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Antigone,
2000.
Antigone,
2000.Antigone Hodgins
September 14, 2000
My life today...how can I describe a life I never thought I would have... I am reeling from the enormity of actually being alive today, when in my mind for so many years, I saw myself dying and moving from this world as a youth. Sometimes I wonder if I would be a different thirty-two-year-old woman if I had spent my twenties getting ready to mature to have my body mature, my mind, my spirit to be old enough to have experiences to reflect upon. I move through this time period with some ambiguity and clumsiness. I had not planned to be here, to have gray hairs, the first appearances of wrinkles. To be called "mam" by young people.
Reading through my interview when I was twenty-five, makes me realize that I have so much more space between my teen's than I did at that time not just in terms of years but in emotional growth and moving through and understanding what happened to me. I feel as if I am much more removed from the feelings around my childhood and teenage years, because I have many other experiences, positive, fulfilling, and supportive ones to buffer between those times and my life today. At the time of the interview, I held primarily pain, fear, and resentment, and harbored a feeling of not being good enough, not being lovable or acceptable to others. I was so in the thick of it, I never thought I would move through it. In fact, I saw many of my friends, colleagues, and other youth who were HIV positive who had not moved through their life experiences to find a meaningful place for themselves in the world. They died before they had an opportunity to come to a place of acceptance of their lives and themselves. Their deaths were scary, dark, pitiful. They were unhappy at the end because they died still in the thick of their pain.
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