You are what you judge: When the world finally holds up a mirror

I used to have quite the infallible attitude in life — I sometimes don’t know how people ever put up with me. Self-righteousness would spew out of every orafice of my body on nearly any topic. And ironically, this attitude of mine fueled the way I thought about HIV in our community.

In 2005, my boyfriend at the time and his roommate had a small house party. They did this kind of thing regularly; each time I’d meet new people from their pasts, and with each guest came a morsel of gossip. At one party in particular, a good-looking gay couple came by and my boyfriend whispered into my ear that these fellas were HIV positive.

It was my first time meeting guys I knew were poz. I didn’t take to them kindly. I acted cordial to their faces, only to roll my eyes behind their backs.

Who gets HIV in this day-in-age? I whispered. All you have to do is wear a condom. It’s not that freaking hard. My boyfriend nodded obligatorily.

Sure, I felt bad for them. I even tossed them a smidge of sympathy. But in my mind it was clearly their fault for letting themselves become infected, and I discreetly stung them with silent ridicule.

I wonder if that lesser-than-kind attitude came from being raised in a Republican family. Conservative politics tend to have a “fend for yourself” perspective, that the poor are to blame for their own circumstances — that they didn’t work hard enough or made big mistakes. No matter the subject, it was always black and white like that. The attitude seeped its way into all my opinions as a young man. Thus I acted like quite the bratty know-it-all and lacked any real sense of empathy.

That was the key word in all of this: “empathy.” Even though meeting those guys had been a fleeting moment in my judgmental journey, learning my own HIV status a couple years later made that particular memory vivid and upsetting. It made me realize that the thing I needed most from others would be empathy, and the idea of receiving the same kind of backlash of ridicule that I once bestowed on others now paralyzed me with fear.

Life lessons don’t really get more ironic than this. I had to wonder that if there was a God and if our paths were predetermined by that God, then God obviously played a well-deserved prank on me so I would stop acting like such a
judgmental wank.

Seeing as how I did not want to be treated the same way, my conservative perspective had quickly shattered. I now had firsthand experience that life wasn’t so black and white after all. Judging people under such standards fails to take into account so many of the thousands upon millions of things that can happen to a person in her or his life.

Did I contract HIV from a broken condom? Did I contract from that time a guy accidentally shot his wad in my eye? It didn’t matter. All I knew now was that life had all these varying shades of grey. And before anyone judged me, I would desperately want them to understand that.

Truthfully, I can’t actually remember the names or faces of the guys at that party so many years ago. But I often imagine that if got another chance to meet them, I would apologize for regarding them in such an egocentric way. Because, in all its ironic glory, the moment I thought I knew everything was actually the moment that I truly knew nothing at all.