HIV

In December, I made a choice to slow down. Not as an afterthought. Not as an apology. But as an act of protest.

t’s the end of the year, and everyone’s telling us to rest.To slow down. Reflect. Be grateful. But how do you rest when the world won’t stop coming for you?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my ripple: actions that I take, big or small, that affect others. Like a pebble dropped into a calm lake, the action of dropping that pebble creates ripples of waves that spread energy further than either the pebble or the lake could have imagined.

Every year around mid-October, a particular heaviness plagues me. The feeling creeps in before I know it. And although it’s an annual occurrence, it catches me by surprise.

“Geez, it’s a helluva time to be sober, huh?” I said this jokingly to a friend of mine recently, a fellow addict living with HIV. We both snickered, but we know the truth: there’s no drug or booze that could make any situation, even the hell of what we all are living through in Orange Cheeto’s America, better.

I’m back from Washington DC, where I attended the USCHA. This conference is the largest of its kind in America. Advocates, healthcare professionals, and pharmaceutical industry professionals converged to network and learn from each other.