wiseMusings

For as long as I could remember, I planned out my life in my head. Not the specifics (“at 20 I’ll be here, at 30 I’ll be there”), but very broadly, and in the most abstract way you can think of. I had life goals I wanted to achieve, and I set them out in the blank slate that was my head.

One of those life goals was to die at 60.
I hoped with all my heart that by the time I turn 60, I would have achieved my major life goals. I would have met some great people and done some great things. But on my 60th birthday, I’d end my own story.

This idea of my life trajectory has always stayed in my mind. Through the successes and the failures, one thought remained the same: I’d commit suicide, and I’d commit suicide after I’d made exactly sixty trips around the sun.

Then something changed.

Two days after my twenty-second trip around the sun, I found out I was HIV-positive. That brought my far-off meditation on death closer to the surface. Suddenly, it was here in front of me. Death was here, and if I didn’t want to remember, the virus coursing through my blood would remind me.

I then realised my earlier arrogance. Who said I would even get to fifty, much less sixty? I hadn’t signed any deal with any devil, so what guaranteed 2057 for me? The answer was simple: nothing did. I was living in mirages, living in a dream I wished I could fulfill but now realising I could not. My mortality stared me in the face and forced me to acknowledge it.

Fast forward almost three months later, and no, I haven’t truly grappled with my mortality. I have to grapple with something else first: my will to live.

Before my diagnosis, I was as depressed as I am now. But for entirely different reasons. I couldn’t find happiness. Joy was eluding me. Flashes of it would come my way, remaining warm in the middle of my hand when I least expected it. I would play chase with my niece and nephew without a care in the world. My article would get published internationally. I would rack up academic award after academic award.

And what did I do with all that joy? Did I focus on it? Did I appreciate the good while I had it? Oh no.
My mind was stuck on the father that abandoned me, the grandparents that died within nine months of each other, the nuisance I was to everybody after all that.
I had so much good, and decided to embrace the bad. And that was why I saw suicide as the only natural end to my story. That was why I was depressed.

Why am I depressed now?

Not because I don’t see what I have. I have more books than I could have ever imagined. My friends would wake up in the middle of the night to lend an ear, and advice, in my darkest times. I continue to rack up academic award after academic award.
And this? I’m appreciating it. I’m savouring it. I’m documenting every moment.
I allow myself to feel the warmth whenever it drops by – which is a lot, now that I consciously cultivate it.

I ask again: then why am I depressed now?

I am depressed now because I only have a while of this. I’ve been introduced to my mortality, and it colours every good moment with a dark undertone. I know that I could wake up tomorrow, sick and unable to move. I’d make my way to the clinic and in time, they would tell me my body is now a breeding ground for infectious diseases. I would cry and beg and even pray in a last-ditch effort to embrace the Christian God and you know what? It wouldn’t change a thing. It won’t change a thing.

So yes, I will celebrate the good. I will smile. I will laugh. I will focus on the good that I let myself forget was there. But when I’m alone with myself, I let myself remember the impermanence of all this. I know that this is the high before the low. I know that my health is on borrowed time, and that any day now, my mortality will fade away into the void it was in before I was born.

That is why I am depressed. I’m living with an incurable illness that is so lodged so deep within me that it uses my own DNA to kill me. And I can’t change that, no matter how badly I want to.

My mirage of making it to sixty – robust, strong, accomplished – is dead.
In its place is HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

That is why I am depressed.