When Your Marriage Feels One-Sided
September 15, 2016
Let’s Talk About Sex
November 3, 2016When Your Marriage Feels One-Sided
September 15, 2016Let’s Talk About Sex
November 3, 2016
By Sophie Jayawardene
The woman I was once-in-a-life...
About the peacock. It's another part of my life that mesmerizes me the most through people I had met, where I have been and today. Is there something about me that suggests that I am a peacock? Definitely. I was brought up to be a proud woman. A woman who was brought up to feel sexy and beautiful.
That changed in a split second when my new identity was labeled contagious. That was 1989. I had become HIV positive. In the years that followed, I got lost deep in the darkest, isolated and scary woods. The hunt for the woman I once was came much later. It was as if I had forgotten my gender. Slowly I reached what I call "in the haze of my life." That is when I realised how devastating it was to lose my womanhood.
All of a sudden I knew that if I should find the peacock in me, I had to find a way out. Love, sex and rock and roll are required to be part of the human species. Unfortunately, I was no longer a woman as far as the species is concerned. That behavior would be judged harshly.
As all the other behaviors I had accumulated came to surface, somehow I continued to justify why these behaviors were in me. I quickly learned there won't be love, sex and rock and roll for me. Only Love, Sex, HIV & Life to be debated.
"In The Haze of My Life”… loss and misery…
Between days, weeks, and months, I had only remembered good days because I made use of them. I spent time with my family, going to rugby matches, gardening, and painting my house. I did what I could do weather permitting and a combination of how my body felt. Writing about my life was always a way of venting out loud to an invisible audience.
Life seems to have been teaching me a lesson, and I was one that would not sit and listen. I was the one that refused the normal theories of life. Somehow I learnt to negotiate or agree to disagree if that had made me feel better.
At war with myself was one of those things I spent time on. I had no idea how I had time to even think of the needs of me as a woman. Then again, I had found myself thinking, “Some habits are hard to change.”
Despite the illness I live with, I am and always have been the biggest flirt in the world. In those darkest days of the epidemic, I was aware that this kind of behavior in a person like me is considered abnormal and a danger to the HIV negative society. I tried so hard not to be sexy and considered changing my behaviour. But like the virus I live with, I could not shake it off.
In between days I was feeling good, I had polished myself like a female peacock, behaving like one, something I had loved. With this virus, the real me was doomed. Trying to live a life that (normal) people accept was scary. Scary, humiliating and unkind was all that it was.
And 30 years later the peacock in me is well, striving, and undetectable.
A version of this article was originally featured in the blog, A Girl Like Me on September 21st, 2016, here.
