Why Don’t I Feel Normal Yet?: On the In/visibility of illness
Cornwall isn’t the first place you’d expect to be diagnosed with HIV. Popular understanding of the virus imagines it lurking in seedy metropolitan bars, or stalking hedonistic nightclubs. Nor is it really considered a 21st century illness. I sometimes feel like an anomaly, a red dot placed by chance at an almost laughably extended tip of the British Isles.
Not that I’m complaining. Other than the mild inconvenience of the lonely train rides to Truro Hospital, I’ve faced very little disadvantage as a result of my decision to study in Cornwall. Since being diagnosed in February, my life has been a flurry of clinic appointments and phone calls. On top of my wardrobe, hidden more from myself than anyone else, is a collection of print-outs, pamphlets, doctor’s letters, and booklets equivalent to the contents of a small filing cabinet. By the time this is published, I will have been given a potent prescription of drugs, with confusing yet exciting names like ‘dolutegravir’, ‘lamivudine’, or the explosive-sounding ‘dual-nukes’.
I am endlessly privileged to be living in a time when HIV can occasionally feel like just a mild inconvenience. The drugs I take will mean that it will not have a significant impact on my lifespan, and will make it impossible for me to pass the virus on. The illness will be completely invisible.
So why don’t I feel normal yet? Being a student is normal, we are told. When I first left for university, a friend of my parents slipped me a £20 note. ‘Spend it on booze’, he said, grinning. Dutifully, I spent it on booze. I realise now how fragile my sense of normalcy was. Students aren’t supposed to be ill. We drink, shag, do drugs, hand in essays late, lose our housing deposits, and fulfil all the trite requirements that are expected of us. The normal student life is a life without permanence; we live in identical dorm rooms, stacked up on top of each other with deadening uniformity.
Students aren’t supposed to be ill. We drink, shag, do drugs, hand in essays late, lose our housing deposits, and fulfil all the trite requirements that are expected
of us.
Contracting HIV was distinctly abnormal; it interrupted my relationships with my peers. Telling friends is difficult. Although I could probably get away with just keeping it a secret, I usually try to bring it up in conversation as casually as possible. As a consequence, though, in the past some have mistaken it for a joke. However, as much as I make it sound like a chore, my diagnosis has made me appreciate how much I rely on my friends for emotional support. Even a socially distanced phone call can go a long way in stopping me panicking.
There are other ways, too, in which the experience of HIV has positively recontextualised my time at university. As an English undergrad, I’ve always been interested in queer theory. I knew that I wasn’t heterosexual long before I became a student, and in my first year I was thrilled at the chance to be able to study people who shared my experiences. One of my earliest English essays focused on the gay relationships in E.M. Forster’s Maurice.
I don’t think I ever really understood what it meant to be ‘queer’ in the sense of ‘otherness’. I had a privileged middle-class upbringing, and although to a degree I knew what it felt like to live in a heteronormative culture, by the time my feelings made themselves known to me, I already had a protective bubble of openly gay friends.
Now though, I feel much more confident in allying myself with the wider LGBT community. In a strange way, being diagnosed with HIV has given me a prouder connection to the activists who fought for my right to exist during the AIDS pandemic. As preventable and tragic as that period was, it was one of the first times in the 20th century where gay communities were openly visible, and my medical connection to those men and women gives me a much stronger sense of community history.
The anxiety over my body. Constantly searching my own features for deformity. The connection between desire and physical decay. A youth that - in my lowest points - felt shallow, wasted, and doomed.
I also discovered this new sense of queerness through the literature I read. Having first picked up Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray when I was 17, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. Suddenly, Dorian’s predicament felt uncomfortably familiar. The anxiety over my body. Constantly searching my own features for deformity. The connection between desire and physical decay. A youth that - in my lowest points - felt shallow, wasted, and doomed. The literary parallels frightened me, but at the same time I noticed a kind of comfort in seeing myself reflected in Wilde’s novel. Like Dorian, I felt monstrous and misunderstood, physically and psychologically self-destructive. Still, I felt immense solace and empowerment in being able to interpret the text through my own lived experience.
Undeniably, the events of the past few months have revealed a precarity in myself, and in the more general idea of what it means to be a student. Sometimes things go wrong. Maybe our culture’s fetishisation of university as ‘the best years of our life’ is bound up in the alienation I felt. Still, this has been a time where I’ve tried to learn to unreservedly embrace my ‘otherness’. I wouldn’t wish HIV on anyone, but it is a permanent part of my life, and I might as well learn to live with it.
