There’s hope!

I know this is the last thing that anyone wants to hear but there is hope! I was in the same position many of you are in now, and i used to hate hearing stories by strangers who claimed they got though it all. At the time i thought no one could really understand what i was going through, no one could have possibly felt as miserable and useless as I did. There was no way in hell i was going to listen to anyone. I’m a 22 year old Italian guy, I grew up in a rural town located far away from any main city you might have heard of. A Very rainy and cold area, in a word: depressing.

It all started in middle school when i began to realize i was not attracted to girls at all. I didn’t give it that much thought in the first year cause sex was a foreign concept to me. During my second year I finally realized: I was gay. Wow what a shock! I didn’t understand why me, why couldn’t I be like everyone else? I was sure I was the only gay kid in my school and I promised myself to keep it a secret from everyone. I had already planned out my life in my head: act straigh, find a girl, get married….all of this translating to…make your parents happy. Sure enough high school started and with it the mocking and teasing came along as well. I was never phisically attacked but sometimes words can be much worse than punches. The bruises that a word can cause you are hard to make disappear.

This is when hell started. Apart from the gay hatred i was experiencing on my skin, I was also coming to the realization that I would have never been able to stick to my “original plan” of marrying a girl. I knew i couldnt have kept lying to everyone. What made everything worse was the close-mindedness of the society i was living in. Everyday in and out of school, ridiculed all the time…i couldn’t put up with it any longer.  That year i started to cut myself. A few years like this one went by until i reached my last year of high school. The situation never really changed but I had found a couple of good friends who worked as a great support system. My homosexuality was still a secret and, despite the support i was getting , I felt depressed and lost at most times. The only time i felt relieved was when i was cutting myself. The last straw came when i went to get tested for hiv. In fact i had a couple of unprotected encounters in public bathrooms (that was unfortunately  the only way to satisfy my sexual drives) and decided to go to the clinic to check if everything was ok.

Sure enough the test came out positive. That day I knew I was going to kill myself. I hated my life, I considered myself “sexually handicapped” and on top of everything I knew my life was going to be even harder than the one of a regular gay guy. That day I knew i couldn’t take “life” any longer. I went home, no one was there, I locked myself in the bathroom and iwetn for my wrist. It took a while to muster the courage but i eventually managed to do it. Turns out my dad got home 30 seconds after i did it. The feelings i had were mixed, on one side I was pissed he got in the house cause i wanted to die but there was also another side, the one which won, that called my dad in the bathroom to ask for help.

4 years went by since that terrible night, a night that i’m never going to forget. I thought I was never going to be happy. Now i can say that if i got through it all everyone can. I realized that nowadays, thanks to the right medicines, hiv is still an illness but it doesn’t necessarily have to change your life. I have a boyfriend, who is also hiv positive ,who made me go through everything. I would have never met my Gianni if I had died that night.

Please everyone listen to me. You don’t know what life can bring you if you end it. Life does offer wonderful things, you just have to stick around long enough to experience and enjoy them.

Un bacio dall’Italia