My name is Becky, I’m 34 years old, I live in Sheffield. I’m a Mum, I’m 30... – I’ve said I’m 34 – I’m a Mum and I work in HIV support. I’m also a teacher and a trainer.

Home is somewhere you just, for me, where you feel your best at. Being at home is being comfortable, so to me it’s not necessarily the house you live in but it’s where you feel at home. So I feel at home… I do feel at home here in my house but it’s also my city, in Sheffield, it feels like my home. I feel at home in water, always, whether that’s a bath or out in a reservoir.

I always feel at home around water and I always have felt really comfortable around water, even since I was very young. I like, I like being in the water and natural water. I think I just feel calm, I just feel very calm and safe around water. It’s always inviting to me and I always want to be in it. I want to be part of the water, not just viewing it a lot of the time, but… You know, if I can’t get in I’m happy to sit and look at it, like sitting on a beach, you know, or sitting by a lake or a river or something like that. So, I think everything about it, like the sound, the stillness over the top of, especially… So, I swim a lot in reservoirs and obviously they’re very big and very flat and I just… I love the calmness on the water. But then I also love it in the rain and when you’re swimming in the rain and watching the droplets on top of the water when you’re in the water and looking around you and seeing the sheets of rain just, like, howling across the hills. Yeah, it’s very wild, it’s very satisfying. You feel very connected to the world. Yeah, I think that’s why I like it so much. It really connects me to the world when I feel like I’m in water.

I think it’s hard to separate my diagnosis from my divorce because they happened very soon after each other. I separated from my husband of about ten years and then three-ish months later I discovered I’d contracted HIV and, and… So, all of those emotions around HIV and having it were all, are all sort of mixed up with that, my changing relationship status as well. So, I think, a little bit. It did change how I viewed my home. I was worried that I’d never be accepted after my diagnosis, which I think obviously is part of… Being home is being a part of your family and your friends and I was worried about not being accepted so that could have, like, yeah… Changed my view a little bit.

If anything, it’s only made the relationships in my life stronger, rather than weaker. I recognise that I come from a real place of privilege for that, ‘cause not many people get that. HIV wasn’t in my life at all before my diagnosis and I think it’s very different for people who have grown up with it in their community or grown up with it or become part of a community where it is really prominent. So… HIV just wasn’t part of my life before I contracted it. And I know I’ve got very supportive friends and family, so I had no fears over telling them over my status. No real justified fears, ‘cause I knew everything was going to be fine. It was just the act of telling them that was hard. I knew after I’d told them everything it’d be fine. I didn’t have to worry about being ostracised from my community or from my family or from my friends. Yeah, everything pretty much stayed exactly the same, but got better because I’d shared this thing with them that was making me very, at the time, I was very ill and they just wanted to know what was going on really.

I think when I decided to be public and share my story that was... The most positive thing I got back from that, it was I met a woman… I used to work for Positively UK, delivering peer mentor training and I met a woman on one of the trainings I went to and she said: “Oh, I can’t believe it’s you. I’ve read your blog, I listened to your thing, I saw the interview,” and she was like: “You changed how I viewed myself.” As a woman living with HIV, she said she’d never seen anyone like me tell her, tell your story. And she was like “… I could relate to you.” And that was probably the best thing ‘cause that’s why I did it, because when I was diagnosed there was no story like mine, even though it’s probably the most common story that people have, who contract HIV. They had sex with someone who didn’t know it, that they had it. And that’s how the majority of people get it and yet the story you hear is of extremes usually. You hear of abuse, you hear of violence, you know, and that does happen and that’s horrible for that, for who that happens to but it’s not the most common story. It’s not how most people contract it. And I just wanted it to be out there that you can and actually get it and anyone can get it and the reason people wanted me to share my story was because I was educated, a mother. I was a teacher, you know, I was a professional and yet I still managed to contract just by doing what everyone would consider a normal behaviour for a single woman in her early thirties, you know...

And it is part of the stigma around it because the stigma around HIV is massive, but the stigma around women having sex is still massive and it’s ridiculous. And when you put those two things together they add an extra layer of shame onto it. Now I’m not saying that men who contract HIV don’t feel, sort of, shame on it but they have a different type of privilege that women don’t have, you know, and women, medically generally are ignored in most areas, including HIV so I just thought it was important to get some other perspectives out there. And there are other women doing it as well, there are, but you know, but it’s always good to have a range.

I remember doing one of my trainings and it, er, one of the men on the training was saying to another person who had had it since birth, who was born with HIV, and he always said: “Oh my god, you did nothing wrong did you?” And then we talked about that process and at the end of the training he says: “I’ve learnt during these three days that I didn’t do anything wrong either,” you know, and part of learning about accepting your status is learning that you don’t do something wrong to get HIV, because I think that is unfortunately a lot of the public’s view of it as well, that if you have HIV you must have done something wrong to contract it. And there’s that whole level of good HIV and bad... It’s good, it’s fine, if you had a blood transfusion in another country or if you’ve had it since birth then you did nothing wrong, but if you contracted it because you had sex or because you shared needles then that’s bad HIV because you did that to yourself. And I think a lot of accepting your status is getting over that, that… That hurdle.

I made that point in my, the very first little speech I did. It was in 2016, the end of 2016 I did it. I made a little speech saying that when I first started telling people I felt like I had to give them a running history of my sexual history and be like “...oh, I split up from my husband and it was the first person I slept with and I had only slept with one person...” and, oh, and I felt like I had to justify it, but, I don’t do that anymore. And I still did it even after I did that speech, sometimes, but I don’t anymore. I made a point in that speech saying that: “If someone came to you and said that they had developed diabetes, for example, you know, would you sit them down and get them to list all the fatty foods they’d been eating and the sugary foods they’d been eating and judge them on it? You just don’t do that. You wouldn’t do that. But people do do that with HIV. They will judge them based on who they’ve had sex with. It’s a bit of a double-standard.

I’ve not had many negative reactions. I think partly because… Sorry, Beatrix! Don’t look away from me like she’s not doing anything wrong. No, I’ve not had many negative reactions. The only negative reactions I’ve had is because I was single for a long time, so the only negative reactions I had was telling people on dating apps or telling them in person. I had a few… One man told me it was disgusting that people like me even had sex with people that who were negative, who were putting everyone at risk. Who didn’t obviously know anything. One person I told who, he did, I told him in person and he did freak out and we’d already had sex before and I thought: ‘Oh, this might turn into something more.’ So I told him and he just freaked out and he was just like: “Oh, you should have told me, you should have told me.” But… I mean, largely I haven’t really had negative reaction because, especially publicly, and I think it’s because, again, I’m privileged to be white and to be educated and I go into, like medical settings for example, people often talk about how they’ve been stigmatised in healthcare. Healthcare obviously within HIV is great but as soon you step outside that sexual health bubble, it’s awful. The knowledge is so low, but because I’m confident I go in with a, with this, like, this HIV activist’s hat on and it’s literally the first thing I tell them and I will ask them: “What training have you had in HIV? What do you know about it?” ‘Cause I’m challenging them, I’m like: “You dare discriminate against me!” Try, because I’m gonna… I’m gonna make it so you cannot! So, I’ve not really had much of a negative reaction. I’m trying to think if I did. But no.

Because I’m a chatty person anyway, I’m an open person, and me not talking about it was out of character to me, to not tell my friends or family about it. So, it just made those relationships better, so it’s a positive change. Yeah, so I had a lot of men just disappear off the dating apps when I told them. That’s always fun. They go: ‘Oh no it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine,’ and then they just don’t reply like the next day. Fine, is it? I remember telling one man and – ‘cause my Instagram has got HIV stuff on there – and it’s an easy way for me to tell people without me telling them. I just say: ‘Oh, just go look at my Instagram and then if you want to continue talking to me after you’ve seen that, just get back to me.’ And he got to me and went: ‘So, what does that mean then?’ And I’ve said that I have HIV. And he said: ‘Oh, right.’ And then he said: ‘I didn’t think you couldn’t not pass it on,’ if you know what I mean, if you had sex. He thought that you get it every time you have sex with someone who’s positive and I said: ‘That’s not how it works.’ And I said: ‘Are you still interested?’ And he was like: ‘No, it’s a risk.’ And I tried to stroke his ego a little bit, I said: ‘Oh, you seem like an intelligent man. Do you not believe in scientific fact?’ And he just said: ‘No. I don’t.’ And I was like… I was like I’m not going to go down that route any further, but let’s just think of all the other things that you believe is scientific fact just because somebody told you it was, yet with this you just blank, not going to… And one other time, just remembering negative reaction, I did a teaching session in a room full of Year 9 so it’s like three-hundred Year 9 pupils and there was this teaching assistant and he came down to talk to me after, after the session and he was like: “Oh, wow, this stuff it was blowing my mind, you know, when I was a kid I remember all the adverts, all the people dying.” I was like: “Oh yeah, it’s changed now.” And then he asked me about U=U and he asked me a little bit more information on it and he kept on questioning it, he kept on questioning about this blood to blood contact and he was like: “You know, if you’ve got blood on blood…” But he kept on asking me about it and I knew he didn’t believe me and I knew he was going to leave that room still not believing me and that was sad. The kids believed me though, so that was good.

I’m part of different communities in the sense like, I’m part of my swimming community and we are a community because we’re a group. We have this one bit of passion and I know I can go along to a swim and I won’t know anyone there but everyone will be, will happily accept you and you can… ‘Cause I’m one of the more experienced members now I can show them the ropes and I can invite them along and everything’ll be, you know, we’ll all get on. Locally, I suppose I’m not as much of a, part of a community around where I live, physically. I mean, I know my immediate neighbours but further than that not, not really. I like to support my local community and the local businesses and shops and restaurants and things, you know. But I’d say the swimming and things is my main community I feel a part of, and again just being a part of the HIV community. It’s a community that has been fully accepting and embracing of me and everybody I’ve met through it and I’ve met people up and down the country when I was delivering that training and it’s just been amazing. And, you know, a lot of them I’m still friends with and, yeah. Oh my god, settle down cat. I don’t think she’s… Because we’ve not had a new person in the house, for months and months and months. She’s very… She’s being very skittish.

So my safe space, I would say is, in water. I can just picture it in the middle of a big lake or a reservoir with all the trees and the hills around you, just sort of floating in the sunshine. I’d say that’s my happy place. And if I can’t do that then in the bath. In the bath at home is the next one. If I can’t get out to swim and I’m feeling a bit low or down I will just go and have a bath and it just sort of levels me out a bit.

So I would say I’m quite a confident, chatty person. I like talking and I like conversation with other people. I’m a very social person. What other people think of me does matter, I think, and that’s not about physical appearance either. I’m a very casual person. I’m not one to wear make-up or do my hair much. Yeah, I think I’m… I’ve got crazy curly hair. And I like my face, I’m not that happy with my weight. Yeah, I’d say that’s it.

HIV is just… Part of my life. It’s… It’s, for me HIV has only ever made my life better because it forced me to look at myself and accept bits of myself that I had been, that I’d struggled with for a long time when I was younger, you know, in my twenties. I think part of that is just growing up, you know, people… You do hit these realisations in their thirties. Part of it is being a mother, you know, you see things a bit differently, you know, and, but… Mainly, I think, I’ve never, I’ve never had to force myself to look at how I react to things until I had HIV. Until this thing happened to me. Yeah… It’s, it’s.. It’s very… I’m trying to think of the best way to say it. ‘Cause I don’t want to put people down who can’t, who don’t cope with their diagnosis very well, but… For me, it’s easy. It’s easy to live with HIV. Because medically I am very well and it’s put me a better place mentally than I’ve ever been in my whole life, so… And I don’t… I’d like to think that change would have happened without me contracting HIV but obviously you can’t back so you don’t know. It was the catalyst for change for me so, yeah… I’ve only ever had sort of good things come from it. Including, say, like finding a new partner because it’s a really good bullshit filter, you know? If someone’s not going to accept that immediately you know they’re not really a good person. One of the things I’ve said in an interview before is that I’m not gonna apologise for having HIV and if someone doesn’t accept it immediately I haven’t got time to wait for them and some might see that as ‘oh, well you’ve got to give people time to read, acknowledging it’, and I was like: “No.” They either accept it or they don’t. And yes they can read knowledge and things like that and they might understand it a bit more but in that initial thing they either accept it or they don’t. My partner, he tells me, I met him online over, in… During lockdown, so we met on Tinder so we talked for quite a bit before we actually physically met up and I told him about my HIV before I met him which is not, I don’t always do but I think the circumstances of what was going on in the country… And he did tell me that when he read it first, that bit of message, he said that he was just so sad because he thought: ‘Well, that’s it now, we can’t date, we can’t have a normal relationship.’ But in that one message obviously I told him about my medication, I told him about being unable to contract it from me, all within that one message and he said, so, he read that first bit of message and then he read the rest of it and then he followed me up with a couple of questions and that was it. That’s the level of acceptance I want from people. Fine, have questions. Fine, be shocked because they don’t know about it but that acceptance has to be… Immediately. And I suppose that goes for anything, like, you know, that is stigmatised in society, like for example someone being transgender. You have to have that acceptance from the start and then you can ask questions. Yeah, that’s it. Lovely.