Your challenge is a diverse one in the sense that you not only have to live with yourself but also with the different world in your life like your friends, classmates, the school community and family. This entire world of yours has to be in good balance for you to live comfortably in school. In them all however, you should not look at yourself as someone “gone” with no hope at all because the truth is that you still have a future to achieve your dreams in life. A number of HIV positive people are still living successful lives.
With yourself, you may need to try and accept your status and better look after yourself by taking your medication consistently (that is if you started on ARVs), keeping out of stressful situations so as not to burden your mind, feed in a healthy way, go for routine counseling for support and guarding your life from re-infection or infecting others.
With friends and classmates, hard as it might seem, you may need to let your friends know about your status so that all can better protect themselves from getting infected, to earn yourself social support which you will so much need and to be a role model for other students that might have the same challenge as you but with less courage.
While in school, you might have to empower yourself with skills to build your confidence because in as much as stigma against HIV positive students is going down, not everyone will have a positive attitude towards you. If you don’t have confidence, you may feel less of yourself and even perform poorly in class.
Besides friends, you have to let medical personnel know about your condition, so that you can easily be helped in case you have need for medical assistance.
At home, one of the main things you need is social support- to remind you about your medication, provide for your good feeding, offer you a stepping stone of confidence, just as it needs to be for any other family member.
All in all, you are going to need to love and appreciate yourself, try to build a firm social network and to live positively. You are still very youthful and still have a lot to offer to your world.
Dear friend,knowing that you are HIV positive is not a crime and you should not worry at all.
HIV as a sickness that can take many years before any symptoms are seen and even after symptoms are seen, as long as someone takes care of himself well, he/she can live for years and finish school or even go ahead and work.
HIV develops through a number of stages and at every stage there are developments seen.If a person takes care of the sicknesses like flu, cough, and feeds well on a balanced diet, abstains from sex, and seeks medical attention early, such a person can live for a long time.
So dear friend, kindly seek medical attention and you will be able to continue with your studies.
Avoid stigmatising yourself by wishing to deny the state in which you are. Accept it and tell friend and parents because you will need their support.
I wish you the best.