Bleed Like Me: A Lesson Learned in the Silent Night

I had developed quite the antagonistic attitude toward the holidays during young adulthood. Pretty decorations seemed like a distraction to all that was horribly wrong and unjust in the world. The mass consumerism felt like a capitalist ploy to exploit those in poverty. Thus, the only thing I looked forward to was spending time with my family.

But by the time of my own HIV diagnosis, my family had already decided that none of us would be traveling to see each other over the holidays that year. We already had a group trip planned for October which I then had to use to tell the family about my new disease. Once that cat came out of the bag, we all regretted our decision to pass on Christmas travel, and by then, the flight costs were too astronomical to change.

Strangely enough, all my friends had their own plans and wouldn’t be around either. While I did have a budding romance with a wonderful guy (the man I would one day marry), our courtship was still too fresh for me to join him at his family’s home. This would officially be my first Christmas alone and it couldn’t have come at a worse time.

With my roommate gone as well, I woke up to a very empty apartment on Christmas morning. It was snowing and I couldn’t remember the last time it actually snowed on Christmas. Riddled with my own sense of mortality, it looked more beautiful than any other snow I had ever seen. Even though I wasn’t going to die, I just couldn’t shake the feeling this could be the last time I see such a thing.

I broke into my roommate’s stash of hot chocolate packets despite the fact that I had long given up on sugary snacks. Such a beverage gave me the warming sensation of when life didn’t feel so horrifically uncertain. The presents my family sent lay all around the fake black Christmas tree I once bought as a snarky response to my distaste for the holidays. And I realized that such joys like these may not have ever been fully appreciated … until now. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to open the gifts, because once I did, there would be nothing else to look forward to the rest of the day.

As night fell, darkness blocked the lovely views, and what little happiness the snow brought began to slip away. When I could feel the next wave of depression coming in, I frantically grasped at the gifts hoping they could keep it at bay for just a little longer. I can’t even remember what the gifts were, but I know that I loved them because of what they represented: my family’s love despite my HIV status. I started to cry. I simply wasn’t ready to die.

As I wiped the tears from my face, I realized that I’d let those little joys, like snow and hot chocolate and store-bought gifts gloss by me due to the lifetime of a pessimistic demeanor. Looking back, I hadn’t just been a grinch about Christmas — I had been a grinch about everything.

In the first Christmas after my HIV diagnosis, I wound up completely alone and the grief of it all felt absolutely unbearable. But perhaps I secretly needed it that way. Amongst this loneliness, I was given the opportunity to realize that the life I had been living wasn’t a life well lived. Perhaps this was the opportunity to take such grief and give myself a another kind of gift: optimism instead of pessimism and gratitude instead of antagonism.