Project Kengikat

What is HIV Support?

// March 25th, 2010 // Uncategorized

What exactly is an HIV support group? What do they do? What kinds of support are they supposed to offer? Are you supposed to walk away feeling more confused and more afraid? Are they supposed to help you through hard times? Or just another place for gay guys to be catty or talk talk shit? Is it a therapy session for people to talk about how HIV has ruined their live? Or is a place for healing?

Since I became positive I have tried unsuccessfully to find a “support group” where I feel like I fit into, where I feel like the people are like me, dealing with and going through the same things as me. I was homeless when I was diagnosed and being homeless is the most isolating, degrading, humiliating and yes even depressing thing I have ever had to deal with. HIV only added to it. Not because I was having a hard time with being HIV positive, but the fact that not even people with HIV seemed to even care about what I was going through.

After homelessness came to an end after 29 long months, I once again tried to find an HIV support group, I even joined some online social networks in hopes of finding people who are gay and HIV positive just like me. Again I walked away feeling like there was something wrong with me. I refuse to be a victim, refuse to sit and moan and grown about how bad having HIV is. I refuse to allow HIV be the only thing that drives me or the only thing I can talk, blog or vlog about. I guess what I am saying is that I refuse to let HIV become the only thing in my life. I refuse to let it take over.

What I have discovered in creating my Unpluggin’ HIV outreach is that there are plenty of people with HIV who feel the very same way as I do. HIV support don’t work….for many people. So with my outreach I created and have worked very hard to make sure that people who are facing and dealing with so much more then HIV have someone who will listen, someone will will do their best to understand, someone who wont pretend like they have all the answers and know what to do, someone who will not make them feel any worse then they already may feel. Through this outreach I have tried very hard to do what other “HIV support groups” failed to do for me…..I try very hard to make people with HIV feel like they have a real friend, that they have someone who can relate to that they are facing.

Since creating this outreach I have tried very hard to identify the needs of the people down on Skid Row and I have done all I can to help out in any way I can. I have tried to get people to care and some times I am successful, but many times I am not and many times I sit in tears feeling like I have failed. Next month is the very first outreach for the residents of my Skid Row outreach where soemone will come to make a presentation on “understanding your labs” I am so happy I was able to make this happen.

However I wont stop there, just like my Do Something Saturday outreach for homeless people I will work very hard to find people and services who will care for the people I try so hard to serve, I will work hard to find some people who are out of the box thinkers just like me. I will not allow people in need to be overlooked or left out, because traditional “HIV support groups” can not or will not make room for them and do everything they can to reach out to them. I refuse to allow the residents of Skid Row to become any statistic on some CDC report or any other report for that matter that seems to point to them being filled with stigma or lack of education. I refuse to sit by and do nothing.

I am doing this because two people, my two best friends did this for me, Tina and Andy refused to let me give up, refused to allow me to be alone in my fight, they worked to find ways to make me feel good about me, safe inside my skin, they refused to allow me to believe for one second that I was not worthy of medical care, HIV support or support services. Other people in my life have also refused to allow me to fall by the way side and here I stand today ready to do all I can to serve the people of Skid Row as well as anyone else who does not fit into the four narrow walls of “HIV support”

But most of all I am doing it because it is the right thing to do and making excuses about the way things are doesn’t fix them, it only created another reason not to do anything about it.