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| This is the essay series by women living with HIV. The authors in Japan,
Cambodia, Portugal and the Philippines, write about episodes and the
feelings of their daily lives. |
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| Beauty vs. Health / Maria |
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 Beauty is imposed to us by the media-we must be beautiful, slim, cheerful, always happy and assertive.
But that’s not the reality at least for me. Well I’m still slim at least…
My body changed, my face is other… I can’t recognize myself on the mirror anymore. And even if I’ve changed a long time ago I can’t still accept the changes. The scars of HIV’meds on my face, on my body…
The side effects of therapeutics are terrible-lipodystrophy (enlarged belly), lipoatrophy (wasting on legs, arms, face), veiny arms and legs, weakening of hair… not a beautiful picture: the loss of female characteristics …
Sometimes, I miss the looks of men, the feeling of power given by beauty and attractiveness. Even if others (just new acknowledgments, the old friends are gone, couldn’t recognize me anymore) consider me beautiful, I can’t. Those times are gone.
Looking into another perspective I’m healthy. I’ve always been since my diagnosis back 89. And health is more fructuous than beauty-it gives me the time, life… can I ask for more? Well, we are unsatisfied by nature… but more than that health cannot be considered just a state of no disease, is more, it implicates quality of life. And when doctors minimize or even ignore the side effects of meds, and when chirurgical procedures for wasting and lipos are not included in the health treatments, what kind of quality of life we have?
Is it possible to scale health and beauty when both compete to quality of life? When we know that our process of treatment involves therapeutics that provokes body changes like lipodystrophy, lipoatrophy, hypertrophy of veins, early aging whose are factors of disfiguration of our image frequently generating depression, the abandon of therapeutics, social and self exclusion and the abandon of relational and sexual activity, solitude? |
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