May 2011

With my career at a standstill, and having just come out of a short, intense relationship with a guy I will call ‘Mr Manipulator’ I began to experience an increased feeling of being defined by my HIV status, a growing concern since my diagnosis as positive in August 2007.

The fear of starting medication, even though I knew this medication would enable me to live a long life, filled me with the panic of knowing that once I started I would never be able to stop. I was also living alone, something I had craved but at that time it only served to make me feel even more cut off from the world around me. I was trapped in my own head and it was a terrifying place.

I was immediately prescribed anti-depressants and referred to the psychology team at my clinic. It felt like a step in the right direction at last. A step I had been too crippled to make on my own.

That day I went home and wrote a letter to my family telling them about me being HIV positive. I really wasn’t sure how it would be received to be honest. We are a small family – just my mum, brother, sister-in-law and their kids. My brother and I had only been communicating for five months after an 11-year estrangement, so I knew I was taking a risk which could have meant that I would have ended up more alone than ever, but it was a risk I had to take.

The one thing I was sure of that wet January day was that I had carried this cross long enough on my own and couldn’t hide who I was and what was going on in my life from them any longer.

When I sent that email I was truly prepared for the worst; disgust, disdain and anger – the whole caboodle. I should have known better. All I got was love from all concerned. I was actually quite ashamed of what I had projected onto them; they truly and completely accepted everything and asked me to come home to Ireland to see them.

I flew home two days later. In typical Irish fashion lots of hugs and cups of tea were distributed.
On my return I embarked on a course of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) at the Mortimer Market Centre.

At first I was so relieved to have someone to talk to I threw myself into it. Wanting and needing help I was ready to do whatever was asked of me. But I slowly came to realise that it wasn’t for me. This form of therapy is task based, you discuss issues you have and they set homework for you to try and change your thinking on specific issues. To an attention-seeking, approval-needing man like myself, a man who as a boy was only comfortable when singing and acting and pretending to be someone else, it was just another performance and I certainly know how to perform.

I have spent my whole life trying to figure out who everyone wanted me to be and trying oh-so-hard to be what they wanted, but all the time just wanting to be myself. But I had lost that sense of self. So every week I went with the report on my performance and got my gold star. But really it wasn’t making any difference, as I never repeated the performance once it had been graded. I finished the course not long after I became aware of this fact.

The year progressed and the anti-depressants were doing their job. But what they really do is suppress. EVERYTHING.

So I carried on without feeling any emotion good or bad. But I thought I was doing OK. So I decided to wean myself off them around mid-June. I thought I no longer needed chemical support. But unfortunately things were about to take a definite turn for the worse.

The company I was working for had been struggling from day one and they had recruited me in to turn it around, which I did. But the owner really had no interest in developing its potential, and was negotiating to sell it.

My career is the one thing I have always done with a great deal of success and, to be honest, due to that I had always defined myself by that success. It feels good to have a strength, but when they announced the sale of the company the new owner made it very clear that due to a contractual loophole I was to be squeezed out. I immediately sought legal advice, had a case and pressed for settlement.

This dragged on for three months and my mental stability went more and more downhill as I found myself sitting at home waiting for lawyers to call with news. I wasn’t working and wasn’t in any fit state to seek employment. My physical health was suffering as well as my mental health.

By September, although back on the anti depressants, I was a wreck, and stock piling pills and booze ready to end it if it all went wrong which I was convinced it would. And it did. The sale of the company fell through and my employers filed for bankruptcy owing me a very large sum of money. It pushed me over the edge. Drinking, not sleeping, worrying and more and more suicidal thoughts building.

By the end of September I was not someone anybody who knew me would recognise in the slightest and found myself sat at home one Friday night with 250 painkillers and a litre of cheap vodka in front of me. I was running my hand through the pills wanting it to be painless and scared of how long it might take.

I was trying to write a note but kept thinking of the chain of events after I was gone. Who would find me and who would break the news to my mother? I was crazed with anguish of how my taking my life would affect her and my family. I walked out of the house and walked around for hours in a very distracted state until I found myself in front of St Thomas’ Hospital.

Not knowing what else to do I walked in to A&E and asked for help, fully expecting them to laugh at me. But thankfully they were really helpful, put me in a private space, made me a cup of tea and got the girl from the psychology department who was on call to come see me. She sat with me for five hours and listened to me while I completely broke down. In the early hours of the morning, when I was truly spent, she suggested I contact a charity called The Maytree which offers residential respite care for the suicidal.
These are the people I truly have to thank for saving my life, offering a space to rest and think and counselling 24 hours a day – if you so wish, for a stay of five days and four nights as a one-off option to get you through the worst which will hopefully help you to realise options other than a final one.

Thus began my journey to a better place. After almost a year of full-on therapy, challenging myself to do delve deeper than I ever thought possible, facing my fears and demons and identifying the things in my past and my psyche that have held me in stasis for decades, I finally feel like I am in a good place.

I decided early in therapy to try and turn my own perception of my HIV status into a positive thing if you will excuse the pun. I volunteered to participate in GMFA’s Count me in! campaign. A choice I am proud of; it was my way of outing myself in many ways and was done in many ways for selfish reasons. But given a lot of people’s perceptions of the virus it was something I am hugely glad I did, as contracting the virus propelled me on to a mental level that is not to be sniffed at. In many ways it has helped me to overcome a lot of my fears but by god there must have been an easier way. And I can but hope that my participating in it will make a difference.

The last six months have been blessed with an enormous amount of personal discovery for me. I have met so many wonderful new people, and I was brave enough to burn the leeches away. I came off the anti-depressants that were, if anything, keeping me in a state of perpetual numbness. And the morning eight weeks after I stopped taking them when I woke up in a bad mood is probably one of the joyous things to have ever happened to me. It took me three hours to figure out that it was only a bad mood, but it was an emotion I had not felt for years, and three days later when I awoke laughing, I was in tears of gratitude for hours.

I also started medication for HIV and the results have been astounding and I feel stronger and healthier than I have in years. For a long time when I went to the gym I pretty much just said ‘hello’ to all the equipment, but now I actually use it. I have a long journey ahead of me, but thankfully that journey does not terrify me any longer, in fact it excites me.

This week has been interesting in many ways. I decided to start dating again, my therapist and I decided that it’s time to wrap things up, and I didn’t crumble when somebody said something to me that a year ago would have crushed me. And I also realised that I have many people in my life, some who have been there for a long time and some who are very new, who I love and care for and who love and care for me.

And yeah, I plucked up the courage to write about it. Now I am not under any disillusions about my writing ability. But to not choke up at the sight of a blank page is a huge deal to me!

So in the words of a recent online campaign ‘It Gets Better’…

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