On Becoming an Alchemist

Some words enter your life like the weather.

They arrive with the temperature.
With atmosphere.
With a shift in the room.

A diagnosis is one of those words.

It does not knock.
It settles.

And suddenly, the body — once ordinary, once unquestioned — becomes illuminated under fluorescent language. Measured. Named. Interpreted.

But long before medicine ever touched me, my body had already been speaking.

It spoke in intuition.
In desire.
In exhaustion.
In fire.

The body is not passive matter.

It is intelligent terrain.

When a woman receives a diagnosis, the world often moves toward containment — protocols, projections, precaution. People grow careful. Language grows tight. Silence grows thick.

But something else is possible.

Alchemy.

Alchemy is not fantasy. It is not glittering optimism. It is a disciplined transmutation. It is the ancient art of refusing to remain in the form you were handed.

Gold is not born gold.

It becomes.

I have learned that information does not define identity. Bloodwork does not measure spirit. And stigma is often a reflection of collective fear — not personal truth.

There is a particular intimacy that emerges when you stop negotiating with shame.

When you sit with your body long enough that it becomes a teacher instead of a threat.

When you understand that nothing in you is contaminated — only misunderstood.

This is where alchemy begins.

Not in denial.
Not in rebellion.
But in authorship.

To become an HIV Alchemist is not to ignore reality.

It is to refine it.

It is essential to understand that the body can hold diagnosis and dignity at the same time. That intimacy does not disappear because language grows clinical. That sovereignty is cultivated through study, discipline, and spiritual steadiness.

I did not arrive here through drama.

I arrived through devotion.

Through reading my own body like scripture.
Through refusing to exile myself from pleasure.
Through tending to the quiet spaces where stigma tried to settle.

The world may attempt to reduce the body to risk.

But the body is revelation.

It is not a cautionary tale.
It is sacred geography.

And alchemy is the practice of standing inside your own terrain without apology.

There is nothing fragile about this.

There is fire here.

There is intelligence here.

There is lineage here.

I am not interested in being brave for applause.

I am interested in being whole.

Some of us were not meant to collapse under language.

Some of us were meant to transmute it.

— Sherley

This meditation expands further in
Embracing the Path of Alchemy: An Embodied HIV Alchemist and Spirit.
Order here.

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