REST

Curious….I’m going to blog about the effects of finally getting enough sleep, so I googled “Rest” to see what cool pictures I could find for the post, and I found R.E.S.T – Real Escape from the Sex Trade. That wasn’t really the kind of rest I had in mind. In fact, I have no intention of giving up sex work any time soon. I have been taking a break for the last couple of weeks, but rent is due soon, so I saw a client tonight. Embarrassingly, I have apparently seen this guy quite a few times before, and I barely remembered him at all although the last time was only a few months ago. It has occurred to me that there must be countless men who have been my clients, and who have seen me out and about in public at some point, and whom I wouldn’t recognize. This doesn’t make me feel slutty, but it does make me feel that I’m cheapening the sex act if I can’t even remember some of the dudes. I’m sure most of you think that being an erotic masseuse is already cheapening sex, or sexual intimacy, but I don’t think it has to be that way. It can be a meaningful exchange for both parties involved. I’d like to think that I would remember every guy I came into contact with, but obviously that is not the case. But who cares, eh? Would every dentist I’ve ever been to, for example, recognize me and my molars if they saw me in a non-dentist chair setting. I doubt it, and nobody would accuse them of cheapening dentistry.

But oh how I digress. I wanted to talk about sleep. I went to bed last night at 10:00 p.m. which must be the first time I’ve gone to bed that early since I was a wee girl. Admittedly I did read until 10:30 p.m. but that still gave me 7.5 hours sleep before getting up at 6:00 a.m. I wouldn’t say that I leapt out of bed with a spring in my step (um, I wasted 45 minutes posting cat videos to Facebook) but I certainly felt a whole lot more awake at work, and after coming home. My mood was noticeably brighter too.

It occurred to me with some sadness that a lot of the things I have fucked up in my life (relationships, job, graduate school etc) are probably the result of being sleep deprived, to a certain extent. I’m already  (how could I put it kindly) somewhat emotionally labile by nature, and if you throw some lack of sleep into the mix (and, God forbid, alcohol and lack of food) I can barely control myself. There have definitely been many things I’ve said and done when deprived of sleep that I bitterly regret.

I’m not claiming that 8 hours sleep a night is a panacea for all mental health problems, but, hell, it gives you a stronger base to start off from.

Married Sociopath

I’m feeling a little shell-shocked right now – by my own stupidity and naïveté, and by the sheer mind-blowing badness of other human beings. I’m thousands of miles away from home, visiting a friend, and I’m trying not to let what happened ruin the trip.

I told my friend about the client, and she was not terribly happy given that she knows I met him through sex work. She’s right of course: hardly the best way to meet a decent man. I showed her a YouTube video of the dude I had managed to unearth during one of my googling frenzies, and she pointed out that he was wearing a wedding ring. I looked a little closer, and she was right!

The YouTube video had been posted a few years ago, so she said “Well, maybe he was married back then, but isn’t now.” Well, true, but this guy had never mentioned being married as recently as 2008. He said he was married once before, but got divorced in his early thirties – a long time ago given that he’s now forty-seven. No other wife was ever mentioned.

A few more quick google searches unearthed the Facebook profile of somebody who is very probably his wife. Also, some things he said just didn’t add up at all. Yup, the dude is married. No doubt about it.

I almost feel like he was fucking “grooming” me for an affair. For example, he made a point of talking about the long, long hours he works. Of course he did! That way when we finally ended up shagging, he would have the perfect excuse for not being available all the time. I made myself vulnerable by telling him a lot of stuff about my personal life, and I think he pegged me as an easy victim. His strategy was to pretend that he, too, had had a crappy childhood and felt lonely, and disconnected from people. He seemed so kind, understanding and empathic. That stuff I wrote about us having a “trauma bond“….man, there wasn’t any fucking trauma bond between us. But he sussed that I wanted there to be, so he sucked me in by creating one. I’ve got to hand it to him, the dude is good.

I’m flabbergasted. I just don’t understand some people. Why would you deliberately lie to your wife, and then lie to some obviously very vulnerable other woman to get into her knickers?  It’s fucking sick. I can’t imagine ever being such a manipulative liar. People like this scare me. They’re sociopaths.

Worse than that, though, I scare myself. My terrible loneliness and desperate need for love and affection are making me very vulnerable and putting me in lots of potentially dangerous situations. It’s happening all the fucking time now.  I can’t trust myself anymore. If I’m not romantically interested in a person, I usually have very good instincts, but as soon as I get interested in somebody emotionally and sexually my instincts go completely out of the window. I only see and hear what I want to hear; if I don’t like what I see or hear, I manage to rationalize my doubt away, and if I don’t hear or see anything I want, I just make up some little romantic fantasy to fill in the blanks.

In the shower this morning, I asked my Higher Power to not let me obsess over this guy. Well, I guess my Higher Power answered my prayers – just not quite in the way I had expected.

Oh well. Back to the SLAA drawing board for me. It’s pretty clear that I cannot be trusted to be within a hundred-mile radius of any man.

I am grateful, though. Grateful for the fucking internet which allowed me to get the better of this dude before he got the better of me.

I’m also grateful for my observant friend here who saved me a whole lot of grief – and for my friend back home who pointed out sardonically how much erotic massage money I lost by developing a romantic interest in this guy. They have both helped stopped me from going to a really dark place.

Reality Check

I really pride myself on having a good brain and a strong intellect, so the most galling thing about addiction is that it’s in control of me. It doesn’t matter how smart I am, as the addiction controls my mind. I hate it. It’s humiliating how much I am able to trick myself to get an addictive hit.

I just had a rather sobering phone call with my sponsor, and I told her about my client. Well, she doesn’t know that I work part-time as an erotic masseuse, so I didn’t tell her how I met him. I had to fib, and say I met him in a café. Yes, I know it’s not great to lie to your sponsor, but I am not ready to open up to her about that part of my life, and I don’t know if I ever will be.

Today we’ve been emailing and texting back and forth non-stop. Again, nothing sleazy – mainly about our tastes in music. And, damn, he has good taste in music. But still…..all these emails and texts. It’s so fucking intense. It’s exhilarating, and intoxicating. This cannot be a good thing. Already I feel myself getting obsessed with him. When he doesn’t respond to a text or email within ten minutes, I sit there waiting all impatiently, not being able to concentrate on anything else.

I asked my sponsor if she thought that all the contact we’ve had today seemed too intense, and she said that if I have to ask that question I probably already know the answer. Hmmm.

God, why am I so dumb? How is it possible that every time there’s a horrible disaster after I’ve rushed into getting involved with a man I tell myself I’ll be more cautious the next time….but then I go and do the same fucking thing again.

It’s just so hard to take things slowly. I am so lonely, and I desperately want to have a meaningful connection with somebody.

Thankfully I’m leaving tomorrow morning to go visit a friend in a different state, so there won’t be so many opportunities for contacting this guy.

Trauma Bond

I heard the phrase “trauma bond” recently. It apparently refers to the type of bond that develops between an abused person and the abuser, and which keeps the abused person going back for more. That’s not quite my definition. For me, a “trauma bond” is the bond I seek out with certain men. When I first meet these men I don’t know them very well – sometimes I don’t know them at all – but I can tell instinctively that they share a similar kind of pain to mine. And that dangerous knowledge draws me to them like a moth to a fucking flame. I suppose in a way that first definition I mentioned above is accurate for me, too. Although I know that men with whom I share a “trauma bond” are no good, I keep going for the same type of man again and again although I know they’ll end up hurting me.

I’m not quite sure why I seek out a “trauma bond” in my relationships. But I think it’s because there is this huge void and so much pain inside of me, and, honestly, a healthy man would never be able to understand that. I can’t imagine being with somebody who hasn’t gone to the same dark places that I have. I’m not saying that I want my future partner to be floundering about in the gutter when I meet him; but I don’t see how somebody who hasn’t done so at some point could understand me. I don’t mean that to sound pretentious, like “ooooohhhh, I’m so complicated”. All I mean is that I want to be understood. That’s all. I just want somebody to understand me, and not judge me for where I’ve been and what I’ve done.

I mention this because I’ve been emailing back and forth all day with my client. I said last night that i had nipped it in the bud, and I thought I had, but….well, the best laid schemes o’ mice n men etc. I emailed him again last night, he responded this morning, and that was it. These haven’t been sleazy emails at all. In fact, it’s just been nice witty and smart “getting to know you” emails. He hasn’t been inappropriate or creepy at all. And yet…..he’s the kind of guy who gets handjobs from an erotic masseuse. This is not good.

I don’t think he’s a sleazebag, or some kind of sexist, misogynistic asshole. What I think is that I’ve met my fucking male equivalent. He told me about his childhood, and his experiences, but he didn’t need to because I already knew. The trauma bond was there.

I’m not really sure what’s going to happen now. All I know is that something will.

Missing Cat

I’m feeling very down today. I’m not sure why. It could be a case of the “gets-worse–before-it-gets-better” Prozac blues. I am also feeling not at all connected to people, or humanity in general. I was supposed to go out with colleagues from work last night, but I decided not to go because (a) I was exhausted (Prozac again?) (b) while I like my colleagues, they’re not people I would usually associate with if I hadn’t met them at work and (c) I’m tired of going out and getting drunk, and making superficial connections with people.

I had texted a colleague earlier that afternoon to let him know I wouldn’t be there, and he only texted me back at 11:30 p.m. saying “Hey, thanks for the heads up. I just noticed you weren’t there”. Really? It took him 3.5 hours (the night-out started at 8:00 p.m.) to realize I wasn’t there?! Other colleagues had texted me wondering where I was, but, of course, I concentrated on the one who didn’t. I was immediately filled with anger towards this guy, and found myself thinking “Fuck you, you self-absorbed dick”. It’s not great that I had this reaction, but I now at least try to ponder what could be the real emotion behind the anger. With me, it’s usually sadness I guess – feeling that I’m not important, that I don’t matter, that nobody notices me or anything I do.

Since I’m feeling so lonely, I indulged in a little bit of romantic intrigue via email with the incredibly witty and smart client I mentioned in a recent post. We really hit if off during the massage session a couple of weeks ago, and once he got home that night, he emailed asking if he could take me out for a drink. I was tempted to take him up on the offer, but no good can come of a sex worker dating a client, so I declined. But that didn’t stop me engaging in some flirty witty banter with him yesterday. Thankfully, I’ve nipped it in the bud, as email/text/iMessage flirtation is often the way I start to get obsessed with a guy.

I know this is incredibly hypocritical given that I’m perfectly happy to take their money, but I don’t really respect or trust any of my clients. I’m not saying that they’re bad guys (because they’re not) but they’re probably not the healthiest of people. They’re either seeing me behind their partner’s back, or they’re single but using my services to avoid facing some difficult area of their life. I just don’t want to get involved with a client because that’s not the kind of man I want for myself. I would like somebody more self-aware. Before you leave a comment telling me what I hypocrite I am, please know that I do realize that I am not the healthiest person either.

I am also sad this weekend because of an encounter with a cat yesterday that ended badly. About a month ago, a big, friendly, fat tom cat turned up outside my door miaowing loudly one night. He was there two nights in a row, which struck me as odd, as he didn’t seem like the kind of cat whose owners would let roam about at night. I fed him, and he didn’t seem particularly hungry, so I just assumed he belonged to somebody but maybe liked wandering about occasionally. I told myself that if he was there three nights in a row, I would assume he was a stray and do something to help. He never came back. But yesterday he did, and he was completely fucked up. Skinny, nose covered in scabs, eyes all gungy, and with a wound on one of his hind legs with maggots crawling on it. I took him to the local vet who said he thought he had been hit by a car. The poor wee guy didn’t make it. He died shortly after arriving at the vet’s.

I feel very bad because it was tough to see this once healthy cat in such terrible condition. I hate to think about how much pain he must have been in. Some “Missing Cat” posters appeared in my street earlier this week, and the cat on them looked very much like the cat who died. I called the owner and he visited the vet to view the body, and he confirmed that it was indeed his cat. Apparently the owner was in-between apartments, and had given the cat to some friends temporarily, and he had escaped weeks ago. The guy doesn’t own a car, and lives on the other side of town, so that’s why it had taken him so long to put up the “Missing Cat” posters. I feel that I should have taken better care of this cat when he arrived on my doorstep the first time. Looking back, I can now see that he was really affectionate and attention-seeking the two nights he was outside my house. I have eight cats of my own for God’s sake, so why did I not recognize that he was lonely, confused and wanted somebody to help him?

Poor kitty cat. If any good came out of this, it’s that he died somewhere comfortable with people with him, and not lying in the gutter all alone.

Can A Sex Worker Be A Buddhist?

Since the age of nineteen, I have been in and out of the sex industry in one capacity or another in four different countries – escort; prostitute (for lack of a better word) in two German brothels; erotic masseuse and “hostess” in a French “bar américain”. This last one translates as “American bar” but I’m not sure why the French called it that, as there were never any Americans to be seen. It’s basically a place where men have to buy ridiculously overpriced bottles of champagne to have the honour of your company. In other words, it’s just a front for prostitution, except nobody ever mentions that word.

I could no doubt write countless blog posts analyzing why I decided to take such a path in life at such a tender age, but this is not the time and the place. And, quite frankly, I’m not all that interested in delving into my past. It is what it is. And I honestly don’t regret any of it. I have experienced human nature in a way that only very few other people have. True, I might not always have experienced human nature at its best, but experience is experience, and I relish it all.

I have been attending mediation classes at the local Zen center, and, although I would not be presumptuous enough to call myself a Buddhist at this early stage, I cannot help but wonder whether there is a place for a sex worker – currently I’m a part-time erotic masseuse – in Buddhism. After all, the Noble Eightfold Path clearly stipulates that Buddhists should have “Right Livelihood” i.e. that they should not engage in trades or occupations that harm other people.

I tried googling “Buddhist Sex Worker” and “Buddhist Prostitute” but didn’t find anything particularly interesting. Brad Warner apparently knows one Buddhist sex worker, but he didn’t mention whether she has an online presence.

Does sex work harm other people? Does it harm sex workers themselves? There is no simple to answer way to this. I’m no Andrea Dworkin but I’m also very far from being a gushy sex-positive feminist who believes that every consensual sexual experience a woman has is empowering. All I know is that, at this point in my life, I have very little interest in sleeping with men for money. There was a time as a really young woman when that turned me on, but it no longer does. I would be miserable if I tried that again.

On the other hand, I don’t have any issues whatsoever with being an erotic masseuse. True, there is usually a handjob involved, but, meh, so what? The dude is lying flat on his back at that point, and I’m 100% in control. Sometimes they try to sit back up, but I won’t stand for it. I gently push them back down. The massage and the handjob always go the way I want it to. I can assert with 100% confidence that I do not feel exploited or belittled in any way. I have been doing this for so long that I know exactly what I’m doing. I also screen potential clients very carefully, and this helps weed out any undesirables.

So, I’m not being emotionally or physically hurt by my involvement in the sex industry, but is it hurting me in other ways? I don’t have an extravagant lifestyle by any stretch of the imagination, but being a sex worker has encouraged me to be more materialistic perhaps. I don’t make that much money as an erotic masseuse since it’s a part-time gig for me these days, but nonetheless, it’s the kind of industry where you always can make more money, or at least fantasize that you can.  I find it very hard to make a budget and stick to it because, well, why do I have to? For example, if I have $100 left in my bank account that really needs to be spent on food, but I see a dress I want, I can tell myself “Oh, I’ll just get that dress now, and do two handjobs later to afford food”. A “normal” woman could not do this. She would just have to go without the dress. This is not a very sensible way of living, and I don’t like having such a materialistic mentality.

What about the men who are my clients? Am I harming them in some way? The men who come to see me are not sleazebags – not at all, in fact. They are just normal, hard-working, middle-class, middle-aged, (usually) white men. The vast majority of them are married, and – if I can believe what they tell me – they are just not getting very much sex at home. One could argue that I am providing a valuable service for these men; that I am helping couples stay married. I wouldn’t go that far, but, well, yes, I clearly have something to offer these men. But wouldn’t it be better for my clients to find out why their wives don’t want to fuck them, and to work on their marriage instead of coming to see me? Aren’t I stopping them from working on their relationships, and growing in them? Aren’t I helping men lie to their wives and partners?

Sometimes I wonder, too, if I am stopping men from finding love altogether. Last week I had a visit from a surprisingly charming guy who works in the game industry. He wasn’t my type physically although he had a great body (nerdy white guys don’t do it for me usually) but I was bowled over by his intelligence and wit, and so I found him very attractive. But I couldn’t work out why somebody like him was single. He’s forty-seven, and had been married in his late twenties/early thirties, but has been single ever since. He blamed his crazy work schedule (fifteen-hour days apparently) but I can smell someone with a severe case of commitment phobia a mile away. Couldn’t it be argued that women like me allow men like him to continue living an emotionally, physically and spiritually impoverished existence? If I didn’t provide an easy sexual release, and the illusion of intimacy, they would have to get over their fear of commitment sooner rather than later.

It works both ways, too. Aren’t I stopping myself from having any kind of meaningful, loving relationship by being a sex worker? I’m not ready to date anybody right now, but what happens when I am? What man is going to want to get involved with a woman who has her hands on hundreds of other men’s penises every year?

It doesn’t really matter what the answer to any of the above questions is because, for the time being, I have no intention of giving up sex work. That might mean that I’ve “failed” at Buddhism before I even started, but, well, there you go. That’s just the way it has to be for now. Sex work allows me a degree of financial stability I could only dream of otherwise. I can save for the future; afford college courses; travel somewhere occasionally and, hell, sometimes buy myself things that make me feel beautiful and special. I will give it up at some point, but just not yet.

Blind

A few days ago Recovering Love Addict 24 wrote the following:

Something happened yesterday evening which really frustrated me. My bottom lines include not being able to flirt with girls, not asking girls for their numbers etc. But yesterday the first day of my bottom lines and my first day of sobriety I was waiting for a tube to last night’s meeting and a girl approached me on the platform. She was absolutely stunning; tall, slim, dark hair, totally my type. You couldn’t write this as never in my whole time in London has such an attractive girl approached me. She asked if she could stand with me and she tried to make conversation however I remained true to the promises I had made and I told her I was unavailable. Immediately after and for quite a while I was so angry with myself for turning down such an opportunity. A week before I would have jumped on it and totally flirted with her, got her number and pursued her until we had sex. But yesterday I stopped myself. I found myself clouded. First with resentment for god, I was screaming out in my head, “Why are you doing this to me.” Second I was resentful towards myself for not acting out and flirting etc. telling myself I had missed such an amazing opportunity. But then I realised I did the right thing for me. I am not ready for girls. I am not ready for a relationship. I have so much work to do on myself first and I need to concentrate on that.

The interesting thing is that Recovering Love Addict 24’s encounter with this girl might not be as random as you might think. According to the Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous “big book”, there is a “diabolic accuracy” to such “coincidental” meetings which “tended to occur when we were most vulnerable to them” (p110). The book urges SLAA members to accept “the possibility that psychic occurrences can happen, in order to make sense of some of these situations which seemed so uncanny”. (ibid.). On p111, we are told that “perhaps the most important principal here was not to deny to ourselves that we were, indeed, being severely tested”.

I would agree with all of the above based on a random encounter I had on Monday at work with the Arab. You might be thinking “C’mon, girl! You work with the guy. You were bound to bump into him at some point!” Well, this is true, but my company is huge, and we work in entirely separate buildings and, in four months of chatting with him online, I’ve never once seen him – until last week when I was out running, and then this week. Last week’s encounter triggered a new obsession about him, and this week’s sorely tested the resolve I had found over the weekend to ignore him.

I was walking into the main building to grab some lunch in the café when he came out, looking, I might add, every inch my ideal man – tall, dark, handsome and athletic.  This was the first time I’d ever seen him up close, and he really is just so incredibly handsome. I can count on one hand the number of men I’ve found that attractive over all my thirty-odd years on this planet. It was the first time I’d ever heard him speak, too, and his voice was everything I thought it would be – deep, raspy and sexy. He wasn’t exactly in a rush to stop and talk, and I haven’t heard from him at all this week. I haven’t contacted him because, well, princesses don’t beg, goddammit! (although they are apparently allowed to obsess non-stop about douchebags).

It’s for the best he hasn’t been in touch, as every fibre of my being tells me that he’s trouble. I can’t begin to fathom why a man would chase and chase and chase me, and then – poof! – blow me off when I finally agree to go out with him. And despite knowing that I shouldn’t get involved with him, it hurts like hell to feel rejected. Logically, I know the issue is that he’s weird, but I still find myself thinking “What’s wrong with me? Why doesn’t he want me? Why hasn’t he contacted me?”

I also feel that I have made myself incredibly vulnerable to this man. I opened up too quickly, and told him far too much personal information – most of it unsolicited (I still haven’t worked out what boundaries are!), but on one memorable occasion he asked me whether I had ever cheated on MM when I knew the marriage was on the rocks. Since the dude barely asked me any questions at all, it was very strange that he asked this one. I was kinda put on the spot, and my idiotic brain actually thought: “Oh my God, the poor dear! He’s probably been cheated on before, and wants to know that I wouldn’t do that! Oh, how he must have suffered!”. My response was half-truth/half-lie, as I mentioned my dalliance with Rebound Guy which began one week before MM and I broke up. I, of course, did not tell him the full extent of what happened. I said it was just “kissing”.

I went round to a colleague’s after work, who happens to be gay, and you can always trust a gay man’s opinion about your love life. When I told him about the Arab’s weird question, he said: “Girl, he just wanted to find out if you were easy. If you’d fucked somebody while married, chances are you’d fuck him even more quickly given that you’re now single”. It depressed the hell out of me to think that all I am to this dude (and all I’ve ever been to a lot of men) is a piece of ass. And the two beers I had drunk at my friend’s house certainly didn’t help my mood. I was incredibly sad by the time I finally left. And, oh, did I mention that I’ve also gone cold-turkey on Zoloft?

I went to the ATM afterwards to pay in some of my ill-gotten gains where, out of the corner of my eye, I could see this skinny, icky, middle-aged white dude. I barely looked at him, but I knew (just knew!) that he was this awful guy I had once fucked when I was still an escort. He is for sure on the list of “Shameful, painful sexual experiences I will never talk about to anybody”. He was putting an envelope into the night deposit, and then he walked to his car, and was about to leave when I pointed at him, and yelled “Hey, you! I know you. Your name’s John!”. I knew I should have let him leave, but the alcohol took away all common sense.

The stupid idiot got out of his car, looking all sheepish and pleased, and came back to the ATM to talk to me. “Yes, that is my name! You look familiar. Do I know you?”. I smiled seductively, and cooed “Yes, you do. Now give me your glasses”. I don’t know what the hell he thought I was doing, but he did actually let me take the glasses, and I walked with them into the parking lot, with him feebly protesting that he was blind without them. I set the timer on my iPhone, and said “You have 60 seconds to remember my name or I’ll smash your glasses”.

He failed the test.

I stomped on his glasses.

And, if this was Hollywood, they would have broken into pieces, and I would have driven off into the sunset to start a new life, and find true love.

But it’s not Hollywood, and they didn’t fucking break. I think I only succeeded in bending them badly.

For someone whose glasses had just been nearly demolished by a deranged, drunk woman in a parking lot, I must say that his reaction was somewhat muted. He said words to the effect of “Well, that wasn’t very nice!”.

“It wasn’t very nice what you did to me either!”, I screamed back, and got into my car and drove off.

I’m sober now, and I actually think this story is kinda humorous, but at the time I felt so depressed, angry and out-of-control. Two guys in one day for whom I’m just a piece of ass. Some forgettable vagina.

I came home, and I just wanted somebody to hug me. But there was nobody. All I got were some text messages from MM, which said that I’m “a demon”, “a fucking monster”, “barely human”.

Some people drink to forget, but when I drink I seem to remember all the bad, nasty, abusive stuff that has happened to me, and I feel like a little girl again – so vulnerable, so in pain. Before meeting the guy at the ATM, I was driving home on the highway and the urge for self-destruction was pretty acute. I was doing 80, and I thought momentarily about just crashing the car on purpose.

Where does all that pain go when I’m not drunk? I feel fine now. I’m sad and lonely but I don’t want to harm myself or other people. Is the pain not real, then? Does the alcohol just create something that’s not really there?

My Name Is Trouble

It hasn’t been a good week. You might remember that my car was towed two weeks ago after I  parked it in the wrong place outside RG‘s apartment complex (that’s what drunk, obsessive horniness does to a girl). This cost me $190. Another result of my obsession with RG was that I neglected to transfer money into my “bills” bank account that same week, so two direct debit bills overdrew my account – another $80 in overdraft fees. I therefore didn’t have enough money to pay my rent this month.

Of course, those of you who have been reading my two blogs faithfully since (when?) 2007 will know that, um, I am rather “handy” when it comes to scraping together some cash in a short space of time. For those of you who don’t know me this means that I moonlight as an erotic masseuse whenever necessary (in other words, I give handjobs to random dudes or, in some cases, regulars). Now that MM and I have broken up, “whenever necessary” pretty much means “all the fucking time” because I obviously have double the amount of bills to pay. Some women have made a career out of writing about their “sexploits” in the erotic massage/escort industry but this is not really my thing anymore although my last blog started off being about that. It’s just a job really.

Today I finally managed to get together all my rent money, which was actually pretty hard.  It is not easy for me to make money as an erotic masseuse because I refuse (absolutely refuse) to email potential clients pictures of myself, even if it’s just a shot of my naked torso. This is a curious thing given that I have shitty boundaries in all other areas of my life, but when it comes to erotic massage I’m boundaried up all the way to the hilt. I can’t stand the idea of emailing pictures of myself to some random dude who can then do with them what he will. Sometimes I think that I must have been a member of the Maasai tribe in a past life (they believe photographs steal the soul) because I am obsessed with having control of my image.  In this digital age, there are very few men out there willing to come see an erotic masseuse sight-unseen.  Although this makes it hard for me to make a living, it is also a good thing because those who do come (or, ahem, cum) are either regulars or those adventurous few souls who can tell from my ads/emails that I’m well-educated, funny, sane and über-discreet, and they appreciate these qualities in me. Very rarely do I meet an asshole. My clients are almost always well-educated, respectful, middle-class men.

However, I digress. I finally scraped together the rent money, a feat made all the harder by the fact that one of my tyres blew out on the way to work yesterday morning.  I was doing 65 (or, well, probably at least 70 since I’m nearly always late for work and end up speeding) and I had always been terrified of a tyre blowing out on the highway. It actually wasn’t all that bad. There was just a huge rumbling sound, which I attributed to a passing truck at first, but then my car lurched to one side, so I knew the tyre had blown out. Since I’m an idiot, it didn’t occur to me to put on my hazard lights, but I just got off at the next exit and turned into the first place I could where there just happened to be (hallefuckinglujah! Praise be to God!) an auto repair shop. Just as fucking well because I ain’t ever changed a tyre in my life and I sure as hell don’t intend to. One hour later, and $90 poorer, I drove off with the tyre replaced and my ego slightly inflated from the hardcore pick-up efforts of LeRon, the playa mechanic.

As if all my financial/blown tyre worries weren’t enough, last night I received an email from MM saying, among other things, that I have Borderline Personality Disorder (I agree – distinct possibility there) and  – this was a new one from him – Narcissistic Personality Disorder. This really cut to the bone because I have read the diagnostic criteria for NPD and I definitely recognize myself in some of them. I truly am very self-absorbed. I know it, and it is shameful. I am acutely aware that all I write about in this blog is myself/my problems/my pain. However, I do not agree that I lack empathy for other people at all…..or do I? I am genuinely terrified that I have NPD because I don’t want to be such a bad person! Please tell me I’m not such a bad person!

I guess  I really should tell you now how my relationship with MM ended. I’ve been putting it off for such a long time because it was just too painful to write about. It is a long, messy, nightmarish story but, in a nutshell, I ended up calling police on him one night. Early on that night we had had yet another huge argument and, amazingly for me, I actually managed to disengage from it by locking myself in the bathroom. MM was drunk, and I knew there was no point in actually having a discussion because it would get nowhere. He then kicked the door open, and continued to rant at me which led to me mocking him mercilessly (I probably said stuff like “you’re a pathetic loser” or “this is why I don’t want to fuck you”). MM had been physical with me before (usually when I was smashing stuff or when he was trying to restrain me) but I never thought he would ever intentionally hurt me. Things were getting out of control in our relationship, and I was scared that I was going to break a bone if he pushed me into or over something, but I never thought for a second that he would ever hit my face. And he didn’t. However, as I was mocking him, his fist came flying towards my face, and he only just stopped himself in the nick of time.

After this, MM went off to the local bar (yup, the same one where RG hangs out all the time) and got absolutely fucking plastered. When he came back lots of shit went down, and I can’t say I was entirely innocent. At one point, I ripped his iPhone out of his hand because I thought he was calling another woman (turned out he was just leaving a really drunk, incoherent voicemail for his best friend) but he was hardly an angel either. He grabbed me and shoved me around, trying to get the cell phone back; aimed a kick at me; followed me around ranting at me when we were back in the house; threw my dinner in my face when I finally sat down, trying to ignore him; grabbed my cell phone out of my hand when a friend called; smashed it on the floor several times…and God knows what else. I wanted him out of house and asked him to leave, but he wouldn’t. Eventually I just ended up calling the police, which ended up with my cell phone being smashed on the floor several more times until I could finally get through to the police. Well, the police came and tried to talk to MM, but he shut himself in a room and refused to come out. He talked to them through an open window, clearly totally wasted, and eventually the police got tired of that, and asked me to let them into the house. I did, and they knocked on the door of the room MM was in, but he still wouldn’t come out. The police eventually kicked the door down and, when MM still refused to cooperate, he got tasered twice. Yes, twice.

The result of all of this is that MM now has three criminal charges against him: interfering with someone making a 911 call; assault of a family member and resisting arrest.

I don’t feel guilty that MM was tasered (this was his own doing – he could have cooperated with the police) and the fact that he was actually was a solace to me in some weird way. I don’t mean that I wanted him to get tasered (of course I didn’t!) but the fact that he got himself in a situation where he was tasered showed me that I wasn’t the only crazy one in this relationship. MM made a point of telling me that I was the crazy one all the time.

However, I do feel guilty that MM is now facing a domestic violence charge. By all rights, both of us should have assault charges. There is a many a time that MM could easily have called the police on me for assaulting him. Maybe he should have. Maybe that would have been my rock bottom, and I would have been a better person for it. I feel immense guilt that MM’s life could be ruined because of me. I feel like no man should date me – that I’m mad, bad and dangerous to know. No wonder RG decided he didn’t want to see me anymore. I have crazy seeping out of every pore.

But, guilty as I feel, I believe that MM does not accept full responsibility for his actions. Any time he was physical with me, he justified it by saying I “provoked” him. I accepted this response because I thought “Well, it’s true. I am pretty crazy. The guy was probably driven to act that way”. But he’s a grown man! Nobody can make a full-grown adult do anything! Instead of blaming me for the mistakes he made in his life, I think it would suit him better to ask himself why he continued to stay in a relationship with me because I was (no doubt about it) totally abusive.

And, boy, do I feel guilty about that. I know for a fact that I ruined MM’s self-esteem. I don’t know why I was so verbally abusive but I was, and I sucked all the life out of him. The terrible thing is that he still loves me. Even today, he told me how much he loves me, and that he will always love me. Perhaps I feel the same way. I have no idea. I’m not sure my poor, fucked-up brain can actually process what feelings of love are.

I feel terrible that MM has to spend $10,000 on lawyer fees, attend court dates, stupid state-mandated therapy sessions and whatnot while there I was fucking RG without a care in the world. For one whole month, I barely gave MM a second thought because I was so wrapped up in RG. What kind of person am I? Could it be true that I have no empathy whatsoever?

MM loved me/still loves me, and I gave him nothing. And when I say “nothing”, I mean truly nothing. I had the time and energy to put into running after RG (a loser, alcoholic drug dealer) but I couldn’t even give a scrap of affection to MM who was my fucking husband.  I know how much he must be hurting because I have been there myself. I have been that person – the person who was mistreated by an emotionally unavailable partner who then spends months, if not years, wondering “what’s wrong with me?!”. I can’t believe I then turned the tables and did that to another person.

I can’t believe that, after everything I’ve done/ all the pain I’ve caused him, he still loves me. He is the first man in my entire life who has ever loved me. And I treated him like a piece of shit. Threw it all away.

The Corporate Ladder

Next week I’ll be getting interviewed for the customer service position I’ve been doing since February as a contractor who gets no benefits and only six days unpaid days of holiday a year. It’s a stupid, low-paid job, but my contract is up in February and if I don’t get hired on as a regular employee at this company, God know what else I will find in this economy.

Also, I have to admit that I do, oddly enough, actually like this job. If you have to work in corporate America then this is really the only place that would be bearable. For the most part, my colleagues are nice, and very few people are total corporate whores. In fact, most people just do this job to pay the bills while they work on creative stuff on the side.

I am so tired struggling to make ends meet, so I will delighted to get health benefits, more pay and job security if I get hired. At the same time, I know deep-down that this could be a slippery slope. So many Americans get sucked into staying in a less than ideal job situation because they don’t want to lose their health benefits. I don’t want to be one of them.

I’m ashamed to say it but the whole “Occupy” movement has somehow passed me by. I am very much a part of the 99% but these protests just failed to move me, and I didn’t go to any although there was an “Occupy” movement in my own city. A part of me is happy that other people are, like me, now over-educated and horribly, horribly under-employed. I know it’s bad to want others to suffer just because you’re suffering, but now I don’t have to feel so embarrassed to have such a terrible job at the age of 34 because I’m just one of many.

Despite not having written in here for nearly two months now, there is not much to report. I go to work, come home, eat, watch an episode of “Mad Men” and then go to bed to do the same thing all over again. Métro, boulot, dodo indeed. I had imagined that changing my schedule to four ten-hour days (instead of the regular Mon-Fri, eight-hour day) would be the answer to all my creative prayers, but sadly this was not the case. Despite having a three-day weekend every weekend, I am usually so exhausted by the time Friday comes along that I don’t want to do much. The same goes for the work week; with a ten hour work day (and that doesn’t include the one hour for lunch, and the forty minutes I spend sitting in a car) there’s no time to do anything. I feel myself becoming stupider and less informed by the second.

Relationship-wise, MM and I are getting on “okay”. Just okay. I can’t remember the last time we had sex. Probably a rushed affair about a month ago. I’m so tired of always being constantly broke, and I feel that he is trapped in a poverty mindset. It’s the same old story – he wants to be an artist, or have some kind of visual arts job, but he doesn’t make much progress towards that, and he constantly changes his focus. I can’t imagine myself ever having a comfortable, normal life if I stay with this man. And, yet, of course, it’s the same for me – I don’t work on my creative ambitions at all.

One of the reasons – the main reason really – I haven’t written in here was because I didn’t really feel like sharing, or being judged for, what I’m going to write next. But I don’t think it’s healthy to keep it all to myself. A few months ago, I got tired of never having enough money, so I started to work as an escort again – behind MM‘s back. Yes, I know that I’m married, and that I’ve broken my marriage vows in what many would consider the worst way possible. Of course, I feel some guilt about it, but nowhere as much as you’d expect. I just feel that I’m doing what I need to survive. I don’t think about what I’m doing all that much but when I do I’m surprised at how normal it seems to me to be doing this. I don’t think of myself as a bad person, but of course I wonder if this means that I am.

The Crimson Petal and the White

 I am very uninspired today, so since I’m doing the whole NaBloPoMo thing, I thought I     might as well nip over to their website and check out the prompt of the day. Today’s prompt is:

“Which character would you most like to meet?”.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind about the character I would like to meet. It would be Sugar from the über-talented Michel Faber‘s novel “The Crimson Petal and the White“.  Those of you who have been reading my writing for a while should know that I am a cynical, jaded miserabilist who’s impressed and excited by very little. Oh, but this book! It’s 894 pages long, and yet I finished it in two days.

If you only ever read one book again before dying, then it has to be this one!

I’ve also read “Under the Skin” by the same author , and I’m constantly amazed by his ability to write from the point of view of a woman and by the fact that he actually does it well. He understands women so well that I would easily have imagined both of these works to be written by a woman if I hadn’t already seen a man’s name on the front cover.

Why would I so much like to meet Sugar? Well, she’s a self-educated, feisty nineteenth century London prostitute. Those of you who know about me and my past will surely understand why this alone would appeal to me.

The following passage isn’t about Sugar, and the thoughts aren’t hers; this is actually Carolyn, another London prostitute’s point of view:

“Responsibilities, responsibilities. To get enough sleep, to remember to comb her hair, to wash after every man: these are the sorts of things she must make sure she doesn’t neglect these days. Compared to the burdens she once shared with her fellow factory slaves, they aren’t too bad. As for the work, well…it’s not as dirty as the factory, nor as dangerous, nor as dull. At the cost of her immortal soul, she has earned the right to lie in on a weekday morning and get up when she damn well chooses”.

As a former sex worker myself, I can relate to the above passage wholeheartedly. Now that I am no longer an erotic masseuse, I guess that I’m now earning my living “honestly”. People would consider it a “good decision”; that I’m doing the “right thing”. The only benefit I can see to having a regular job is that I’m guaranteed a regular income – that was something I could never be sure of with sex work, especially after the economy went pear-shaped. Apart from that, though, what’s good about it? I earn less money; I’m doing a dead-end job in which I’m not really appreciated; I have less time for myself; I barely make ends meet. And, oh, don’t forget that I’m a contractor, so I’m not entitled to any benefits (that means health insurance, my European friends) or any sick or holiday pay. I could be fired at any point, and once my contract is up next February, I will have to find a new job because the company can’t legally hire a contractor for more than a year – although they can wait six months, and then hire me back for another year of benefit-less joy!

If you’ve got the stomach for it, then, hell, sex work really ain’t that bad in comparison to that. Quite frankly, I miss it.