i view them as inseparable. it took a very long, long, long, long-you get it-time, for me to actually grasp what to even do about it. not to kill myself, sure. or that i had any kind of hope or any kind of future or any kind of anything. self-esteem? gone. the image of myself as worthless was almost completely cemented into my brain in technicolor flashbulbs.
most of that is the media and popular mythology which has thankfully become more and more false as medical advancements accelerate. this is something that everybody is afraid of, everybody makes jokes about, and nobody takes seriously until it is too late.
even though i am completely stable and managed and could pretty much do what i want when i want, according to my doctor, i still do not feel “free.” there is a sense of freedom that a well person has that a sick person does not have and it is variable in terms of how much your illness takes from you your freedom to do things, but when it comes to HIV, that is a very long, very restricted list of freedoms.
and when you are fifteen that is a very difficult thing to come to terms with, especially if you are not the most well-adjusted individual to begin with (and most of us who contract this disease generally do so because we are not well adjusted, we lack support, we live in poverty, we are addicts of some kind, or we are abuse victims, or we are victims of our circumstances that we cannot control at all).
most people do not get HIV by accident. it’s certainly not an intentional practice by far (again, most of what you hear about this is mythology, not reality. 99% of human beings do not want to get this disease.) but the circumstances of an individual’s life that predict HIV are often something that could be avoided with compassionate intervention, this is just not done, because our society is very far from healed.
although it no longer impacts my life to the degree that it once did nor consumes my every waking thought nor requires more of my health than i am afraid of giving up, i do not think i could separate my disease from PTSD. i obtained it from abuse, i was abused because of it, and discriminated against, and bullied, and it is interwoven into the fabric that makes up who i am as much as PTSD is.
they are not the same thing, there are distinctions, but often those distinctions fail to matter when push comes to shove. both are very stressful, very damaging, very permanent changes to one’s life and having PTSD has affected my disease management (don’t think about it, don’t talk about it, don’t care about it, miss doctor’s appointments, skip meals, skip medications-) and having HIV has affected my PTSD management because it affects my time, and my body, and my health, and it makes everything that could otherwise be easy, into a strenuous and thought-out master heist.
hopefully you do not feel that i have monopolized your thread too greatly but the question posed was certainly interesting. i am curious to meet these rare individuals who do not consider their physical health and mental health within the same woven tapestry.