Here is how I try to tell the story: drunk, haltingly, laughing hysterically in voicemail to my therapist. At the next session, we dance around it: “I think the word you used was ‘whore.’” I package it as neatly as I can: I was too young for a real job, I was on my own, I needed the money. She says she doesn’t blame me, but it sounds like forgiveness. That isn’t what I want.
I skate around other angles: “it was,” I remind her “less than a year after I was first raped– I was still pretty messed up about that, and like, still am, probably.” It doesn’t matter; she doesn’t blame me, the case is closed. It isn’t. If I tell the story differently I will not be forgiven.
At fifteen I lacked good judgement. That was apparent, on some level, even then. The fear that had nestled inside of me the first time my now ex-boyfriend raised a hand to me had morphed into something different: adolescent invulnerability on steroids–I survived him, I can survive anything. I don’t need to be afraid anymore.
At that point in my life I barely slept. Instead, I would go for long walks in the wee hours, crawling out the window or letting myself out the front door of the house in which I rented a room. I was told that I looked much older than fifteen, only by men, only during their confusing flirtations. I may have. I dyed my long hair dark and wore more makeup than was necessary; in some ways, this was a life I invited on myself.
The first time a man offered me money for sex it was just after dawn. We were a part of the 7 am public library crowd, shivering and waiting for the doors to open. He was eating yogurt. How strange is that? It’s part of what shakes me, now, part of what makes it all sound absurd, or invented. Yogurt! I think it was peach. I had .78 cents in my bank account. Afterward, I checked out a copy of Fight Club, because I was fifteen and did not yet know better.
I started walking at night in different places, different clothes. The specifics have since blurred. There was a thrill, and fear, and money in my hands. Part of me expected to die, and I was okay with that. I was suicidal anyway. There were close calls. It wasn’t why I stopped.
During the day, I was a top student; straight-As and a reputation for being a bit of a teacher’s pet. At the end of sophomore year I was signed up to take an SAT subject test, not much of a challenge, in all honesty. I was out the night before, crawled back into bed around 3 or 4. The night itself does not stand out in my mind. My alarm went off at 5. I knew within minutes I was not taking the SAT that day. It wasn’t anything dramatic–I was exhausted and hung over, I just wasn’t up to it. I went back to bed. That previous night ended up being the last: hitting the snooze on my alarm clock shattered the illusion that these were two lives I could juggle, that I could keep everything from bleeding through. When I took the rescheduled test three months later, I got 30 points less than a perfect score.
For the first few years, after, I pretend it never happened. My daytime self becomes my full-time self, I never speak of it, even to myself. I get a bit crazier, end up with half a dozen DSM codes trailing behind me, everyone trying to explain why the things I do don’t always make sense. My high-functioning daytime self falls apart, becomes someone else entirely. It’s not necessarily a result of the past I’ve been concealing; there are a thousand other places to lay the blame. When asked, I say I don’t consider sex work to have been a trauma, for me, necessarily, as a fact of itself. There were traumas involved, but sex work was the context, not pain itself. There were other traumas, outside of that, that mattered more. Very few people believe me when I say this. Those within certain circles would prefer I did not say it at all.
It’s still not the whole story though, and the rest gets harder to explain. A few months after I finally return it to the narrative of my life, I start to wonder. I’m applying for, working at, and quitting a string of minimum wage jobs in quick succession, and I’m getting less hireable every time I do. I find myself asking if it wouldn’t be easier, if it would really be so bad. I could make so much more money, for what everyone tells me shouldn’t feel so much like nothing. I flirt with the idea for months.
When I drunk dialed my therapist, I left more than a few things out. The men I had met, was meeting, online first now, with a bit more safety or at least greater peace of mind. The men who were handing me twice as much money as I had been handed 5 years before. The second first time, now marginally an adult, now scared in different ways. I drove the whole way home with the money in my hand. I couldn’t let go of it, I was scared it could just disappear. I wasn’t sure I even needed the money, really. I got home and tried to figure out if I should worry about taxes, or what it said about me that I had gone back. I always knew, on some level, I would go back. What does it say about me that I knew that, and what does it mean that I was right?
The people who have known have fallen into two categories: those who forgive and those who do not. I have yet to meet anyone who did not think I was asking for forgiveness in the telling. I have never been. Still, I worry that going back makes me less forgivable, makes my agency that much more suspect. At the least, I become a bad victim, untrustworthy to the core. The people who don’t forgive me no longer respect me, the people who do treat me as an object of pity. I don’t want any of that.
I don’t regret much of it, when I am being honest. The choices I made worked for me. People tell me they don’t blame me, and I wonder who they do blame. I have a sneaking feeling it will be me, if I don’t tell the story right, or reduce complexity into narrative. I’m not blaming anyone.
Tags: sarah hamilton, sex work, writing
I don’t know how it works in the US, but if you live in the UK and want to bank your earnings revenue and customs really do not give a flying what you write on your tax return. My friend just writes ‘therapist’.
Sorry that was the only thing I could really think of and it’s not really a response.
I do not think there is anyone to blame for anything. Just life, and you are brave to write about it.
I think I sort of know what you mean when you say you always knew you’d go back to it. I’ve been dealing with intermittent homelessness the last few years, and the first time it happened, I felt like it was inevitable that I’d ended up there, like part of me had always expected it. That first time, it only lasted a week, but then the second time it was much longer, and as I was getting rid of all my things again, I almost felt a sense of relief, like “finally I can stop waiting for that shoe to drop, I’m going back where I belong”. Or maybe it’s not the same thing at all, but the way you put it reminded me of similar thoughts I’d had.
I also really related to the line about the sex work not being a trauma but the context for trauma. There was a lot of dangerous sex after I was raped that I would describe the same way.
Thank you for writing this.
No fifteen-year-old should ever have to read Fight Club.
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This was good to read.
I’ve had that reaction to telling people I was molested. “I don’t think any less of you.” Uh. Right. Yes. Good. I’m glad that you… felt the need to tell me that, unprompted, as if thinking less of me for having been sexually assaulted were some sort of natural reaction for people to have and you not thinking less of me is proof of what a generous and lovely person you are. Well done, you. Slow clap.
Some stuff has happened to you. You have made choices, some of which were not particularly safe but none of which hurt anyone except yourself and all of which were your choices to make. You don’t need forgiveness, and I don’t forgive you.
Yeah, are you fucking kidding me? People are the worst.
“I don’t think any less of you.”
Ugh. I am sorry people say that shit to you while probably feeling all self-satisfied for doing so. A different thing, but something that gives me a similar “ugh” feeling: when people say stuff like “that’s fine by me!” or “well I think that’s *great*!” in response to people coming out as gay.
“I still really like his movies.”
Oh my fucking god, how is this even a thing you thought was appropriate to say.
That is an also-gross, but different thing: the quiet insidiousness of feeling self-satisfied bc you so generously are allowing a person to either have undergone a very harrowing ordeal or to have the sexuality that they have.
Well, in all honesty, not being some kind of a sex-work hating moral fossil (there are many, many kinds, ranging from hateful woman-blaming types to insidious, passive-aggressive Nordic model supporters), or a gay-bashing, whore-shaming sky fairy cultist (of whom there appears to be quite an abundance of varieties, too) is indeed a kind of an achievement, though announcing that is rather tone-deaf, so to say.
Then again, I myself am quite incapable of finding the right words when someone tells me of some traumatic experience they’ve had, so it always ends up being awkward and inappropriate.
Thus I can’t put much blame on the people who say cringeworthy and insensitive things while thinking they are being nice, compassionate and progressive. Some of us just aren’t very good with this “being supportive and considerate” thing, and not always for lack of trying.
I’ve also struggled with finding the right words and the best way to respond when people disclose something like that. Right now, I usually say something like “Thank you for telling me that.” It feels better than anything else I’ve come up with, although it doesn’t always work.
Yup. I mostly say, “I’m sorry that happened to you,” in response to a situation where the person had no agency, but it is also sometimes clumsy.
” I could make so much more money, for what everyone tells me shouldn’t feel so much like nothing.”
I can imagine that sometimes even people who see themselves as progressive thinkers in regards to destigmatizing sex work might boggle at the notion that some people might actually not feel awful about doing the work that they do. There might even be those who conceivably – gasp – enjoy it!
Powerful perspective. Thank you for sharing your story.
This is a very good essay and I appreciate it.
There’s a line from the I-Ching “No praise, no blame.” It means “this is just what’s happening, we don’t attach fault to it.”
This made me think of it. It was good writing.
Huh. I don’t know how I feel about this. It hits hard, resonates deeply, like an alternate timeline. Things considered, never explored (or fearfully avoided). I know half of this story so well, but I folded under anxiety and poor judgment, hiding away for years and years, until normal fell out of the picture for good. I don’t know what to call what I became, but now that I’m somewhere adjacent to the other side, it’s impossible to explain and elicits a lot unsolicited forgiveness when I try. People would prefer I didn’t talk about it, or prefer outright lies. It keeps me very quiet, talking and writing in bursts and stopping when it starts to feel false or overly revealing or just pointless, culturally irrelevant. The choices I made did not work for me and I envy your ability to say otherwise. I don’t want to pretend “bad victim” is the same as “bad/lazy mental patient,” I just want you to know I admire the very act of pitching, writing, publishing this, after suffering so much forgiveness.
Yeah, I don’t see anything here to forgive either. It is what it is. Thank you for sharing this – it’s brought up lots of feelings for me and has inspired some very productive journaling for me.
Sexual repression is the disease. When you know that, you see us drowning in the symptoms.
Sex workers of all stripes should have unions, safe working conditions, a common place in society (polite or not) and every other benefit workers strive for.
Sex workers should not have scorn, pity, hatred, work place abuse (physical, mental or substance), or any other ill workers strive against.
Sex workers most certainly needn’t be required to explain unless we demand plumbers explain why they plumb.
But then I’d also like a pony.
Actually, we do demand to explain plumber why they plumb, we’re just a bit more insidious about it (because if they stop plumbing, we drown in shit)
Doing menial minwage work (or certain non-minwage work, for that matter – like that of construction workers, food workers in “nonprestigious” places or field workers at sanitation facilities) is seen as a kind of “failure at society game”, it’s just less explicit.
Thank you for this. Our government was recently ordered to overhaul its law against prostitution. Sex workers and many feminists hoped it would lead to decriminalization of sex work, yet many of the “experts” allowed to give testimony in hearings on the subject were evangelical Christian organizations. When one sex worker testified that her job was just a job, that she wasn’t being forced into it and it wasn’t dangerous or degrading, they flat-out told her they didn’t believe her. The new law criminalized sex work.
Ugh that’s disgusting. Lived experience? What lived experience? This guy has a degree in Christianology!
This is the precise opposite of what Harry Frankfort said about American culture: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” And the point about context, and a context for suffering, seems key; as I tell students, “Context is king, but you have to have the guts to explore it without judging.”
Well done, of course. ‘Thank you’ also goes without saying, I suppose. I always wonder, “Now what?” How can you/we/some group of people, who hope for the possibility of a future in which young people experience initiation differently, have a prayer of bringing such a vision even a millimeter closer to realization?
If nothing else, inquiring minds would like to know.
“I was told that I looked much older than fifteen, only by men, only during their confusing flirtations. I may have. I dyed my long hair dark and wore more makeup than was necessary; in some ways, this was a life I invited on myself.”
A one-two punch of recognition and sadness.
I was thinking though, at the age of fifteen, don’t most girls try to look older and wear more make up than is necessary? I know I did. (I’m not trying to make a point in some way – just sth that struck me as strange.) In any case, whatever she ‘invited’, she never invited having to put up with judgement or pity when she only wanted to talk about something.
Actually, we do demand to explain plumber why they plumb, we're just a bit more insidious about it (because if they stop plumbing, we drown in shit)
Doing menial minwage work (or certain non-minwage work, for that matter – like that of construction workers, food workers in "nonprestigious" places or field workers at sanitation facilities) is seen as a kind of "failure at society game", it's just less explicit.
This was a very powerful essay. Thank you for writing it. I agree with all of the comments above, but I wanted to add two more things:
please be safe, and take care of yourself. I wish we lived in a society where sex work wasn’t so risky, or so stigmatized, but in the meantime I want everyone who works in that field to be secure and safe.
also, good luck with therapy and dealing with the stress and trauma that you mentioned. In my day job I’ve known a few prostitutes, and beyond being interesting people in their own right, they sometimes have personal issues (history of physical or severe emotional abuse, drug addiction, etc.) that made their lives a lot harder than, say, mine is. I’m glad you have the self-awareness to realize some problems in your health, and the wisdom to look for help. And may you neither be blamed nor forgiven, but accepted.
I left one kind of sex work three years ago and just started another kind recently. This new sex work is more therapeutic and sober and sane feeling, but it’s still got the escapist allure that I miss so much and It kind of feels like home. I always thought of it as a safety net and a reliable place to re-center myself.
“I don’t consider sex work to have been a trauma, for me, necessarily, as a fact of itself. There were traumas involved, but sex work was the context, not pain itself.” This is the thing I have been trying to put into words about my sex work experiences. Thank you.
I love the way you wrote this. Thank you.
Hope you are seeing a 3rd category of people: those who think there is nothing to forgive, nothing to think less of you for. You did nothing wrong.
Your story reminds me of someone I knew, loved…still do, and care about very much. I understand enough to know how stupid saying “I understand” is.
Your story moved me and opened a lot of old wounds, and also made me think about blame and how hard and ongoing it can be forgive oneself.
I don’t understand. I don’t blame you. You’re courageous to not only share so frankly, but to live it. I hope it’s okay to wish you your version “the best.”
Please keep writing because so many can benefit from it.
Your writing really hit home, thank you! When I was in my thirties I told my therapist about my early experiences with sex work expecting forgiveness but after talking about it as something bad (me) he said “sounds like it was fun and exciting too” that began the reframing and at 40 with my Masters in counseling, I choose sex work consciously. I don’t need forgiveness and won’t listen to blame. Sex work can be financially liberating, immensely healing, compassionate, exciting and safe. It often isn’t but that is in no way inherent in the work. My only trouble of any seriousness, was with the police and legal system and that was devastating.
Me too. And this is so, so beautiful. Thank you.