After dropping a bombshell announcement on Matt Lauer on Tuesday morning (November 17th), revealing that he’s HIV positive, actor Charlie Sheen penned an open letter to the public opening up his struggle and internal battle since being diagnosed with the virus.
Read more below.
“Roughly four years ago, I suddenly found myself in the throws of a seismic and debilitating three-day cluster-migraine-like headache,” he started the letter. “I was emergently hospitalized with what I believed to be a brain tumor or perhaps some unknown pathology. I was partially correct. Following a battery of endless tests, that included a hideous spinal tap, it was sadly and shockingly revealed to me that I was, in fact, positive for HIV. The news was a “mule kick” to my soul. Those impossible words I absorbed and then tried to convince myself, that I was stuck, suspended, or even stranded inside some kind of alternate reality or nightmare, were to the absolute contrary. I was awake. It was true… reality.”
Despite the intense and rigorous treatments that he went through in order to make living with HIV more bearable, Charlie Sheen reveals the hardest part of it all was telling family and friends of his illness. He turned to drinking and drugs to cope with his problems and stress, all the while those he thought were close to him, turned his personal struggle into blackmail.
“…I dazedly chose (or hired) the companionship of unsavory and insipid types. Regardless of their salt-less reputations, I always lead with condoms and honesty when it came to my condition. Sadly, my truth soon became their treason, as a deluge of blackmail and extortion took center stage in this circus of deceit. To date, I have paid out countless millions to these desperate charlatans.”
Sheen hopes that coming out about his illness will free him from all the shame and blackmail that have come over the past four years. He said, “I accept this condition not as a curse or scourge, but rather as an opportunity and a challenge. An opportunity to help others. A challenge to better myself.”
Read the full letter here.
Source Vibe
