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A testimony to the power of one life lived in truth
Some messages are not just read...
They are felt.
They move through you.
They remind you why you are still here fighting, breathing, serving, shining.
Yesterday I received a message that shook me to my core.
I received these words from someone who found me when he was just a confused teenager, with no sex education, no guidance and no hope.
Someone who faced his diagnosis with no terror, no shame, no self-loathing... because before that moment, he had already found me.
I share his message with his permission, because it captures the deepest truth of advocacy:
You never know who you are saving.
You never know how many lives stay alive simply because you stayed alive.
Here are their words 🙏❤️🦋
💚 María... Many years ago, I contacted you for the first time.
I was just a 15-year-old teenager, still a gay boy who didn't understand who he really was.
At that age, I already knew about you: I had seen you, I had read you, I had searched for you.
You were the first woman I found on the internet speaking about your diagnosis with a bravery that no one had at that time.
You were ahead of your time, exposing yourself to the world when HIV carried a much more brutal stigma than it does now.
When everything was silence and secrecy, you decided to exist out loud.
I was born in '94, the second generation after the great epidemic of the 80s.
I grew up without sex education, without real information.
Everything I knew about HIV came from rumors, prejudice, and fear.
But you were the first light that showed me another reality.
Three years ago, I received my diagnosis.
And even though I felt the world shift under my feet, I did not crumble.
I did not destroy myself.
I did not hate myself.
I did not feel terror.
Do you know why?
Because I had already found you.
Because you taught me without even knowing that HIV is not a death sentence, but a different way of living, with strength, dignity, awareness, and self-love.
I will never forget your words:
"Today I feel healthy."
I carry them tattooed on my soul.
I also never forget your advice, your infusions, your teachings on how to live with HIV without fear and without shame.
If I had never found you when I was young, I probably would have lived my diagnosis in the worst way.
But thanks to you, I understood that I could also be wonderful, incredible, strong, and valuable while living with HIV.
Because of your example, your fight, your resilience, and your voice... today I am still here.
And like me, thousands.
Sometimes I know life feels heavy.
I know you've carried things that no human being should carry alone.
But I want to tell you something from the deepest place in my heart:
Behind you there are not admirers; there are entire generations being held up by your story.
It's not your responsibility, you never asked for it, and it's not fair to carry something that doesn't belong to you... but even so, your life has become a fortress of hope.
Just knowing that you are alive produces light.
And if one day you grow tired, we will be right there behind you to lift you up, support you, and embrace you.
Because your legacy is not just activism.
Your legacy is life, hope, and dignity for those of us who grew up without answers and found in you a guide, a spiritual mother, a luminous survivor.
To me, María, you are an icon.
My role model.
My greatest inspiration.
Thank you for existing, for resisting, for teaching us that living with HIV also means living fully, beautifully, fabulously, freely, and without shame.
Thank you for opening a path that millions of us now walk behind you.
MUCH LIGHT TO YOU, MARIA 🥺🌱🥰
When I finished reading their message, I felt something shift inside me.
I remembered my 37 years living with HIV, my decades of activism, my exhaustion, my tears, my comebacks, my resurrections.
And I understood this:
My life has not been in vain.
My pain became a path.
My voice became a shelter.
My existence has allowed others to exist with less fear.
If I lived, others were able to live too.
That is the sacred chain of advocacy.
Because you lived, we live.
