My heart broke today. I send out an infrequent and irregular email newsletter partly to remind my lovely clients that they should come see me but mostly just to send updates about my activities into a slightly more curated void than a public blog. I sent out my email this afternoon and received this automated response:
“Thank you for your time…..however….it is time I move on with my life and recommit myself to the ones who have loved me. I am guilty of horrible transgressions and now must attempt to rebuild my life and embrace my children and wife of 29 years. This email account will no longer be active….may God bless you….and I pray he forgive me.
Please wish me luck as I attempt to rebuild my life from the few pieces that remain.”
My responses are many and varied but the overwhelming sense is one of loss. This industry can provide the impetus and the safe structure to reexamine your personal life and realign your actions with your personal ethic. Unfortunately, because of the socially acceptable narrative regarding sex work, that reexamination is often fraught with anger, shame, regret, and a sense of loss instead of gain. While I applaud this gent’s rededication to his life and family, these two tiny paragraphs catch at my throat as I read them to myself.
Horrible transgressions? Confusion or neglected or anger need a safe outlet and professional providers can help create that. Rebuild your life? He and the providers who saw him through the rebuilding deserve respect, not shame. Any God worth worshipping will forgive confusion and the deception necessitated by broken relationships.
I do wish him luck, though I also wish him and his loved ones a healthy sense of humanity. We all make mistakes. Sometimes they involve withholding sex from our husbands, sometimes they involve deceiving our wives. Sometimes they involve impulsive decisions, sometimes they involve long term planning. Humans make mistakes, then we learn from them. It’s how we have lived life for millennia and the fact that I can feel this client’s self hatred through his words makes me angry. While I don’t agree with deception or spending money you don’t have, discovering this industry does not happen in a vacuum and obviously he learned something valuable as fuck in his adventures.
If anyone reading this is looking to either exit or enter this industry (provider or client), please try to keep shame out of the equation. An honest assessment of your situation, absent the whirlwind of society’s negative emotional narrative, can do wonders. Recognize that sometimes this is a safe and reasonable answer to a problem, sometimes it is not but in neither case should you considering it or me offering it raise feelings of shame and anger. Please. I beg you: think clearly and forgive yourself a little.