Today, I’m not scared to disclose my status. I’m not worried about rejection, because anyone who would reject me based on it isn’t worth my time. I don’t regret getting herpes. I’m not sad about it, I’m not angry about it, I don’t spend time wishing that things were different.

Herpes just is, you know? Like getting stuck in a traffic jam or burning your dinner or the fact that Eddie Murphy inexplicably had a hit song. It’s a skin condition that flares up every once in awhile, like eczema, and then resettles beneath the surface.

I could forget I even had herpes if the society I live in weren’t hell-bent on reminding me. Sometimes that’s with “funny” (by which I mean extremely tired) jokes about how everything stays in Vegas (except herpes!), or references to glitter (the herpes of craft supplies!). Sometimes it’s worse.

I’ve been told that having herpes makes me “disgusting.” I’ve seen friends dumped by people they really liked after disclosing their HSV-positive status. I’ve known people who stayed in abusive relationships after their partners told them no one else would want them because they were dirty, damaged. I had a doctor who was so uninformed about a virus the CDC estimates 1 in 6 people has that she didn’t know how to treat my herpes during my pregnancy and was wholly unprepared to deal with my symptoms flaring up.

The reality is that being STI-positive is extremely marginalizing — particularly when it’s an STI we carry with us for life, and regardless of how harmless the symptoms of the infection actually are. Which is silly, because if it weren’t for the scarlet H on my forehead, herpes could just be what it feels like to me: no big deal.

When I first started having weird symptoms in my pelvic region, herpes wasn’t my first guess. If you had aching skin on your butt and vulva, or sore quadricep muscles, would it be yours? For a long time, I thought I was sick with something else. And then I thought I was making a big deal out of nothing. It’s just a little tenderness, I’d tell myself. Though, in reality, my quads were so sore that my legs would give out on me, and my skin ached so badly that I couldn’t put pants on sometimes. So while that sounds extreme — and I suppose it was — there’s a reason I didn’t rush straight to the doctor to get tested.

I thought, and my online research suggested, that herpes meant outbreaks, and outbreaks meant lesions. But that’s not what herpes looks like for me. My outbreaks just look a lot like a single ingrown hair that always appears in the same spot. They itch, but they don’t hurt. They scab over, but they don’t ooze.

So herpes wasn’t exactly on my radar. It was almost a year after I started to notice symptoms that I finally found myself staring at ceiling tiles in the Planned Parenthood clinic, while a doctor told me that my potential lesion was too scabbed over for her to do a culture, sorry, and I asked, "Well then please could you do a blood test so I at least know for sure?"

It turns out that many, or even most, of the people who have herpes aren’t aware that they do. For some, that might be because they don’t show any symptoms at all. But for others, it’s because the virus is portrayed as a single thing (ugly, painful genital lesions) and their symptoms, like mine, don’t look like that — so they go undiagnosed. That lack of information, which impacts both patients and doctors, is a big part of what causes the stigma and silence around the virus.

In the online HSV-positive community, they call the person who gave you herpes “your gifter,” as if herpes is a present, tied with string, topped with a bow. Something you unwrap with anticipation, the way a lover carefully removes each piece of your clothing. Except the gift of herpes is one that no one wants to open.



When you do find out you have herpes, you usually want to determine who your “gifter” is. For some people, the answer is clear. For me, not so much.

It could have been the guy I slept with almost exclusively for over three years, who I found out had cold sores only after his friends told me. We didn’t use condoms, but even if we had, it wouldn’t have protected me from his cold sore transferring to my vulva.

It could have been the tattoo artist I met on OkCupid and saw just a handful of times, the one covered in ink and body hair, and who wasn’t great at respecting my sexual boundaries, though he did at least always wear a condom. He stopped talking to me after I had what I thought was an allergic reaction to the latex condom and texted to ask him about it. It definitely could have been him.

It could have been one of the many people I hooked up with in a blackout, people whose names I’ll never remember, whose faces are just a blur.

Some people might read that sentence and suddenly feel free to write off my herpes as karmic retribution for getting drunk, or high, or having sex outside of an exclusive, monogamous, chaste relationship. Which is crap.