Something Positive for Positive People

Happy 10 year herpes anniversary to me from South Africa ya'll. Here I share more of my origin story as well as where I stand these days with my diagnosis. I fumble through the Venom/Eddie Brock and Tony Stark/Iron Man analogy I attempted to speak through and tease on Instagram. I share my backstory, useful resources I've found most helpful, and the importance of just living despite herpes.

We got an at home STI Testing kit sponsor: https://shamelesscare.com/?ref=643 use my code SPFRPP at checkout so we get that money to the non profit.

Robert Johnson is the Founder of Shameless Care, judgment free health care tailored to the consensual non-monogamy community in all 50 states.

Shameless Care sells at home STI testing kits in all 50 USA States, as well as medication for erectile dysfunction. Be sure to use the SPFPP link/code when you make a purchase. www.shamelesscare.com/spfpp

Robert and I discuss how his own experience with an STI led him to starting this company. Very similar to SPFPP, he's serving a community he's not only drawn to, but also part of after identifying a need through his own experience which he shares with us.

Being preachy somehow flowed naturally to me this episode because boy did I let that ish rip here. I got a sense my man was seeing himself in a way that I've seen myself . . . see myself sometimes, and what I said to myself. Just check this out for some inspiration!

People praise me for being vulnerable on a regular basis and I've accepted it up until my therapist pointed out to me that people don't connect with that part of me. It didn't take long for me to grasp what that really meant because I know I've really been able to hide behind this mask of vulnerability that is Something Positive for Positive People. He pointed out to me that I'm not sharing my experience or much of anything about me, as Courtney. I've realized that is because I've accumulated this immunity to criticism through SPFPP. Who's going to give me shit about having herpes when I'm doing this so people don't wanna kill themselves? You gotta be a real dick to talk shit about me for that. But I do open up myself to the criticism that comes with sharing my own emotions and experiences as a man navigating this space and that feels right in my soul to speak that truth so here it is. I put this out here to connect with and encourage more men into this space that is crying for masculine presence and experiences.

Despite how hard I tried, herpes still came up in this conversation that had the least to do with herpes specifically out of any podcast interview I’ve done. Justine Fonte is our guest this episode. We initiate the conversation with the intention of disseminating the difference between a sex educator and a sex education advocate, but we travel down the intersections of intersectionality beyond mainstream thoughts ie race, sex, gender. As a math teacher in Houston, Texas, Justine caught on to areas of students’ learning being impacted by intersections that people are actively fighting for us to be able to turn a blind eye to because we should “let kids be kids”. The reality is that there are relationship/family dynamics, understanding (or misunderstanding) about our bodies, and their natural responses to developing, our interactions with the world around us, responsibilities, and way more than I can list that influences our ability to do math. It was a student who missed a year of math class because she didn’t know she was having a natural body development occurrence, (her period) because no one wanted to talk to her about her health. Within the intersections of HEALTH lies sexual health, which lies at another intersection of intersections that really gets tricky to navigate, which is why we need professionals who are trusted and present information that is medically accurate to create not only learning environments conducive to the students, but also equip them with the tools to understand their bodies so that they can move through the world.

This episode is for anyone especially with conflicting information or beliefs about what sex ed is. It isn’t intercourse ed. People are being educated about the things that make up sex, and I believe many adults think their youth are being taught to engage in intercourse. The reality is that youth need the tools of educators so that they can tell the difference between misinformation and accurate information about their bodies and the space between theirs and others.

Connect with Justine:

Website: https://www.justinefonte.com/

Instagram: @ImJustineAF

Our guest this episode is a 34 year old Puerto Rican woman who, you’ll be able to hear as the episode goes on is rather shy at first but really opens up and leans into the experience sharing her story utilizing her diagnosis as a powerful connection tool to deepen the intimacy of her relationships. Now, we speak in episode 274 about relationships and intimacy in the platonic sense and I think this episode really adds value to that, so if you’re hearing this without hearing the other, I strongly encourage you to listen to both of these close together. As our guest shares, you’ll get some insights to how our cultural upbringing can and does sometimes shape our response to something like a herpes diagnosis. There’s an initial misplaced trust that eventually, through her herpes diagnosis, our guest was able to re-establish a more solid self-trust to herself after seeing how sharing her status with supportive friends was something that was ongoing validation that nothing about who she is changes per those people she put her trust in. This reciprocal trust cycle continues to perpetuate and reinforce itself within us. That said, you should be able to trust yourself to trust who you confide in.

Our guest, Nina from episode 203: https://www.spfpp.org/podcast/spfpp-xx-identity-care-is-checking-in-vs-checking-out rejoins us on Something Positive for Positive People with the intention of speaking mostly about grief. While that was the original plan, we fanned out into a conversation that while unexpected, really put a pleasant perspective on disclosure. While the bulk of the burden of initiating a conversation about sexual health appears to be on the person who has herpes because they are expected to disclose their positive status, what we’re actually doing is initiating an attempt for intimacy. As a community, we may be one of the few kinds of people proactively combating commitment phobia, and the other secondary effects of hookup culture by initiating invites for the kind of intimacy that potentially follows a herpes disclosure.

In this episode, we also discuss the word “relationship” and how potentially triggering that is in a dating sense. When we look at the definition of the word which is just a way we relate to others, what we see is that everyone has a relationship with everyone, even if there’s no relationship at all, that’s the relationship. Hookup culture teaches us to move further away from the discomfort of intimacy and emotional connection through vulnerability by us putting our efforts into defining things in ways that don’t invite closeness. Think about friends, and then think about friends with benefits. We’re not as close with our friends physically as we are to someone we have sex with, so we’re close but not too too close and that’s what’s safe because vulnerability is scary. We even go as far as calling a relationship a “situation” in order to save ourselves from emotionally being invested in the humanity of one another. We defer to “the situation” rather than having to communicate about what we want with one another and accept the outcome of whether or not we can meet each others’ actual needs which is more often than not, intimacy.

Avoidance. Many of us tend to avoid leaning into the intensity of an emotion by engulfing ourselves into something familiar to take our suffering and pain out on. In nature, after an animal experiences an injury, it HAS to stop the bleeding before going on to hunt, eat, drink, etc. There’s a lesson here for us to take in. Our injury may look like a herpes diagnosis, the end of a relationship, or some sort of other traumatic event that shatters us emotionally. I was playing God of War Ragnarok (on my PS5) and Kratos said this to his son after one of their comrades who’d become family was killed, and Atreus (Kratos’ son) wanted to go hunting in order to ignore the grief. MAN I felt this hard and knew immediately that when he said “stop the bleeding” that this was a lesson to incorporate into SPFPP. If an animal doesn’t first stop the bleeding, they cause more harm. Integrating that analogy into human experiences, if we ignore what causes us emotional damage, what harm are we doing to ourselves? Our guest, Erika shares her experience with “stopping the bleeding” by simply being comfortable receiving support from the people around her for this traumatizing experience of receiving a positive hsv diagnosis. Let her story serve as a roadmap for navigating this aspect of stigma for yourself.

Thank you to The Love in Action Fund for their contribution to SPFPP. I take some of my own experiences of recent disappointments, relationship transitions, and my responses to them. I speak about first identifying the emotion of your triggered situation and then identifying the most recent time you felt that emotion, as well as the FIRST time you experienced that emotion. When you connect those three dots, you get a pattern. Patterns are locked in and while people swear by "breaking" them, I think it's a lot easier to redirect them and make use of them. In my case, I speak to how my mommy issue and daddy issue still show up for me and how I just have to redirect the retriggered energy I get from when I'm activated. My pattern has been to get so good at meeting my mom's needs that I convinced myself that meeting her need consistently was the equivalent of meeting my own needs. This is one to listen to with a notebook to journal.

Joyce is a 64 year old Black Lesbian living in NYC. She was diagnosed with HSV in 2014 and shares some well needed wisdom to navigate not just this diagnosis, but also dating in a way that only an someone with this much life experience can articulate. At her age, sex is important, but it’s a different kind of priority. We discuss what to look for in dating outside just what our eyes see and tell us what we prefer. We chat about how supressing needs “for” another person to not hurt their feelings, while not only hurting them anyway, but also damaging the relationship. We also talk about meeting people “the old fashioned way”. I was curious about how she met people given that she’s 64. She says she just talks to people. So today I’m going to go work out without my headphones and attempt to make convos with folks and report back about what happens. This will NOT be a habit lol. Most of my work is audio based and listening to things so I’m gonna make the effort today and see what happens.