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Lorraine B
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VIDEO - HERSTORY: Lorraine Shares If She Is Fearful About Her HIV Diagnosis

Lorraine explains if she has any fears about her HIV diagnosis.

Lorraine:
I don’t think I have a whole lot of fear now. Probably in the beginning there was a lot of fear, and it wasn’t so much just the fear that I had in myself, but the fear of just the unknown, not really knowing what HIV was doing inside of me.

There would be times I looked in a mirror, and I would sit there and say, “Wow, there’s something in there doing something, and I don’t even know what it looks like.”

Or, the fear of dying, the fear of what people would think of HIV and how they would reject you, and I think that probably has a lot of fear for a lot of people. For me, today I can say that my fear is not so much of death because I feel like this is not what’s going to kill me. I really believe that I am going to outlive HIV because I don’t think about living with HIV daily; I think about just living.

I will say that there may be times when there is fear of me telling someone I am HIV, and that usually is more when it comes to, for more personal reasons, if it comes to dating and stuff like that. But one thing that I can tell you that I have done to help with that fear is I told myself that if I am upfront in the beginning before I invest feelings in individuals, then even if they reject me, at least it won’t feel as bad because it wasn’t someone that I really cared about in the first place. So if you get that out of the way, it kind of takes less of that intimidation away from you.

So I don’t really live with the fear anymore. I mean, I just live. I mean, I try to live each day to the fullest. I start off my day working out knowing that, you know, hey, I am going to live to be 100 so I need to have a strong heart; I need to be fit, you know, so, and I just think of myself as doing all the normal things of someone that would do that isn’t HIV positive.

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