Lia models torrent12/31/2022 An opportunity to work through the shame and where I have gotten to in this moment. To be given the gift of practicing forgiveness in a narrative eight times a week for three years - eight times a week, I was allowing myself to forgive my father onstage and both of them in the ground. When I got Kinky Boots, the trajectory for my character, Lola, was about forgiving her father. And as an artist, I’m grateful to have been given opportunities to work through my shit. My trauma served me, my story has served me, in terms of forward motion. And it was my engine for a very long time. There has never been a moment that I’ve not been in trauma, which is what I’ve discovered this last year. Nooo.” And he said, “Your test came back positive.” Wheeeew. I was like, “What?” He sat down, and I was like, “No. So I went in, got the pimple drained and got tested, and then the doctor came back and looked at me. One day I was like, “I’ve got to get this taken care of,” so I went to the Callen-Lorde clinic and the queen at the front desk was like, “You want an HIV test? They only $10.” I said, “Yeah, yeah, it’s time.” I got tested every six months, like you were supposed to. I had a pimple on my butt, and it got larger and larger and harder and harder, and then it started to hurt. HIV-positive, where I come from, growing up in the Pentecostal church with a very religious family, is God’s punishment. The shame of that time compounded with the shame that had already in my life silenced me, and I have lived with that shame in silence for 14 years. And by June, I was diagnosed HIV-positive. By February, I had been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. I was on the precipice of obscurity for about a decade or so, but 2007 was the worst of it. I was the generation that was supposed to know better, and it happened anyway.
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