Local resident prepares for San Francisco Half-Marathon
SAN FRANCISCO For Marissa Freeman, two life challenges will soon come to a head here.
For the past four months, Freeman, a make-up artist and writer who lives near the border of Santa Monica, has been training for the San Francisco Marathon, the self-described “non-runner” readying for the summer event all while harboring a heartbreaking secret from her friends and family.
Freeman is HIV positive. It was following a blind date in 2002 when Freeman, 24 years old at the time, went to go see her gynecologist, a nagging suspicion that all wasn’t right with her health.
“I just had this intuition,” Freeman said during an interview last week.
She surprisingly was met with resistance from her physician, who rather than encouraging an HIV test, assured Freeman that she was not in the risk group.
“I had to insist two or three times,” Freeman said. “They didn’t refuse, but they made it difficult.”
Her fears were confirmed. She experienced depression for several years, unable to disclose the secret to many in her family — with the exception of her mother — and friends, afraid that she would be ostracized for her condition.
It wasn’t until she moved to Los Angeles a few years later that she began seeking services of the AIDS Project of Los Angeles, finding an understanding community.
“I didn’t feel like there was so much stigma attached to it,” she said.
There are an estimated 60,500 people living with HIV/AIDS in Los Angeles County alone, of which only 45,000 are aware that they have contracted the disease, according to the APLA.
It wasn’t long before Freeman began toying with the idea of participating in the San Francisco Half-Marathon in August, returning to the Bay Area where she spent several years as a student at San Francisco State University.
She caught sight of an advertisement for the marathon earlier this year, deciding to sign up a month later at her boyfriend’s encouragement.
The marathon training was seemingly incomprehensible at first, Freeman barely able to run a mile without getting winded.
“The hardest part was getting the motivation to do it,” she said.
But physical endurance slowly found its way to Freeman, who in attending training sessions every weekend at Griffith Park has been able to increase her mileage.
The marathon has enabled Freeman to slowly reach out to her loved ones about her condition, though she has yet to disclose it to certain members of her family.
“It’s proven to be a good way to bring the topic up,” she said.
But perhaps most importantly, the marathon has served as a self-affirmation for Freeman, to live in the moment and worry about the future later.
“I looked for acceptance outside of myself and I started to realize that I had to find acceptance for myself before anyone accepted me,” she said. “It’s been recently that life has started to get really good.”
The thoughts of death have slowly left her mind, realizing that anyone can die at any moment.
“I think I’m more scared of not living life to the fullest more than I am of dying,” she said. “I just try to make sure I am surrounding myself with people who are important to me and would be there for me if I did get sick.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 26, 2008. Read the original PDF.