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World AIDS Day 2025: Composting Grief, Disruption, and Hope Into Creative Recess

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Red awareness ribbon and words HIV and AIDS on blank background, close up by AtlasStudio from Noun Project (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Today, December 1, marks the 38th World AIDS Day – a global moment to honor those we’ve lost, uplift those living with HIV, celebrate the brilliance of the movement, and recommit ourselves to ending the epidemic. This year’s theme, Overcoming Disruption, Transforming the AIDS Response, feels especially apt.

World AIDS Day is not an abstract observance for me. Diagnosed with Stage III HIV/AIDS in 2021, disruption is part of my story – part of what broke me open, part of what I have composted into the nutrients that now feed Creative Recess.

My Diagnosis, My Becoming


When I was diagnosed with HIV, it wasn’t a death sentence – but it was an identity quake. A fault line. One of those moments after which nothing is ever quite the same. The science is clear: people living with HIV who maintain viral suppression experience better health outcomes and cannot transmit the virus through sex (U=U).

However, knowing it intellectually is different from emotionally metabolizing it.

KP sitting in a hospital room in September 2021, wearing a hospital gown with monitor wires draped from the neckline. They look directly at the camera with a tired, determined expression while awaiting an HIV diagnosis.
KP, pictured in September 2021, while hospitalized awaiting a confirmed diagnosis.

Diagnosis forced me into a deeper relationship with my own body, my shame, my resilience, and ultimately, my capacity for possibility. It forced me to unlearn the stigma I had absorbed. It forced me to reshape my understanding of care – not just medical care, but emotional care, structural care, community care.

It also forced me to confront disruption — a theme echoed across the movement this year. Even as global progress continues, funding cuts, political hostility, and institutional neglect threaten what has been built.

Disruption, it turns out, is a shared language.

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“After decades of progress, the HIV response stands at a crossroads. Life-saving services are being disrupted, and many communities face heightened risks and vulnerabilities. Yet amid these challenges, hope endures in the determination, resilience, and innovation of communities who strive to end AIDS.” (World Health Organization)

Composting as Praxis

Looking back now, I realize that HIV didn’t ruin my life.

It reorganized it. It composted it.

The shame, fear, and grief that once felt heavy in my chest have become part of my creative and community practice. They’ve become the soil for Creative Recess — my work of helping people rediscover creative agency, civic imagination, and shared possibility.

Diagnosis taught me that:

  • We are not our disruptions.
  • We are what we do with them.
  • We are what we compost.

Creative Recess emerged from that understanding. It is my love letter to the movement that taught me how to live. It is my invitation for others to metabolize their own ruptures — personal, political, communal — into something usable, nourishing, and transformative.

A side-by-side comparison of KP in 2021. On the left, KP wears a yellow polka-dot shirt and appears noticeably thinner due to AIDS-related wasting. On the right, taken three months later, KP looks healthier and fuller-faced, showing physical recovery.
A side-by-side comparison of photos taken in 2021; the first was taken two weeks prior to diagnosis, and the second was taken three months later.

Honoring the Lineage

Every year on World AIDS Day, I feel the lineage of this movement in my bones:

the elders who refused to be erased,
the organizers who built care and support systems long before institutions tried,
the artists and lovers and fighters who insisted our lives are worth living.

As one advocate noted, this day honors the “resilience, brilliance, and determination of communities who built systems of care long before the world invested in them.”

Creative Recess is my way of continuing that work — not in the clinic or the streets, but through imagination, play, and the rebuilding of human connection.

A Final Note — and an Invitation

December also marks the final month to lock in Creative Recess founding membership rates for life. That matters because Creative Recess isn’t just a business model; it’s a community. A practice. A way of living into possibility — together.

If you’ve been curious about joining, this is the moment.

But today, more than anything, I want to say this:

HIV is not the end of the story.
It’s the beginning of many possible ones.
Mine included.
Maybe yours, too.