Category: General

Nothing Bad Happened


Content note: This piece includes discussion of sexual assault, sexual violence, consent, substance use, and BDSM imagery.

I titled this piece Nothing Bad Happened before I knew if I was ready to explain it.

Nothing Bad Happened (BW) – 2025

That’s often how my work functions. I process parts of my life through art before I fully understand what I’m touching. Sometimes intentionally. Sometimes not. This was an image I took down from the wall, looked at briefly, and put back. Not because it wasn’t good, but because I wasn’t ready to sit with it.

Then someone I care about asked me about the title. Someone I want to know better. I don’t let people get close easily, so the question caught me off guard. Instead of deflecting, I chose to answer.

This year, my themes have been connection, authenticity, community, and intentionality. Not the loud kind. Not the polished kind. The quiet kind that shows up sitting on a couch in a gallery, talking honestly about a piece of art.

So I told the truth.

Twelve years ago, I invited someone into my home under a sexual pretense. There were drugs. There was bondage. And there were substances involved that I did not consent to. I woke up hours later still tied up, alone, my home emptied. My credit cards, my car, my electronics gone. What happened changed the trajectory of my life.

I was sexually assaulted.

Our culture is obsessed with narrow definitions. I’m done shrinking my experience to fit them.

I did nothing wrong. What happened was not my fault. I did not get what I deserved.

I’ve done years of therapy since then. Different modalities. Different clinicians. Harm reduction because it works for me right now. Trauma doesn’t disappear just because time passes. It lives in the body. In desire. In fear. In the places you still avoid.

For me, that includes a complicated relationship with bondage. I’m drawn to it and wary of it at the same time. I want to experience it as something consensual, skillful, and safe. I can’t say I’ve fully reclaimed that yet.

This photograph was part of that work.

What you’re seeing is not my body. It’s someone else’s. What mattered to me was the care in the moment. The attention. The trust. The skill. I witnessed restraint practiced with intention and compassion, and I was able to capture it. I was present. I was grounded. Nothing bad happened.

When the idea for this exhibition came together, the title arrived instantly. Not as denial. As truth.

I lived through witnessing restraint. I lived through photographing it. And this time, there was no harm. That matters more than it might seem.

Maybe someday I’ll trust someone enough to go there myself. Maybe not. For now, I have my art. I have the stories behind it. And I have the act of creation, which has always been where I reclaim my power.

Art doesn’t erase trauma. But it interrupts it. It creates light where there used to be silence.

Nothing bad happened.

And that, for me, is a kind of healing.

Keep telling the story,

Sawubona,

Professor Peacock

USCHA reminded me: gratitude is how we honor the fight, and responsibility is how we continue it!


What USCHA Taught Me About Legacy and Belonging

This was my first USCHA (US Conference on HIV/AIDS), and I wasn’t ready for it. I’ve been to HINAC (HIV Is Not a Crime) and AIDS Watch each twice, but this was different. There’s a magic at USCHA that gets under your skin.

I travelled to USCHA as part of NMAC’s 50+ Cohort, joining others like me from around the country who are aging and living with HIV. I’m grateful for the experience and the connections I made.

I’m 57. I’ve been living with HIV for 13 years. That’s my place in the timeline. Not better, not worse – just mine. But when I saw the decades of HIV/AIDS laid out at the Friday plenary, the science, the struggle, the survival – it cracked something open in me. For the first time, I felt the weight of what it means to be a long-term survivor. And I also knew that wasn’t me.

I came along after protease inhibitors, after HAART reshaped the fight. When I was diagnosed in 2012, my doctor told me, “The guidance is changing. We used to tell people to wait. Now we recommend you start treatment right away.” He still gave me the option – that’s how new it was. I didn’t understand then how historic that moment was. I do now.

In the 80s, I was a teenager. In the 90s, I was climbing the corporate ladder, coming out of the closet, largely disconnected from my community. By the time I came out, the epidemic wasn’t invisible anymore, but it was still tearing through our communities. The mid-90s would become the deadliest years. And while that grief was swallowing a generation, I was safe in my bubble, largely untouched, largely unaware. That’s the part that haunts me. The loss I didn’t live. The fire I didn’t feel.

So no – I don’t carry the same survivor’s guilt as those who were told they would die and somehow lived. My guilt is different. It’s the guilt of surviving in a post-HAART world, of being shielded by privilege, of waking up to a history I wasn’t part of, but which shaped everything around me.

At USCHA, no one made me feel like an outsider. But I did. I think people at USCHA saw me at 57 and assume I’m a long-term survivor. I’m not. I’m someone aging with HIV, without that same story. That difference is mine to wrestle with.

And yet, USCHA gave me clarity. It gave me a way to honor what came before me and what is still unfolding now. Because just as I look back in gratitude, I also look forward, knowing that those who come of age in the U=U and PrEP era will have their own place in history, too.

To say USCHA was “life-changing” sounds cliché. But this was something deeper. A reckoning. A reminder that every place in the timeline matters, including mine. And for that – for the people who came before me, for the community that still carries me forward – I am deeply grateful.

Keep telling the story,

Professor Peacock

Note: These are my thoughts and my story. I used AI to make helpful edits to my ramblings and online journaling.

When Depression Steals the Room


Depression doesn’t always arrive like a storm. Sometimes it slips in quietly, dulling everything it touches. The things that used to bring me joy – laughter with friends, coffee, a good conversation – drift out of reach. Colors wash away. The world shrinks into a small, cold corner where it’s hard to breathe.

It feels like a lifetime’s weight pressing me down into that darkness. I wake up heavy with years I didn’t ask to carry; every small hope becomes harder to lift. I feel alone and isolated, watching my life through glass. Friendships that once gathered now feel permanently distant. Family conversations thin into echoes. Simple pleasures scramble into things I can’t recognize. And there’s a voice that settles in: you are unworthy, insignificant, worthless. That voice is loud and mean and, in the silence, it feels like the only truth.

That loss doesn’t just hurt me. It hurts the people who love me, too. They watch helplessly from the outside, wanting to help but not knowing how. Their eyes ask questions they can’t answer, and I feel the weight of their worry alongside my own. Guilt spreads on both sides: I feel it for not being able to “just try harder,” and they feel it for not being able to make it stop.

Too often, depression is misunderstood as a choice, as if I could simply wish it away and rejoin the world. If only it were that easy. The truth is, depression is not weakness, laziness, or a moral failing. It’s an illness that isolates, confuses, and holds tight.

But here’s what matters: feeling powerless does not make me powerless. Speaking it, naming it, asking for patience – that is its own kind of strength. Depression hurts. It steals parts of me and makes me feel small. But I am still here. I am still reaching. I am still worth the light I hope will find me again.

Keep telling the story,

Professor Peacock