Lessons Learned

This morning, I woke up like I usually do on a Saturday morning, earlier than I planned to get up yet later than I ever sleep during the week.  Each Saturday morning, it is my routine to get up and flip the television over to Food Network, and I spend the morning soaking up culinary inspiration.  The highlight of my morning is watching Pioneer Woman.  For some reason, I connect to her show, her food, her way of life.  She and her family live and work on a cattle ranch in Oklahoma.  She is very vivacious and down to earth and her food vision is amazing.  I have made more of her recipes in just the last month than I have ever made from any other recipe source.

But, I am sort of going of on a tangent.  Gotta love age + HIV meds, they do screwy things to your head.

The me from a few years ago, or even a few months ago, would never have found joy in cooking.  I had always held a deep interest in cooking, though for some reason or another (usually just pure laziness) I rarely got on the kitchen and attempted to create.  But when you have HIV, or any terminal illness, I believe a light is shone more brightly on your flaws, and one has more of an impetus to change.  All the sudden your bucket list becomes real.  Every day becomes another opportunity to do good, or to start over.  Each day is a new recipe of trial and error, to see what fits and what doesn’t.

I know full well there are definite negative consequences to living life with HIV.  I live those consequences daily and have written about them either on here of my Facebook.  But HIV also has many positives (no pun intended) that I think can be easily overlooked, sort of like when the sun is covered over by clouds.

Walking hand in hand with your mortality enhances my senses, at least the physical senses.  I taste things more intensely, I see things (literally see things) that I have not seen before, even on the same road I have been on a thousand times before.  I am always pointing things out to people that I notice and they tell me “Oh, that has been there for years.”  Of course, that could very well be because I am blond inside.

I have a much greater  appreciation for music of all types.  I listen to and love things that are so far outside of myself, that I would never have listened to or derived pleasure in before.  For example, jazz.  Or country.  Or classical.  All of these have become rich new means for me to feel.  And oftentimes, music has become one of the few ways that I can actually feel things.  I have struggled with depression off and on throughout my life, and to be able to feel again is a true gift.  Maybe one day I can feel outside of music, but for now I will take what I can get.

Having HIV also has taught me a lot about boundaries.  To live life with HIV but without boundaries leads to a very exhausted person, or at least that has been my experience.  In the first few years after my diagnosis I was so very cautious and miserly with my energy and my time, to the point that I hid out at home and rarely went out.  Then I went through a period of becoming too social, too far outside of my energy zone.  Now, I am back to being a hermit again, but I really am starting to see the need of a middle road, of a balance between being a hermit and being exhausted.  I just have to figure out where that medium is and I have not done that yet.  I am very much like Goldilocks in that regard.

I guess my point is this:  there can be a silver lining in situations, but they may not always be immediately evident.  Sometimes you have to dig a bit before you come across any gold.  Sometimes you have to bake a crappy batch of cupcakes before you figure out how to make good ones.