get up the next day and do a full day of paid work that enabled them to go out in the first place) and I say nothing, because to tell them how I really feel will create an explosion that I don’t think I could control. And god forbid anyone should have an opinion that doesn’t agree with the self-indulgent nonsense people spout on a daily, if not hourly, basis. 

I refuse to look inward these days, if I do see a gap and emptiness that I long to fill, but it will take time. Time I am giving myself as I think it will be worth the wait. I wont compromise who I am and what I want for a quick fix. It doesn’t and never has worked before. Each day is an opportunity to start again and a chance to get it right this time. I wont feel sorry for myself, I will employ every distraction tactic I can think off to keep myself from falling into self pity, I’ll clean my apartment, I’ll read a book, or I will actually sit and listen to music. And by listen I mean digest every word, find hope in the melodies and the prose. Truly engage with art and appreciate the madness and darkness that drove people to produce work that endures. 

Each day is a fight, but every night as I fall into bed mentally as well as physically exhausted I tell myself I have won that fight. And each morning as I climb out of bed after a night disturbed by dreams filled with the very demons I fought during the day, I prepare to fight again. 

The fact that I’m writing this means I am winning. And I have made a deal with a friend, a friend who actually does understand the darkness. The next time I find myself on that bridge, I will call him no matter the time of day or night before I make a choice.

So after my last post when I revealed to the world that my spate of celibacy had ended, I have been on a couple of dates, nothing to shout about huh, we all do it with a greater or lesser degree of success. Having had the casual shag with the hairy Lebanese guy, I thought it would relieve some of the pressure I put on myself.

But it dawns on me that at 43 I’m just not that good at casual sex, never really have been, to be fair. I would much rather feel a connection with someone and have sex as a journey than just wham bam thank you Sam (or whatever his name may be).

I have re-installed all the ‘dating app’s’ (read – are you available for a fuck app’s) on the old iPhone, and I have been chatting to a few guys with an outlook towards meeting people. For some reason I seem to be getting a lot of attention from 20 year-old twinks.  Now you have to understand even when I was myself a 20 year-old twink I wasn’t interested in them, so it is a little frustrating

I’m sure we have all felt times that we seem to not attract those we are interested in. Makes me beg the question “do we all aspire too high or not high enough?” (Sorry if I sound like Carrie Bradshaw right now.) This is a topic I have covered before in my personal blog, but it does perplex me as to why some people message others. Myself, I barely have the courage to leave a track on the profile on people whom I am interested in, let alone send a wink, a grope or a woof.

Yesterday I received a message from a guy on ‘Scruff.’ I read the message before looking at his picture.  I’ll be honest in saying I was a complete grammar Nazi and was about to correct his when I flicked back to his picture. This 29 year-old guy is a lean mean sex machine, and the first thought to enter my head as all thoughts of bad spelling flew out of it was, ‘why the hell is this guy interested in me?’

We chatted a bit; he apparently knows me from somewhere, although I have no recollection of ever having seen him in my life. I suggested that since I am a bit of a poster boy for HIV in London that he may have seen me in the GMFA campaign or an associated article, or possibly have bumped into me in a bar.

His reply was that he never goes to bars and “what’s GMFA?” . It turns out he was a member of the gym I use for a month and he saw me there. Now at the gym I never bother to cruise or even really pay much attention. The gym is my time; it’s the one part of the day other than being at home when I don’t have to talk to anyone, my job is very social able and there are times I get to hate the sound of my own voice so the gym is very much GLASSES OFF/HEADPHONES ON time. So apart from the fact I cannot really see anyone clearly I’m usually singing along to whatever is my music of choice at the time (huge music geek – just so you know)

But back to the dating game; it dawns on me yet again what an absolute minefield that world is. On my online profiles I very clearly define my status; this has resulted in conversations with a multitude of people admiring my honesty and opening up dialogue with people about their own personal journey since diagnosis. Which is all well and good, but I’m HUSBAND HUNTING. Putting oneself out there is a double edged sword in some ways;  there are times that militant, activist, awareness Denis wants to take a back seat and have some romance. Maybe I am looking in the wrong places, and maybe like many of the celebrities whose hair I do, I am beginning to realise that once you put yourself out there in a certain form, people will begin to see you in a one-dimensional way. And at times I think this must make anyone who makes a stand want to retire from the front-line and just enjoy his or her own life.

But I doubt I will do that. If my experiences with HIV and/or depression help one single individual avoid suffering, infection or stigma then of course I will keep making noise and smile when people approach me with questions. It is after all our duty to help those who struggle and I mean that in regards to life, not just health.

Sorry I am rambling again. I am supposed to be talking about dating.

I am meeting the lean mean 29 year old sex machine, who if he has read my profile and not just looked at my handsome picture (irony) is aware of my status.  We are meeting tomorrow for lunch, after I go to the gym in the morning for the first time in ten days, (not been going due to a trapped nerve in my shoulder) so I will probably push myself way too hard while there and go and order a salad for lunch, as I am overly conscious of my shape and size right now. And am already worried about what he thinks of me and in the back of my mind thinking about a comment I made last week.

I have been rejected by men more often for being a smoker than I have for being HIV-positive. So maybe I will stick a nicotine replacement patch on after showering and see what happens.

Wish me luck.

I resigned from writing for PostiveLite.com a few weeks back. You know how it is when you’re positive. Life gangs up on you at times, makes it difficult to concentrate on anything but what’s going on inside. With myself it’s a twofold thing as I am also extremely mindful of clinical depression, as anyone who has read my posts here before will know. It’s a debilitating illness which gives me more concern than HIV.

I have had an extremely eventful time since I last filed a report, and not all of it good. I mentioned having left the academy I was teaching at so as to concentrate on doing my own thing; I was delighted and nervous at the same time, however life does nothing except test you, huh. Two weeks after leaving the academy, the guy who runs the studio I base myself at announced that he was closing the studio as he had been served notice by the landlord, and we had exactly a week to get out.

To say I was floored is somewhat of an understatement. I had spent the previous week in a state of panic about what I was going to do with work anyhow. Having done what I wanted and left the academy I panicked and was fearful of the future. But this announcement didn’t send me into the flat spin I expected it to.

With the support of friends and a calm approach (not something I am known for) I planned what I was going to do next, but not just the immediate next, the long term next.

On speaking with my mother I said that I felt like the universe was trying to teach me something, as this wasn’t the first time my career had seemingly imploded on me, I said to her that I felt I had missed the lesson and the same thing was going to keep happening with increasing frequency until I learned whatever it was I needed to learn. On reflection I think it might be as simple as taking responsibility for my own future and not relying on others to support my dreams. Or indeed to follow my own personal dreams, and not aspire to follow the dreams of others.

Since having that conversation a Zen like calm descended on me, and my mapping of the future has been very clear. There is a long way to go, believe me. But for the first time in what feels like forever I can see the path I'm on and know exactly what I want to achieve. And step-by-step I am putting the foundations in place to move forward and feel very positive about it.

But there was one other thing bothering me and I have spoken about this in a previous post. I was still celibate. I have even been interviewed by Gay Times for a feature on Celibacy, but it was really beginning to annoy me. I had said at the end of last year that I intended 2012 to be the year of the sluttish achiever. Friends were even asking how that part of my resolution was going. And I was ashamed to report that there had been no movement. I mean to say what kind of gay man was I turning into who couldn’t pull a casual shag.

I’ve been going out lots with friends and having a blast, but no joy on that front. Dating apps and online sites were proving equally useless. I went out to a club to celebrate a close friend's birthday. There is a dark room at this venue. I'm sure you can understand my hesitation at my first sexual experience in, at that point 449 days, being a drunken fumble with a stranger in a room with others.

That night also I was mindful of the fact I had gone out in a group of mates to celebrate a special occasion so I didn’t want to ‘cop off’ and desert them. At the same time I was a horny little devil and was imagining all sorts of things with all sorts of people.

So I went back a week later. I knew a bunch of twitter friends would be there also that night - people I know well enough to hang out with but not so close that I would feel guilty if I went off with someone else to have a good time.

I did partake of rather a lot of Dutch courage on said evening. Remember it was 456 days at this point; it’s almost like the first time all over again. Nerves, sweaty palms, fearing rejection or even worse, a bad rating. My god, I thought, what if I only get 3/10. So I drank a lot of beer and vodka and threw myself onto the dance floor with reckless abandon (in reality it was more of a shuffle and moved my hands around a bit)

In a short space of time I found myself kissing a rather handsome Italian chap, but when he told me he was 25 I got cold feet and moved on. Only to bump into a 40-year old hot ‘n’ hairy Lebanese bloke who was only in the country for three more days. I was very honest with him about not having had sex for a long time and the reasons why and he didn’t laugh at me, but I think he was quite pleased that I chose him.

BINGO. Who cares if I got a bad response; he was leaving the country. Anyway I won't go into detail other than to say he was a great kisser, very tactile and left the next morning saying he wished he had met me at the beginning of his 3-month stay in London. Not a bad response for a ‘blowing away the cobwebs’ session.

So that’s it. As one friend said, the seal has been broken, and that comment made me think of a Joan Rivers joke about horse riding.

I am about to hit the shower to get ready to go on a date with a major hottie. I am excited beyond belief, not with expectation, as that would be silly, but because there is nothing standing in the way of me just having a good time with him, whatever happens.

And I just have to say a special thank you to my twitter friends for being a good bunch of people to go out and be a slut with.

John, Rob, Mike, Stef, Adam, Ben, and Lee you helped to make an old man very happy…

 

If you are a twitter fan you will have seen lots of these in a hashtag #thatawkwardmomentwhen but for the most part they weren’t awkward or even moments. But yesterday I had the most awkward of all.

I’d had a lazy morning lay in, coffee in bed, reading the papers on my iPad. A good session working shoulders at the gym was followed by a light brunch with friends.

Then making my way home it struck me that due to having been working like a lunatic for two weeks, my fridge and freezer were totally bare. So I took a detour via the convenience store. Now I hate shopping for food. Having to practically run through the sweets, treats and cheats section, the bright fluorescent strip lighting and piped music makes me want to run for the hills.

I don’t find them very inspiring with their lay out. In an ideal world, produce would be laid out in a way that makes me think of a recipe rather than have to wonder aimlessly around looking for ingredients. I will inevitably forget the KEY ingredient in any meal.

This particular store has had a makeover since my last visit so I was even more lost than usual. Probably the only time I get mistaken for a straight guy is when I struggle my way around looking dumbfounded.

I had placed about three items in my basket, when disaster struck. Completely without warning. My stomach lurched and then contracted and then  - yes, you’ve guessed it. #thatawkwardmomentwhen you shit yourself in the convenience store.

I’ve been lucky to date. Since starting medication a little over a year ago all of my toilet-based issues have actually happened when I have been either near or in the bathroom. But this was another story. Having heard horror stories from other people, I usually carefully plan my route to wherever I happen to be going by way of a few easily accessible rest rooms. I always carry wet wipes and a change of underwear.

But of course yesterday I was totally unprepared. I dropped my basket and hobbled out of the store, feeling the wetness leaking down my legs. I got outside onto the street, which was populated by the usual plethora of people going about their business but also a group of homeless drunks. Who where clamoring for my attention.

I dropped my gym bag. Typically yesterday despite the cold I was wearing a hoodie and a quilted sleeveless jacket with a t-shirt underneath. I tied the Gilet around my waist to disguise the noticeable stains and hobbled carefully to a coffee shop. Thanks are to whatever spirits look out for me that there wasn’t a queue for the restroom. And it also had toilet paper.

I locked the door and stripped off to clean up as well as I could. Thankfully I had my gym kit with me, so was able to put on the under wear I had worn that morning on to replace the hideously soiled stuff. I stuffed that pair into the sanitary bin supplied for the ladies who frequent the establishment.

I tried to ring a close friend who lives two minutes from there to ask if she would grab an old pair of trackies of her husband to bring to me but she wasn’t at home.

So I left the coffee shop having made myself as presentable as possible and hailed a cab home. Typically I bumped into a neighbor who wanted to stop and chat as I put the key in my front door. I hope she forgives my seemingly rude response without me having to go into to much detail.

I stripped off and jumped straight in the shower and scrubbed myself clean, not sure whether to laugh or cry. I laughed, and you probably wonder why that's what I chose to do. Well on Saturday night on twitter after posting on my own blog, a parody account of the pope no less decided to send me offensive tweets about my blog. He had taken the time to read the blog but was clearly offended by it, saying that God had dealt me a SHIT hand and I should stop pestering everyone with it and get on with life. My response was to tell him not to read it if it offended him that much but he was clearly out to try and upset me as much as possible.

Had it been someone brave enough to not hide behind an anonymous account and be honest with me about how me blogging made him feel, I might have got upset. But it just proved to me that people without balls hide behind religion (but that’s just my opinion and I wont go into that here). So I laughed the shit away.

Yes it was probably one of the most humiliating things to happen to me that I can remember. And it was one of those things that reminds me of being HIV+ when most days I can just get on with life. My poor neighbour must have thought I had cracked as she heard this manic laughter emanating out of the bathroom but who cares SHIT HAPPENS HUH?

However I have vowed to never leave home again without an emergency pack and a map of all the conveniences programmed into my iPhone.

A double boil wash later and I think I will be able to put the jeans on without thinking about #thatawkwardmomentwhen

I have discovered that it comes with the territory of blogging that people feel they know you even if they have never met you. People share things with you that they do not share with their partners or therapists. I do not have a problem with that. But I do hope that people understand I am not some guru with answers. It gives me a sense of pride that my ramblings touch people in a way that makes them feel comfortable enough to open up to me.

But if I had the answers I would be writing a self-help book and being lambasted on Oprah, not wittering here.

A week ago while chatting to my twitter crush about his life, I made a comment; it was only after I hit send that it struck me as sad.

I told him that love was the one emotion I did not understand. You see I firmly believe I have never truly been in love. I have been loved but never loved back. And what’s sad about that is that I am 43 years old and have never truly felt love. I have never felt that glow when a name shows up on caller ID. I have never been warm with anticipation while awaiting the arrival of that special person.

On Thursday evening I met my best friend Simon after work. We had a coffee but I needed to talk, so I needed to walk. It was freezing and dark, pretty much how my soul was feeling at that moment in time.

I was trying to explain to him how I was feeling, and he encapsulated it when he said, and I quote “its like you have experienced all the deadly sins but not got the reward”. He said this as we were walking over Waterloo Bridge in sub zero temperatures so I didn’t smack him one (for a change),

Some things are hard to admit even to oneself, but having chosen to blog and having had such personal responses from people I cannot avoid this topic.

So I looked them up

Pride  - an excessive belief in ones own self and abilities, (strike one, I have had this in bucket loads)

Envy - the desire for the traits, status, abilities or circumstances of another. (Yeah, guilty as charged)

Gluttony  - desires that don’t balance with need, (well we all love hairdo sweets huh)?

Lust  - cravings for the pleasures of sex (probably the closest I have ever come to love)

Anger - fury. (Who hasn’t, but to what end?)

Greed  - for so much and so many

Sloth  - laziness (well if you could see my bedroom right now you would understand just how guilty I am of this)

But when I look up the meaning of Love, it does not sit close to home. What I have thought was love had too many of the above emotions attached. And when I break it down the closest I have really come is Obsession.

Maybe I have not been ready or deserving of Love to this point in my life. Maybe I was so full of the above that I missed it when it was in front of me.

I hope that what I am about to say is not true  - but maybe I have missed my opportunity.

I truly hope that my last statement is not true, and I hope that one-day, even if it is only for one day, I truly feel and experience love.

Monday was my anniversary. Exactly a year since I started on my clinical trial and committed to taking 5 pills a day. An odd one to mark and certainly it wasn’t something I wanted to celebrate, but then in an odd way I guess one should celebrate.

But getting my results from last bloods put me on a downer. My viral load is still undetectable. But after the initial spike when first starting meds when my CD4 jumped from 320 to 780 it has slowly dropped, month by month.

Not one month gave me cause for concern, but the increments have added up to a 200-point drop over the last year and my percentage has risen slowly from 22% to 35.5%

My doctors are happy and I guess I should be also. But I find myself worrying and even that cannot be good for the numbers.

I have never been particularly numerically literate, as my accountant will attest. But even I can tell that it's not going in the right direction, even if it's not drastic or even interfering with my health.

Anyhow after I left clinic I went straight to work, and I had only slept for 5 hours the night before after finishing a job at midnight on Sunday. The day went OK but then the academy I tutor at had its annual company meeting.

The boss went through his usual routine of telling us how amazing he is and how lucky we are to be working for him. And I just realized that I have done nothing but complain about him and the place for months.

I got home at 9pm and after a bit of a chat with my mum I popped a zopiclone and went to bed. And slept reasonably well. But on awakening still tired, I pushed myself to go to the gym and while there I had an epiphany of sorts. Doing a job I love in a place I hate, that takes up so much of my time, and gets in the way of allowing me to develop the other parts of my business that give me so much joy was not only pushing me back towards depression but quite possibly suppressing my CD4 levels.

There is a lot to be said for happiness aiding health and the last six months at that particular part of my working life have been thoroughly unenjoyable

So while pumping iron (actually I was polishing the seat of the machine with the fabric of my shorts to be honest as I wasn’t doing very much) I realized that despite the drop in income that will arise from what I was about to do, the lift in spirits was undoubtedly going to help my mental health. Ongoing taking control of my well-being could only benefit my health in general

So I resigned that day, resigned from what has been for the last 12 months a steady source of income. And to say I am nervous about replacing that income with other things is a little of an understatement.

But the sense of relief is palpable and hopefully it will show up in my counts in 4 months time, so tonight my frame of mind is light and optimistic.

Update.

Got a call from the clinic today asking if I could pop in immediately, as something was wrong with one of my tests results. As you can imagine it put the fear of god into me. I had just left work and was walking towards the underground. And couldn’t really hear which test the nurse was talking about. Now luckily I work a 3-minute walk from my clinic so I really was able to go in immediately.

Thankfully when I was there he was able to explain that there was just too much Creatine showing up in my system and nothing major.

He wanted to know if I was injecting steroids. This made me laugh and I asked him to take a good look at me and tell me what he thought the answer was to that. He also wanted to know if I had started taking supplements for my gym routine or was pushing much harder at the gym. I have never taken an exercise supplement in my life as I feel what takes longer lasts longer. And my schedule has been so busy with work I was going about 40% less than usual.

The only thing I could think of was that there are mild doses of steroids in Beecham's Nightnurse, a flu medication I had been taking as it helps enormously with my insomnia.

Anyway he took more blood but I was able to discover that the rest of my results where back and my CD4 has gone back up to 710, which is a weight of my mind.

Am still happy I resigned from the job by the way