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Antigone Hodgins
Her Apartment, Upper Tenderloin
June 17 and August 19, 1995
I started talking like I was 70 years old, "Oh, I'm not ready to go yet." It took a while for it to sink in, and I would play Nintendo for eight hours a day. My hands would hurt. My mom would come home from work, and I'd tell her how I was doing at the game. And she's like, "Okay, I'll watch." And I'd play again. Or we'd watch a movie and then she would read me Winnie the Pooh in bed, and then I'd cry, and go to sleep. I slept in the same bed with her for a month or something.
I
felt my whole life had been taken from me. The way you think when you're
negative is so different when you're young from the way you think when you're
positive. It's hard to explain, but the idea of having your whole life ahead
of you is completely gone. I felt lost, and I felt confused, and depressed.
I ate a lot of candy and sugar. I gained 50 pounds. I was smoking a lot.
I thought no one would ever want to be my partner. I was afraid to tell
people at first. I'd first say I had a life-threatening disease. Most of
my friends stayed with me, but I lost a couple of friends for various reasons.
First it was like, "why me?" I had friends who had the same behaviors or even shot drugs and were negative. Why am I positive and they're not? After it sank in, I started to get really angry. Why didn't I think I was at risk for HIV? So what if I'm this middle class white girl. I was really angry that no one sat me down and said, "You are at risk for HIV." I had unsafe sex. Why not me? There's a lot of anger inside, why did I do that to myself? But you know, those were my coping mechanisms, even though they were self-destructive.
Now, I live my life on a five-year plan. I have this age 30 in my head that that's as long as I'm going to live. I really changed the way I looked at my life. From: I'm going to be a therapist and I can go to college for however many years... To: oh my God! I think I have about five years left, so what do I want to try to do.
MW: Why do you say 30?
Antigone: I don't know. Ever since I tested it's been 30. I have this feeling that I probably won't live much past then. But, I really want to be here for 1999, New Year's Eve, the big party Maybe I'll let myself drink that night. I'll have to decide that day. It's not that I think I'm going to die at age 30, it's that I really hope that I live to be 30. I'm not sure if that will happen. That's a long time. October 6th will be five years, since I tested when I was 22.
Two processes happened at the same time. I went into the group at BAY Positives, and then I became a peer educator at the clinic. After that, I made a video on counseling and testing. I started doing trainings and speaking everywhere. I wasn't really getting paid. Since I was living with my mom I didn't have to pay rent. At that time, there were just two young women who were talking about being positive. People wanted to have me speak because on top of that I was in recovery. I kept getting all these calls. At the same time BAY Positives was continuing to grow, and more and more people were coming. Then a group of us, I'd say 20 people, decided we wanted to have our own organization because we were always getting treated badly at all these other organizations because we're young.
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