Even then, it felt like a memory. I haven’t been properly anchored to my body since. I only know my body for what it represents: black, woman, and HIV+ (and hesitantly, I could also add fat). It wouldn’t be exact to say that what floats above and looks down upon my body is my spirit or soul. I consider it consciousness – “a knowing”. I experience myself as a concept, as some sort of theory that is fed by other theories, but not an actual person. I do not know if the theory of me is well-established, but certainly my existence as one came to be on the night I learned of my HIV status.
I find it particularly sad that, at twelve years old, the most consuming apprehension was that nobody would ever love me. “Who is going to love me? Who is going to love me now?”, I sob-screamed and snotty-nosed into the tear-drenched pillow, praying to the Lord. There hasn’t been a response yet. God doesn’t seem to care about getting me a boyfriend. They may point to the abundance of love from my family and friends – there is so much love there, but the embarrassing truth is, it was specifically romantic love I was mourning for. “What does a [twelve-year-old] know about antiretrovirals [and love]?”
Yes, I know, romantic love is overly valued in comparison to all the other loves. Still, before I am accused of “hetero-normative-romantic-centeredness”, it is important to distinguish the primary loves, each equally important but fulfilling distinct and profound emotional needs. Familial love is naturally binding and the closest to unconditional. Friendship where you are chosen and loved for who you are. Then romantic love, which ambitiously attempts to combine the first two, more specifically, a love where another chooses you not only to support but to share a vision of a life that both of you would build together. Biblically, when two become one. Sex being undeniably a key factor here (which makes the HIV factor awkward), and the biological product of the “one” being a potential child is never underestimated. To simplify, an example: if I were to get a job in some faraway place, this love would be for the person who chooses to uproot their life and come build one with me, as us. I think that is a powerful type of love that most, if not all of us, pray to experience at least once in our lives.
Alas, almost thirty-three and I have never been in a relationship. Not to be mistaken for never having been desired or indulging in desire (I need to write a separate piece to fully unpack the nuances of HIV and desire). I only know of love, but I haven’t felt it. The loneliness that comes with HIV is not only in the stigmatisation but in the profound need to shed the burden of unlovable-ness. I understood earlier than most children the reality that I was going to die someday, possibly before someone ever loved me. This is still an unreconcilable hurt I feel in my adulthood. I think how pathetic it is of me to hold on to a twelve-year-old’s heartbreak. I am thirty-two, living during a resurgence of 1950s trad wife conservatism, “sprinkle sprinkle” dating advice, an uptick in incel men, and still wanting a boyfriend. I am constantly grappling with loneliness, trying to figure it out. Is it my HIV or feminism that is preventing me from getting this boyfriend? I just know God is rolling Their eyes, “All this intellect and still this dusty whisper of a prayer request – a boyfriend, really? Flowers and chocolates, “I love you, never could live without you, let’s build a home, let’s travel–LIES. You want that?”
I have perfected intellectualisation. I am much more feminist, much more logical, I lie and say I am much more mature than I was at twelve, on that night. God does not care because I’ve convinced myself that I do not either. I deem my singleness as some ideological strength, some practice in de-centring men and romance, as evidence that I am actively dismantling the patriarchal system. Surely, if I wanted a boyfriend, I would have had one. I see how women who have men get them. They put themselves out there, they wear the dresses, know how to do the make-up, lose the weight, cook most times, if not every day and have the happily storied rectangular framed lives on Instagram. That could be me, too, but I tell myself I am a better feminist. When you are alone with no one to text incessantly about your day, you’re left with only the ideological win. When you can’t admit to yourself that you perhaps fall short of a system’s standard, the only way to save face is by subverting it. How many of us are leftists because we are broke? How many of us are feminists because we are lonely?
Well, of course, there are a variety of legitimate reasons for one’s politics. My cognitive dissonance in acknowledging the lie of patriarchy that pushes women, since they were girls, towards the dream of Prince Charming, white dress, fairytale wedding and marriage, is constantly in conflict with the yearning of a lonely inner child. I do not have an answer for the child, but I have proof against patriarchy. I have the theory and survive the dissonance only through thought, humanity as described by Rene Descartes, “Cognito, ergo sum”: I think, therefore I am. Thus, a separation from my body into my mind, existing as “a knowing” fed by other already existing knowledges. I wonder if this grand consciousness, I believe to be subverting the systems, is also fooling me into an unbecoming. I am not arguing that I should discard feminism and get married (I’m aware of the statistics regarding unhappiness for married women), but I am denying myself the feeling, the admittance, heartache and the answer to the question that lingers from my childhood, “Who is going to love me?” by hiding behind an ideological identity.
The personal philosophical mission for most people in life is to be who they really are. It is difficult. If you manage to overcome the social constructs of woman, black, and HIV positive (which is nearly impossible), you will face the question, “What now?” The alternatives become prescriptive too, whereby I feel I cannot be romantically lonely because I am a feminist. Nobody says it exactly like that, but people expect intellectualism always to be above emotion. My consciousness must always float above my body. The mission is to go back to one’s true self. I have not determined where one’s true self is located. We speak of a soul (that might be too deep to unpack in this writing), but I considered Audre Lorde’s erotic – an assertion of life force, creative energy empowered, internal knowledge reclaimed and respected from that twelve-year-old sobbing girl. Lorde’s warning was that if we lived outside ourselves and only by external directives, rather than internal knowledge and needs, then our lives were limited by the external and alien forms, and we would conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual’s. I certainly believe that feminism is a movement based on human need, yet if I am truly a subverter, then I must admit to myself that subscribing only to logic and theory, as superior to intuition, that head can function without heart or my consciousness without a body, is a betrayal of myself and all that I could fully bring to the world.
I’ve spent many Valentine’s Days alone (read un-partnered), and each of those, I’ve thought about that twelve-year-old girl. I’ve interrogated and wrung her for pathetic-ness and internalised patriarchy to deny myself ever feeling sad and lonely. Whilst sadness and loneliness do not feel liberatory, the erotic says, “I feel therefore I can be free”. So instead, this Valentine’s Day, I yearned for that erotic. I wanted to feel as much as I thought. I want to make decisions, write, and live from feeling as much as from thinking. I no longer wanted to hide behind some “knowing” and to sit in the uncertainty of “will it ever work out?” and to conjure a self-love that was not logical or an external shield, but a deep feeling of one’s true self.
Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” 1981. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, 2007.
Lorde, Audre. “Poetry Is Not A Luxury.” 1981. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, 2007.