The prevailing sentiment was that a person infected with HIV had six months and a year at most to live. I was diagnosed as being HIV positive during this time and believed it. Influenced by this belief of my imminent mortality, I decided that there was no point in freeing myself from the grips of my cocaine addiction.
For ten years, I existed in a belief of hopeless apprehension of every cold being a sure sign of my impending demise. Six months came and went, and I was still here. A year went by, and my lights were still not out. The colds that I caught went through the normal cycle and was over.
I had made a shamble of my life, being of no use to myself or anyone else. I was confused and exhausted with my cocaine addiction, and at the same time, felt that being HIV positive had made me non-human and not worth any personal efforts to liberate myself from myself.
Being both a cocaine addict and HIV positive, I deliberately distanced myself from my family out of shame and to keep them out of accidental exposure to the virus by contact with me.
One year turned into two years and three years, and I was still making a fool of myself. The only sign of my illness was the testing results that confirmed it.
Encouraged by not being placed on an HIV death bed, I begin to pray to an invisible, non-existent character to give me the strength to overcome my addiction and to cleanse my body of HIV.
By allowing myself to have faith and hope in that which did not make any sense, denial of my disease became the answer to my prayers. My refusal to accept the truth placed others at risk of being contaminated by me. I gave the credit for the things that I was doing to improve myself to a fairy tale of someone who I did not know imagination.
My faith in the unproven did not make me strong but weak as I placed my trust in the wind and bequeathed my deliverance to a faultily written story. The evidence of my condition that was clear and factual became easy to discount because I believed in the unseen.
All the while, I knew that my hope was no hope and that my faith was hindering me. Three years turned into ten years of wasted life controlled by self-pity. Common sense flew out the back of my head and landed on a made-up story where it became useless to me.
Fortunately, I realize that the value of believing in a lie is a drastic reduction in my thinking abilities. Cognitive powers are one of the gifts given to me by my mother while I was still inside of her. To surrender what my mother embedded in me to phantasms is beyond idiocy and crossed referenced by stupidity.
I have lived beyond the six months to a year at most that I believed I had, and now old age has encased me. My deliverance has come from me and other human beings and not from dreaming. A window that one refuses to open, inner strength gave away, recklessness for the welfare of others. That is denial enforced by faith, and one should avoid it.
