Kanoa

@WCSdancer2010 here's some bits and pieces of my mantra... - I am a beautiful creation of the earth and everything that happens to me is good. I attract love and peace and abundance because I radiate love and peace and abundance. I respect and cherish my body as I respect and cherish the earth, because we are one... My body is strong and pure and heals itself from within, because I carry inside the energy of the entire universe... etc etc... I am good; I am pure; I am free of any negative thought or energy, because I am a beautiful creation of the earth and everything that happens to me is good -

Yes :) I hated having to take it every day... I had terrible headaches, sometimes they would keep me up all night. I also had to take it at night, as it made me so tired/dizzy I wasn't safe to drive, etc otherwise. I took it every single day for about 4 months, but quit completely about 2 months ago (I don't even take it during outbreaks...) I think the only reason I would take it again would be if I had a H- partner. But I know people who have no side effects whatsoever with it... I hope things improve for you!!

Hi @abc123! I just went through and read all the parts of your story and just want to say a couple things... and the first is that everything is gonna be ok even if at the moment it feels like ripping your heart out would be less painful than everything else you're feeling :) I can tell from everything you wrote that you are a beautiful person, and the type of person I would want for a friend... you care huge for people, and that's just awesome. Also... you had 2 choices when David told you had herpes -- neither one was wrong. You had every right to make the decision that you did, just as you would have had every right to say "no". Don't let yourself or anyone else make you feel guilty about that. Honestly, Mark sounds like an ass who was not worth your time... after every time he walked away from you, you were there to take him back and forgive whatever wrongs he had done. But at the one time you needed him, he walked away... again. You need (and deserve!) somebody that's not going to walk away, no matter what. Someone that YOU can trust. Focus on your needs for a little while! I know that sometimes the hardest person to forgive is ourselves, and that kind of becomes a value thing... you have just as much value and worth as anyone else. It's not lowered by the fact that you have herpes or slept with someone without telling them that you'd slept with someone else who had herpes... even if you had known at that point that you had it and still slept with Mark without telling him, and didn't use any sort of protection, it wouldn't effect your value&worth as a person or make you unforgivable. You didn't know you had it. Next time you'll handle things differently. Learn from it and move on, and don't beat yourself up in the meantime... you did not in any way commit an unforgivable offense against Mark :) By the way... if he doesn't forgive you, that is his problem and the only person he is really hurting by that is himself. You've acknowledged that you messed up, apologized, etc; don't give him any more power over you. Something that has helped me with the whole self -valuing thing... Write a mantra out for yourself in the way that you would WANT to view yourself -- only positive things! -- and put it in a place where you will see it everyday. Even if you don't see things as being true at the moment, write them anyway... words are powerful in shaping our realities! Consciously choosing to focus on positive ones, and to speak them into being, can change a lot of things. I'm vegetarian and huge animal lover but spiders creep. me. out. But to put your mind at rest...I didn't kill him :)

Lysine helps me :) I have no idea how much I take a day... a friend gave me like 5 lbs of it (white powder) and I dissolve maybe 1/2 - 1 tsp of it in water every day and drink it... I recently flew with a bunch of it in unmarked orange "pill" bottles and it looked like I was flying with a shit load of coke... but anyway, since quitting suppressive therapy and doing the lysine thing every single day I haven't had an outbreak (previously if I wasn't taking valtrex every day, I had nonstop outbreaks...)

thanks for the welcome, guys! and @wcsdancer2010 thanks for the suggestion! I'm sure he'll show his furry head again so I'll have to try that...

Hello everybody! I’m passing time in the wee hours of the morning surrounded by flip flops and fly swatters waiting for a freakishly massive spider to reappear so that I can once-and-for-all permanently dispatch it from my bedroom… so I decided it would be a good time to introduce myself. (sidenote – this is the 2nd night in a row said spider has kept me from sleep…waking up to see a large dark object moving across your ceiling is a little unsettling. After spending a night chasing him in circles and zig zags… and thinking I maybe had finally gotten him… he reappeared tonight and I am determined that he will not evade me again. This fucker is as big as my hand and entirely too fast. one of the “perks” of living in the tropics…) Anyways… I’ve been one of those “lurkers” for the past couple months…I love how open and supportive and just generally awesome this community is. So. My story… My world changed, forever, when I had my first outbreak and was diagnosed with HSV-2 9 months ago. Herpes. The word silenced every other stream of thought in my head…. I’m sure it is the same for everybody else who has found themselves trapped in the shadow of that life-altering word. The guy… was beautiful, charming, the only person I’d ever been with that I thought I would be with for the rest of my life. He was ultimately also extremely selfish and insecure, in that he failed to give me a choice in whether or not herpes was something I wanted… just because he was afraid. In his 3 years of having it, he’d never talked about it to anyone. At an early point in the relationship, I asked if he had or had ever had an STD, and specifically asked about herpes, and he lied to my face…and then went on to lie about his condom usage (moral of the story: if you wake up and have sex in the middle of the night, don’t trust a promise or even the sound of the package ripping…turn on the light or do a feel-check or something) and three months later, boom. My brain refused to comprehend even though I knew, before even receiving the results of the test. But I’d never had an STD. I never thought I WOULD have an STD. I was cautious; I always questioned, thoroughly. It was a Huge Deal to me. As someone coming out of a near-death experience says their life flashes before their eyes, so my future flashed before mine… and it wasn’t something I could quite wrap my mind around – that took awhile. Occasionally I have days where I feel like I am still trying to wrap my mind around it… but those are few and far between now, thankfully ☺ and, as some of y’all have also said, I’ve come to see it as a pretty huge positive in my life. It’s made me sloowwwww down in relationships a bit. It’s made me respect and care for myself more. It’s made me have to work that much harder on self-esteem and self-worth issues, which has been one of the biggest positives. After getting to the other side of a lot of shit storms, I thought I was pretty good at the whole forgiveness thing…ya, not so much. Herpes has given me opportunity to practice it every day, sometimes hundreds of times a day (a little while after it all happened, I sat down and googled “how to forgive somebody…” pretty lame. I just couldn’t do it and the lack of it (forgiveness) was drowning me. For the record, I do (forgive him)…110%). It’s a great meter for weeding out junk food guys from want-more-than-a-short-term-sex-toy guys. I actually kinda like “the talk,” because of that… it provides an opportunity to get a lot of insight into a person’s character and what they want and, depending on how it goes, to either build huge amount of trust right off the bat or part ways safely before too much was invested. (another sidenote… I’m not meaning to imply that choosing to walk away would make somebody a “bad” person, at all… everyone should have that right to choose, and everyone has a valid right to say “no, I’m not ok with that” and doing that in no way says anything negative about them.) It’s added incentive to live a healthy, stress-free lifestyle, which was important to me before… but now it’s an absolute necessity. My health was a little sheisty around that time…I’d recently gone from a healthy 120 lbs to a skeleton-look-alike 95, and my immune system was shot. (I got mono a few weeks after my first outbreak… fun, fun.) It's made me love harder, value more, judge less...One thing that I’ve started to do is to make lists of the slivers of beautiful moments I come across in normal, every day life, and to be purposeful about pausing to see and recognize them… What we focus on is what we give power to and the thing that dictates our realities. Okay this is too long, I’m tired of being awake, and my spider friend is still in hiding so… I’m out. Hugs to you all ☺ Keep being awesome.