- But I remember being
very upset with people who didn't want me to pursue
a relationship with him out of fear because I've had
guys whose families question them dating me because I'm blind. (cheerful music) Hello, welcome to another
storytime in my bedroom. You guys have been loving
my storytimes lately, which is great. Oh no, Gallop was being
all cute and snuggly. Now, I just have his weird blanket and part of his bed up here. Ruined the whole vibe Gallop. All right, so you guys have
been loving my storytimes which I'm very happy about because I'm stuck, you know,
chilling in my apartment, having to make up content
while I'm stuck inside. So, stories are kinda the easiest thing. I love telling you guys about my life. There is honestly so much
I haven't told you guys. It's not because I don't want to. It's just because there is so much that has happened in my life and I have so many crazy stories and I don't just wanna make
my channel a storytime channel because there's so much
other content I wanna make. So, storytimes, I have like
this whole list of stories that I wanna tell and
they kind of just get put on the back burner and then I'm like, "Oh, one day I'll write another book "and I'll tell it then," and I don't know. Like you guys are always like, "Tell me about winning
Miss Teen Canada," or "Tell me about like touring
with A-list celebrities like "Macklemore and Demi Lovato,"
or whatever and I'm like, "Yeah, one day we'll get to it, someday." But today is not that day. I'm not telling you
about Miss Teen Canada, I'm not telling you about
working with Demi Lovato. Today, you see it in the
title, I am telling you about the time I dated somebody
who was HIV positive and this is something that, you know, when you are
talking with a new guy, you're talking about like past experiences and relationships or when you're talking
with friends about like, "Oh, this guy I once dated," and whenever this part of
my dating history comes up, people are always very
like, oh my god, wow. Like it's a very
confronting thing for people when they hear HIV positive or AIDS and there is a separation. There is a difference between
having full blown AIDS and being HIV positive and that is something that a
lot of people aren't aware of and I admit I was 18, I'm 26. I was 18 when I dated this guy. We're gonna call him Michael
to keep him anonymous, that is not his name, but when I did Michael, I
was 18 and when I met him, I was ignorant about HIV and AIDS and in choosing to date him, I made a really big
effort to educate myself and I think there's still a lot of stigma and there's still a lot
of stereotypes around people living HIV positive. And so, I wanted to make
this video to kind of break maybe some of those
stereotypes, to educate and this was eight years ago, I haven't retained quite
all of the information that I knew back then. So, I'm gonna link a lot of information, resources and articles about
HIV and AIDS down below and I really encourage
you guys to check it out, to read, to learn, to
educate yourself because, you know, this is
something that in 2020 is, it exists, it's in our world. You know, you never know when
you're gonna fall for somebody who also happens to be HIV positive or a partner gets diagnosed with AIDS. So, I think it's
important to just be aware and unfortunately, it's something that when we get taught in school,
when we have sex education, if we even have proper
sex health education, this isn't something that I
think gets discussed enough or enough proper
information is shared about. So, that's why I'm here
to talk about it today. Hello, Molly from the
future here popping in. It's not really from the
future, it's the exact same day. I stopped filming three minutes ago, but I wanted to mention, I'm
also gonna link down below a girl that I've worked
with named Ashley Rose and she was also born HIV
positive and is an HIV activist and does a lot of interesting content. So, I'm gonna link her
below in case you want to follow anybody kind of
in the social media world who's doing awareness and education around HIV and AIDS, check her out. I've wanted to talk
about it for a long time, but it's Michael's story too. It's not just my story
and I want to respect him and I would never want to
hurt him by sharing this. So, I'm gonna try to keep
him as anonymous as possible and therefore keeping
this as vague as possible with still being able to share the story. I have a lot of respect for Michael. He is a very talented
person and I don't know, you know, where he's at
in life at this point with his journey, but
I wish him all the best and I hope he's doing well. So, let's just get into it. When I was 18 years old,
I traveled to a state. Again, I'm gonna keep
it very vague so as to internet sleuths cannot like, do the little research
and deep dive into this, but I traveled to the States. I'm originally from Toronto, Canada. I was living in Toronto at the time and I traveled to spend one week in the US for a leadership program. I had just graduated high school in June. It was now July and I was taking part in a leadership conference. I then went on to work for two
summers at this conference. It's an incredible conference. I wish I could tell you
guys more about it without telling you guys about it, but I can't. So, I'm gonna say it
was a great experience to volunteer there for two summers and it was a great experience
to attend my first year as a participant and that
is where I met Michael. And it was midway through the
week that we really bonded. There was a talent show and
he was an incredible acrobat, just like so incredibly
talented at tumbling, gymnastics, acrobatics, so talented and we were both rehearsing
for the talent show. I was singing. Honestly, I'm not that a creative singer. I'm fine. You know, like, nobody's like, "Wow, Molly and Adele are really similar." Like, no, it's not. We're not there yet. You know and we never
will be, but it's fine. So, I was singing just
because I love singing and he came over and he
was petting my guide dog, Gypsy, at the time and we got chatting and I had heard of him before because my mentor had worked
with him and known him for many, many, many years. So, she had kind of told me about Michael, but I hadn't connected the dots right away and we were sitting
there, we were chatting and as he was telling me about himself, I was like, oh, this is Michael. Like, this is the Michael that my mentor has told
me about over the years and we instantly connected. Like we just instantly had
chemistry, we got on really well, we had interesting conversation and he didn't tell me right
away that he was HIV positive, but because I had heard of
Michael and connected those dots, I knew and I didn't feel
like it was my place to ask or mention it. It didn't really matter to me. At the time, I didn't
realize we were gonna end up dating for a bit. So, it didn't matter to me. I didn't feel like it
was my place to be like, "So, I heard you're HIV positive." And so, I just, you know, went about building a friendship with him. Over the next few days, we
became closer and closer, we were flirting and I can't
remember how it came up. I think we were talking about kids and if you guys watch
my videos frequently, you know, I'm somebody who
always kinda says like, "I'm not sure I really want kids." I'm open to it, I'm not like
there's a hard red line no, but if I had to like look into
my future with a crystal ball and decide if I was having
kids or not, I would say no. And so, I think we were talking
about that and I was like, "Yeah, I don't really want kids," and he brought up not really wanting kids. Anyways, the conversation of
him having HIV just came up. We started talking about it and because I'd already known of him, I knew that he was born HIV positive. His mother had contracted
HIV and did not know because from the research that I've done, symptoms of being HIV positive
or having full blown AIDS can stay dormant in your
body for up to 10 years, which is why it is so important
to go get tested frequently if you are sexually active, but this is back in the 90s and early 90s and it stayed dormant
in her body for years. She went on to get married
to Michael's father, to get pregnant and conceive Michael and it wasn't until she was pregnant that she actually found out
that she was HIV positive because the symptoms started to present and in doing blood work
and checking out the status of her pregnancy and all of that, they discovered that she was HIV positive and it was going to be
passed on to Michael. So, he was born HIV positive and it was very interesting
in getting to know him just the stigmas and the
stereotypes he faced. He was Caucasian and a lot of people, you know, would make race based jokes about being HIV positive, which
is just so disturbing to me, would make jokes about him being gay. And so, being like a straight white male who was still a teenager
and being HIV positive was very hard for him because
a lot of people would make, yeah, jokes about his
race, about his sexuality, about his promiscuity, not realizing that, A, you can be born with it
and B, he was born with it. So, something he often felt like he needed to keep a secret from people and you know, I really
felt for him because hiding who you are, how
can you love yourself when you hide so much of yourself away and I'm not saying that he needed to shout from the rooftops about it, but it was something he struggled with as a part of his identity and
I think at the time in my life being an 18 year old girl and having gone through a large journey to recovery
and self love myself and was on the tail end of it, but definitely still on that journey and having had both really
healthy romantic relationships and really unhealthy
romantic relationships. It was a place where I was... I think I was dating
people I needed to fix and I think that's a phase
a lot of people go through. You wanna be the fixer, the helper, guide people and I think I developed romantic feelings for him through connecting and relating to his self internal struggle with who he was. And so, after the week was over, we continued to stay in
touch through text message. He lived in the US, I lived in Canada. We lived about, I wanna
say an eight hour drive away from each other. So, it wasn't like... Like he lived in a state
that bordered to Canada. So he didn't live too far away from me. We would have phone calls,
we would text every day. So we would stay in touch and, you know, I just continued to grow to develop feelings for him. Physically, he was my type. He was like on the shorter side, I wanna say he's probably like definitely no taller than 5'8", probably closer to 5'5", 5'6". I'm four foot 10 and a half,
so I like shorter guys. He was super fit, banging body, great body 'cause like I said, he was a gymnast. He was a competitive tumbler. So, great body, blonde, just my type. And so, he was physically my type. I found him interesting. I've always been attracted
to people who live very different lives to me and who have a very
different life experiences because I think it challenges me. It creates more interesting conversation. So, there was a lot that
appealed to me about him, but obviously, you know, we
lived in different countries and I was still very young, so was he. So there was challenges that way, but we stayed in touch and, you know, our feelings for
each other continued to grow and during that time and considering like the fact that I liked this person, I began to share it with
friends and family that, you know, I had met this
guy and I really liked him and whenever I would share the fact that he was HIV positive with people, the reactions were very negative. Just like I said at the
beginning of this video, whenever I share now that I
dated somebody at one point who was HIV positive, people
are really like shocked and when I would share it with friends and family at the time, they were really shocked and they were really concerned for me and a lot of that concern
came from a lack of, again, a lack of education
and a lack of understanding, being concerned that I would contract it through kissing him, which HIV isn't spread through saliva. So, things like that. Also, not understanding
the difference between being HIV positive and having AIDS. Being HIV positive and being undetectable, which is the status that he
was at in his journey because he had been medicated from birth. He was highly monitored by his team to always make sure the
virus was under control and if he was growing
resistant to medication, he would switch. So he was undetectable which
means it was not transmittable, but even then, you know,
condoms, things like that. Again, saliva, you cannot
transmit it that way. So, just things like that. So I really made a real
effort to educate myself on it so that I was making the right
decision for my own self, my own health and I could be aware of how I could potentially
contract it or not, as well as being able to then share that information
with my friends and family and hopefully ease their concerns about the decision that I was making. But I remember being
very upset with people who didn't want me to pursue
a relationship with him out of fear, because I've had
guys whose families question them dating me because I'm blind and I've had guys question
dating me because I'm blind. So, I know how it feels
to have a romantic partner or their family choose
to not pursue something or be concerned about
you pursuing something because of something that I cannot change and it's really devastating and at the end of the day, he can control his HIV through medication, but he can't change
the fact that he has it and he was born with it and even if you contract
it, you can't control that. Like, once you have it, you have it. So, it was really hard for me to be like, to be confronted with
people's fears for me and I understood it came
out of a place of love and a lack of understanding and education, but it was hard because I was like, you're doing the same thing
that would devastate you if his friends and family did to me and I think for people, they were like, "No, it's different, it's different," but to me, it wasn't
different, it felt the same. And so, I wanted to give
him just as much a chance as I would have given him
if he did not have HIV. And so, I drove down with a friend to the state that he was
in for a weekend away and we met up with another
friend from the conference, we met up with Michael and the four of us had a really great weekend and yeah, we just had a great time, we made out, didn't go any further. I was only 18. You know, I wasn't
super active at the time on my sexual journey. So, that's the extent of how it went. Made out with him in front of my friends. I regret that, I'm sorry to my friends, if you're watching,
that was inappropriate. I shouldn't have done that. Heat of the moment, what can I say? I was overcome. But yeah, so that was
kind of the extent of it. We had a great weekend, I went home. We continued to talk and one of the things that he
really, really struggled with the most in coming to
terms with his diagnosis was the anger he felt towards
his mother and I understand. I have a genetic disease. My blindness was passed
down due to faulty genetics from both my mother and father's side. They both had a faulty gene,
it came together and boom, Molly's blind. It was very rare, it was highly unlikely it
would happen, but it did. Didn't happen for my brother,
same parents, but for me, you know, the stars
aligned and it happened and I've never held it against my parents. They didn't know. And so, it was a
conversation we often had of, you know, your mom did not know she had it and just like she didn't know
she was passing it on to you and my parents didn't know
they're passing it on to me, like, this isn't a choice my parents or your mom
would have ever made. And so, it was conversation we had ongoing and I think I really wanted
to help him love himself because I think loving yourself is the most beautiful thing you can feel and is one of the most
empowering things you can feel and I just wanted to find a
way to help him move forward and I felt that in order to move forward on his journey to self
acceptance and love, he needed to forgive and to
strengthen that relationship with his mother. So that was like an ongoing
conversation we had and I remember after high school, I didn't go to college or university. I started touring full time
as a motivational speaker, which is when I worked with
Demi Lovato and Macklemore and yadi yadi yada and it was probably October
that I got a little tipsy. I had some wine, I got a little tipsy and I worked up the courage
to message him on Facebook and end our relationship and we were long distance. So it wasn't like I was
gonna drive eight hours. Well, I can't drive, so I was definitely not
gonna drive eight hours, but I wasn't gonna drive
eight hours to see him. He had no plans or
availability to come see me. I was touring full time,
building my career, traveling all over the world and I regret not just
giving him a phone call, but I think I was a coward and I had never been in
this situation before and having a glass of wine just helped me to make the decision and do it and I just opened Facebook
and I messaged him and I said, "You know, I care about you so deeply "and I'm so grateful that we met "and I just don't feel like
it's the right time in my life "to pursue this, but you're
gonna find an amazing girl "and I don't want you to feel
like being born HIV positive "has to change things for you." And he was really receptive. You know, he was totally understanding of me building my career and
that that was my focus and, you know, I didn't date
anybody else for almost a year because I was just so focused on my career and what I was doing, but we
didn't really talk after that and I was this first kind of, it wasn't even a long relationship. It wasn't even officially a relationship, but like I was his
first kind of girlfriend dating experience. Almost two years ago, I
received a letter from him. He was now working at the conference. I wasn't working there that summer, but kind of my mentor, the link between us who had kind of told me
about him over the years, she was still working at the conference. He was working at the conference and they would do this
these jackalope letters where you would write a letter to somebody who made an impact in your life and she came home from the
conference that summer, again, like a year and
a half, two years later and said, "Michael wrote a letter for you "and asked me to give it to you." And I was a coward, I
thought he was going to be mad at me or upset. I was in a new relationship with Matt, who you guys if you're an
OG, you know all about Matt, but I was too scared to read this letter and I was gonna need somebody
sighted to read it to me. So I was just really scared and he messaged me on
Facebook to see if I'd read it and I ignored the message. This was a really cowardly
time in my life you guys and eventually I brought
the letter over to Matt who was the closest
person to me in my life and the person who I felt most
was comfortable reading this and he knew the story,
I told him all about it. And I said, "You know, I
know you won't judge me "for what he might say about
me or what he might think of me "and I want the person to read this to me "to not judge me because
there was so much judgment "in my life around the decision
to date him to begin with "that I wanted to share this with somebody "who wasn't gonna judge me "or what he was gonna
say about me or to me." So he read me the letter and
in the letter, he told me... Oh my god, I'm gonna get
emotional, I'm not gonna do this. I keep crying videos lately. I don't know what it is, but
he read me the letter and in the letter, Michael told
me that I saved his life and that he had been really
struggling with being suicidal for many years and I had known that. I had known he was very
depressed and had a lot of anger and pent up, built up
emotion inside of him at the time that we were dating, but I didn't quite know
how dark it got for him and I had always shared openly with him my history of being suicidal and of dealing with situational depression in the hopes of sharing my
journey of recovery and self help and the tips and tricks that I'd used, hoping it would help him
and reading this letter and hearing that, you know,
those two or three months that we were in contact had
made such a positive impact on his life and his acceptance of himself and his forgiveness towards his mother and his hope that he could move forward and find love and find a
healthy, happy relationship and find people who would
accept him with open arms and who wouldn't treat him any different. He contributed to saving him
and that was really incredible. And so, I wanted to make
this video for a few reasons because like I said at the beginning, I wanna hopefully help break
some of that stigma down and link that information
and hope that you guys empower yourselves and educate yourselves, but also, I wanna remind you
that you never know the impact you are having on somebody's life and you never know how a simple
thing that you think is just nothing could make the
biggest world of a difference in somebody's life. So, I just encourage you to
live with compassion for others, to educate yourself on the
diversity in this world and on different lived experiences. I encourage you to lead with your heart, to love openly, to be fearless and to walk the journey of
love and acceptance in life for yourself and for others. And that's really all. I know this was kind of a long one and I don't know my mood
was kind of like not... I feel like very calm in
this video and very zen and I think it's because I think Michael is a very special person and he was a very special part of my life even though he was a very
short part of my life and I don't wanna tell
the story like oh my god, I dated somebody with AIDS like
or he was born HIV positive. Like this story was
not made for clickbait. This story was not made
to be sensationalized. This story was made to help people. And so, I'm trying to
be calm and collected and share it with the right intention and I hope that's come across. If you learned something new,
give this video a thumbs up. Hit that subscribe button if
you wanna be updated next time I make a video. I hope you enjoyed it. Share your own experiences down below with dating, with self love, with maybe dating somebody
who people in your life didn't expect or didn't accept and let's have some healthy discussions. Yeah, that's all I have for you today. If you wanna watch
another storytime video, you can click this one
right in the corner up here or this one over here. I love you guys so very much and I hope you have a
beautiful, healthy happy day. Bye.
