19 years later.............

Sorry for not posting yesterday but it was what I call my Fibro crash day where all I wanted to do and did was sleep.  Not so good for keeping my boysih figure, that I am deperately trying to regain but hey I guess if you need to sleep, you need to sleep.  The way I view myself since the hospital has been a really huge issue for me, and frankly I am not crazy about everything I see in the mirror.

Well as of tomorrow at 9:45 a.m.I will be celebrating 19 years living with AIDS.  In my minds eye, quite the milestone, somehow.  So much has changed in those long years, so many more medications, so much more acceptance and understanding of the disease, much longer life spans to name just a few.

With pneumonia just almost two weeks ago, I guess I am in a place where I have been giving a lot of thought to what the last nineteen years have been. Where I am trying to go now and what things are like this very moment.  There is some sadness to this thinking. I think one of the biggest was that while on my way home from the doctors office for my post-hospital follow up. I noticed that the only North East Ohio AIDS Hospice was closed and the building is for sale. I was one of the early volunteers, one of the original donators to help get it moving and now it is all over.  Where now does someone with no where to go, go?  Those memories are still alive and very real but the place is gone.

My health is recovering and I am left wondering exactly what am I going to be able to accomplish, even finishing school with a degree?  Somehow it doesn't seem like a possible goal, somehow I can not see that far ahead, somehow I don't see is it going to make huge changes in my life.  I know depressing but it is the truth.  Do I want to stay in school of course I do, do I want a degree, more than life itself.  Do I want to be more than what I am now, well yeah I do it is why I am in school in the first place.  But is it really going to happen?

I don't want anything in my way, including me.  I just want to somehow secure a future that is in all reality is mine and that in itself is the biggerst change in nineteen years.  Plain and simple, HOPE!  All those years ago the only hope was two years at the most and here I am with the real hope of twenty more years.  I have never had that kind of hope, but with hope comes planning.  Or at least for me it does, how am I going to live and on what?  Where does that what come from?  I actually opened a savings account to try to plan more for the future.  Thrive, and do I want to do what I am doing right now?  The answer to that is mixed. Some of what I am doing now yes, some absolutely not!

Nineteen years later and I am still trying to find out who I really am, what I really want, where do I really want to be and is any of who I was all those years ago still relevant?  Well until next time I am glad we had this time together.