What is the biggest inconvenience you've faced, and turned it into an advantage?
What can you share on getting ahead when the going gets rough?
River Huston,Writer, painter, dog rescuer and wonderer.
story?
I have been HIV positive for 31 years. It was a death sentence when I was first diagnosed. Everyone died. No treatment. You were also deemed an untouchable, a pariah. I was a straight woman and felt I had no community and no one to share with. What I did with this awful fate was choose to be free. Do things I would normally be afraid of doing. I spoke my mind and even made it funny. Now after living with this debilitating disease for most my adult life I have a body of work I would never had accomplished without this diagnosis.
I was a fitness trainer in my last year of college when I found out. My goal in life back then was to have a great body. HIV pushed me so much farther than that. After I found out I did not give a crap what I looked like anymore. Life was too short for vanity. What a liberating moment that was!
I wrote six books, was a sex columnist for 10 years, I became a slam poet and eventfully was named Poet Laureate of Bucks County. I did a one-woman show, Sex, Cellulite & Large Farm Equipment: One Girl’s Guide To Living & Dying in theaters all over the world. I traveled internationally speaking on sexuality, HIV, sexual assault and addiction. I was given an honorary PhD for my work. I appeared on many TV shows as a writer, activist and performer.
I eventually retreated to the Caribbean to paint full time. Painting huge colorful paintings. As I painted I really felt what HIV had given me, the ability to not judge my work, to go for it. I would often say when I felt afraid of the canvas, making mistakes on a big painting, “You are going to die anyway, just paint!”
HIV is a huge inconvenience. I hate it and wish I did not have it. I have suffered so many physical challenges, depression, and loneliness but I decided to not let it define me and to use it to allow me to bypass the mundane minutia that makes life so often drab and futile. I never worried about money. I didn’t have it but it didn’t matter, I had enough. I never worried about the future or getting old because it was not going to happen. And now that it has happened and I have no savings, no plan I took a leap of faith and I retired to a small mountain town in Mexico where I could live cheaply and allow myself the luxury of spiritual growth, spending many of my bedridden days in deep meditation. I have become fearless through this disease.
Life is life and I live in the moment, in complete acceptance, at peace. That is a place I do not believe I would have ever landed in this life with out the inconvenience of AIDS.
