Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (20 page)

Chapter 22 '""-' I INTEGRATING MYSELF INTO SOCIETY The natural flights ofthe human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope. SAMUEL JOHNSON, THE RAMBLER I f anyone supposes that leaving prostitution ought to be met with some sort of jubilant mental fanfare, I cannot say they are mistaken in all cases, but they are certainly mistaken in mine. On leaving prostitution, I swapped the daily living of it for the daily reeling from it. I swapped enduring it for examining it. Both were uniquely painful, and the latter had its own flavours of fragmentation, new ones to contend with. For example, I could make no link that seemed worth making between my present-day self and the fourteen-year-old girl who'd walked out of her mother's house eight years before. Who was she any more? And who was I? And how in God's name could we be in any way related when the one thing that spanned the distance between us was a rotten foetid experience that had morphed her out of all existence? That wasn't growing up. That was growing out, out of myself. It took a very long time to accept that what was good about me had survived prostitution; that the more basic elements of my fourteen-year-old self still existed and that they still existed inside me. When you grow through the stages of adolescence into adulthood in prostitution, you've literally grown up in prostitution. It informs everything you know. It was hard for me to face that I'd grown up in that, and harder still to identify with what was left of my original self. I felt like a girl who'd gone to a party in a beautiful new dress, lost hours she could not number, and come to consciousness covered in dirt and clothed in rags. I could not connect to myself. I'd lost the view of who I was. Dissociation had become concrete. I had thought to title this chapter 'reintegrating myself into society', until I was struck by the realisation that progressing into prostitution from a childhood where I was never socially assimilated in the first place means that I did not re-integrate myself into society. I began the task of integrating myself into society at twenty-two, for the first time. Needless to say, this was not easy. Much ofwhat made it difficult was the daily assault of memory. This did not lessen easily. Ittook years before a lessening even began. It is said that time is a great healer, but I am inclined to think that maybe time heals nothing. Maybe all it does is create distance between you and that which you wish could be healed. There is comfort in this distance, and I think it is possible that people have mistaken the comfort of distance for the comfort of healing. In any case, for a long time I thought that was the only comfort I could take, and I was happy to take it. I spent my first year out of prostitution cultivating this distance without knowing that was what I was doing. I had begun my last cocaine binge on 16 June 1998. It was a short one. It only lasted two days. That was no credit to me; it stopped for the same reason it had always done: the cocaine had run out. Once I began a binge I never stopped for any other reason, but I had spent months before that trying to stop taking cocaine in the first place. Most of my attempts were pitiful. I would get two days clean, maybe three. I even got five days once or twice. These were big deals, those clean days; bigger than I can express. If you've lived in a madhouse of the mind for four years there's a lot to be said for a three-day reprieve. I kept going, and then I'd got one week, one month clean, and then I packed up my child and whatever else was worth taking and got on a bus that would take us out of Dublin to the house in the countryside I'd rented for a year. That was some year. . An immediate after-effect of cocaine abuse is a well-documented crippling depression. It passes within a couple of days. What is less spoken of is the milder but longer-term sadness that lingers after you've spent years abusing your body and mind with a narcotic substance. I'd wake in the morning in our weirdly quiet home, get my child ready for school and walk the considerable distance to its gates: I didn't drive at the time and no bus passed that way. This year away from Dublin was supposed to be an exercise in getting my life together, but when I returned from the school and sat alone with my thoughts I felt that my life was anything but together. I saw, really saw, what my life amounted to. The summer that had just passed was a time when I'd felt I had no other choice but to get drug free. It was because my only child was about to start his first year at school. That was the reason why. It's a reason every parent will understand. In those days I was a mother with nothing else to hold onto but instinct, and I am so glad to say that instinct prevailed and served us both. But as for that first year of clean living, that was spent in the sort of contemplation inevitable for someone kicking a drug problem on her own. I wonder now how different it might have been had I had some professional support, but I know as quickly as I raise the question that the answer doesn't matter. I got through it without rehab, or counselling, or any other service luxurious and non-essential to a rabbit bolting out of a trap. I spent that year looking at the sitting-room wall, and in all that looking, I found some way back to the idea ofliving a drug-free life. Before that first year was out I knew I had to get back to Dublin. I missed home, and I was tired of being reminded I was an outsider by some of the locals, who were so clannish-minded they couldn't cope with the understanding that I came from an hour's drive away. I found myself, again, packing up my child and our belongings, but this time, thankfully, heading for home. I rented an apartment on the north side of Dublin. I felt very positive about this new start, and about the future, but as soon as my child started the new school term I found myself living on social welfare again and staring at the wall all day wondering what to do with myself. The time between wondering was spent watching daytime television shows and reading British women's magazines, until one day it occurred to me to write something for one ofthem, so I did. I amused myself that day by writing a scandalous piece of imagination about a woman whose husband passes out drunk on their wedding night and who decides, while drunk and feeling sorry for herself, to consummate something other than her marriage with someone other than her husband. I waited a couple of months and then forgot all about the piece. Long after I assumed it had been dismissed without even the courtesy of a rejection slip, a cheque for two hundred and fifty pounds sterling dropped through my door. It had been nine or ten months since I'd posted my story and that cheque wasn't only a welcome financial surprise, it was an affirmation that I was capable of making money by doing something I enjoyed rather than something I detested. I can scarcely express the surprise I felt at opening that envelope. I'm sure it didn't cost a thought to the person who posted it, but opening it gave me such joy, confidence and hope. My mind then began to operate on a different level. I began to imagine things that hadn't felt previously imaginable to me. I began to want things I hadn't dared want before, at least not overtly; not in the sense that I could imagine them manifesting in a real and tangible way. The first thing I knew I wanted to do was to learn how to type. When rd been arrested at sixteen rd spent a short time in a technical school in south Dublin under the order of the children's court, during which time I'd discovered word processors. Within weeks I'd moved on, from the technical school and before long was back on the streets, but r never forgot about the word processors. I had watched in amazement as the words were manipulated on the screen and I realised I had just come across a fascinating invention. I saw this as a way I could process not just my words, but my thoughts; I saw it as a perfect way to put order on the writing experience. I had always written. As a teenager I would scribble on bits of paper and cardboard and the back of beer mats. My bag would be full of loose scraps of paper, hurriedly torn from notebooks and flyleaves and anywhere else I could think of. Every receipt was unravelled, pressed flat, and the back covered in my semi-legible scrawl. I was once arrested by a policewoman and had to endure the embarrassment of her reading my poems and verses, before turning to me wide-eyed and asking: 'Did you write this?' The humiliation evaporated. I had thought she was going to sneer at me. Instead I was moved because she was moved. It was nice to know someone thought I wasn't suited to the life I was living. �During those post-prostitution afternoons when I sat alone in my flat, I didn't know what I might possibly do in the future, but I knew I had a feeling those word processors ought to have something to do with it. The problem was, at twenty-three and knowing nothing about the education system, I thought myself too old to return to learning. I thought that because I hadn't got the Leaving Cert, �hadn't got a chance of being accepted anywhere. I'd never even heard the term 'mature student'. It simply wasn't used in the circles I'd grown up in. At exactly that point there occurred one of the oddest things that's ever happened in my family. I had always known that my mother was adopted; she had been adopted by a Dublin couple in the late 1940s and raised as an only child. In 1999, her half-sister tracked her down through her marriage records, so she came to find my mother through my father's sister, whom my mother hadn't spoken to in the best part of twenty years. My brother called in and told me about all this and I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. In fact, it sounded to me very much like another of my mother's schizophrenic fantasies. Sadly, many of them focused on her family of origin, and anyway, you might expect the family of an adopted woman to come looking for her in her late teens or in her twenties; you do not expect it in her fifties. But my brother assured me it was true. I passed my number on for my mother's sister to call me, which she did, and the situation turned out to be very much authentic. The upshot of all this was I went from having no aunts to having two, one from my mother's side and one from my father's, and the important point in that was that I suddenly had something else I'd never had: two older female relatives to advise me. They wasted no time in influencing me to return to education and I was stunned to learn that anybody over the age of twenty-three could apply for further education without having a Leaving Certificate. I enrolled for a course at a Post-Leaving Certificate college for the following term. I remember shaking, probably visibly, as I was sitting in the college hall waiting for the interview. I got a place on a course specifically for adults returning to education that taught typing, communications and computer applications, including word processing. Although I was terrified, I advanced quickly. We were all given elec.tronic typewriters to bring home to practise on and we were advised to practise for forty minutes a night. I never practised for less than an hour; it was a joyous experience to be learning how to type. I was the fastest typist in the class when we graduated at the end of the year, and I�ot four distinctions out of the five modules we studied, gaining a merit for the fifth (which was Microsoft Excel-figures have never been my strong point). By the spring ofthe following year I had decided what I wanted to do in the future and so I applied for a place on a journalism degree course at Dublin City University. This was no small thing. There isn,t a word or any combination of words that could adequately describe my fear at walking into that university for the first time. When I went in for an interview, I was walking into the unknown. I was attempting to shove myself into a mould that didn,t fit, that didn,t recognise me; or ifit did, I felt, recognised me as something that didn,t belong; but to hell with it, I thought, I would stick my square self into the round hole, because some part of me knew I had to be there. I was trying, attempting, determining, �o attain for myself a new life, a new existence; a new way of relating to the world and, for the first time, framing the terms I expected the world to relate back to me. I felt just as rd done approaching the PLC college, only much more amplified, and the huge imposing buildings of ocu seemed to reflect back that difference. I was successful at the interview, and then hurled straight into a different sort of nerve-wracking time. I had beenoffered a place but it was conditional on my grades from the PLC course being high enough to secure it. I needed a majority of distinctions, so I was told, but I wouldn,t know my results until late that summer. I had to spend most of the summer waiting to see if the grades from my PLC course would be high enough to get me into ocu. They were, thankfully, and I went to university in September of that year. There were problems for me in university that I hadn't foreseen coming. I had been worried about my academic capabilities, but those for the most part weren't a worry. I did fall down badly in a couple of subjects but I just took grinds in those. The real problem was in making myself believe I had a right to be there. I always had this sense that I was about to be found out; that I would soon be discovered as ineligible and unworthy. It had been just over three years between the end of my prostitution life and the beginning ofmy university one, and I still was so mired in a negative view of myself that I would sit sometimes alongside my classmates and almost wonder how they could not recognise me as an imposter. How they could not spot the prostitute in the room. To assimilate into this highly regarded social setting was very difficult, because being a drug-addicted prostitute positions you at the very bottom ofthe social scale; you just don't get much lower than that. So any woman in my former situation has a lot to come back from and there were great tremors of insecurity involved in the climb. I remember one ofmy classmates saying during a first year seminar: 'It is much easier to fall than it is to climb'. Another classmate traced his finger down his face, as if indicating an invisible tear, and laughed. It was a joke and it was not directed at me, but still, it stung the hell out of me. I wanted to break his face for him. Those kinds of feelings were enormous, but I got by with them and I graduated with them too. One ofthe difficulties I had no way offoreseeing was figuring out how to behave when setting boundaries in normal mainstream situations, like going to college and then going to
work. I had a very strong sense of how to handle myself in prostitution, of how to deal with people and how to protect myself; but I had a very damaged sense of how to frame the boundaries of what was acceptable to me in these standard social situations. In college, I see now looking back, I was inappropriately aggressive. The only time I ever hurt anyone physically was when one classmate shoved his tongue in my mouth while drunk in the student bar. I stewed on the sense of violation for days, and head-butted him the next time I saw him. Apart from that, I never hurt anyone physically in college, but I occasionally felt like it, and I was relentlessly verbally forceful. I realise that I came off as mouthy and, most likely, a bitch. The truth is that I was frightened, intimidated, and trying to find myfeet in a place I only half-believed I deserved to be. I remember making a remark one day in class in response to something the lecturer had said. I forget what she'd said, but my response was: 'But what if you got into college by the back door?' This was supposed to be funny. Nobody laughed, and I was embarrassed. When she next saw me �lone she remarked that I seemed under-confident, and that there was no reason for me to be. I was mortified that she'd picked up on that, but I also thought it was sweet ofher to have said what she said. I thought as well, for obvious reasons, that she didn't know the half of it. So that was one of the ways my prostitution history affected me and those around me while I was trying to live the life of a 'normal' young woman in third level education. Sometimes I would just sit on the campus benches between classes, smoking and wondering how I got there, while staring at the big university buildings all around and trying to measure the distance between them and the houses on Waterloo Road, in a way that had nothing to do with miles. By the time I began working I had the opposite problem; I no longer reacted with verbal aggression when I felt insulted or demeaned. I had figured out that that wasn't acceptable in the real world and that itdidn't make me feel good either, but what I hadn't figured out was how else to handle those situations. So instead I retreated silently into myself when treated badly or spoken to abruptly and just took it, because I didn't know what else.to do. If I was out and about in public I would react as I'd always done, that is to say aggressively, to such. slights, but in work, where I was expected to conform to social norms, I hadn't the first idea how to enforce healthy boundaries in a reasonable and appropriate way. Thankfully, I have since learned how to do that. I have learned how to calmly state that I am offended by something that's been said to me, and more often than not I can resolve things without the need for any further discord. It was only in recent years, I learned that people who have been sexually violated, especially in childhood, almost without exception present a skewed and unhealthy understanding of boundaries, with their ideas of boundaries being either far too rigid or far too lax, and I see now how I swung between those extremes, as I tried to find my own balance in the world. As I find my way towards that equilibrium, I find that I am feeling more balanced and centred in the core of my own self. Integrating herself into society is not the only challenge for the former prostitute. There is a larger, more important and more difficult one: she must also learn to integrate herself into herself. Sex is the first stumbling block and here is the problem with it: we women have learned, over the course of countless encounters, to remove ourselves mentally and emotionally from the sexual act. We have gotten so used to divorcing ourselves from our feelings and so attuned to the small acts which signify when it is time to do that, that we are left in the position of Pavlov's dogs, where the unbuckling of a belt causes us to shut off and shut down. This position must be regarded as reversible ifwe are to hold out any hope of living a normal life. There is one element which makes this possible: it is deep trust between the formerly prostituted woman and her partner. For my own sake, I was not so damaged that I could not think of trusting a man, though I've known some women for whom this would have been very unlikely, ifnot impossible. But I had not lost the capacity to love men, and I am very glad of it. As far as my relationships are concerned, I have a very firm necessity to feel respected by a man I am involved with. If I do not feel respected in a relationship I cannot stay in it. If I did, I would begin to hate myself. I think it is true of all of us to a greater or lesser extent, that ifwe stay with somebody who treats us with contempt we will internalise that contempt, and it becomes a part of us; it becomes a part of our view of the self. This is something I think of like the circular stain on a table left behind by a hot mug. It has been accentuated and stamped on me by my prostitution experience. No matter; rejecting contempt is one thing I'm good at. Appreciating the difference between sexual contempt and loving intimacy is another. A powerful truth is that when men express their love through sex, they can bring incredible healing, and I want men to know that and to understand that, and to know and understand too how much heterosexual women love and appreciate them for it, especially ifwe have ever been prostituted. Another of the problems I've faced in moving on has been in how those close to me process my prostitution past. I think what we do sometimes as humans is to interpret what we encounter in line with what we already know or believe; or, more frequently, to superimpose upon these things the shape of our own present needs. I do it myself. I think that's what I did the first time I read the Desiderata. Recently one of my sisters gave me a copy of that beautiful verse on bronze-coloured canvas with a brown paper label attached informing me it had been screen-printed by hand in Bali. I hadn't read the Desiderata in many years and didn't read it for many months after she gave it to me, instead rolling it up and putting it away, knowing I'd be moving to a new home soon and would find a place for it when I got there. When I eventually unpacked it and hung it by my computer I sat there reading it, in anticipation of the closing line, which has always been my favourite. I was surprised and disappointed to read that it was not the line I remembered. I'd had that verse hanging on my wall many years before, when I was sixteen and living in a little flat in Rathmines, a year after I'd entered prostitution. I had often repeated that line to myself during tough tiines, for the sense of comfort I drew from it. The line I'd repeated was: 'With all its shame and drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world; be careful, strive to be happy'. The actual line, as I've recently discovered, reads: 'With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world; be cheerful, strive to be happy'. I was disappointed to read this because the line I'd been comforting myself with for many years did not exist as part of the Desiderata, as 'j l I ~~ J I'd always taken for granted that it had. The 'new' line didn't ring true for me. It was not what I had needed. Shame, after all, was far more relevant to me than sham and to be careful was far more appropriate and realistic advice for me than to be cheerful! I think this is what we do as humans. I think that, in many areas of our lives, we look at what's in front of us and take from it what we need at that present time. That's the only way I can explain my having misread the closing lines ofthe Desiderata every one ofthe many times I read it hanging on my wall, and it's the only way I can explain my having morphed prostituting myself from something that horrified me into a matter of courage: because that's what I needed prostitution to be at that time. There is nothing unusual in this. I was once disturbed and devastated by the drunken comment of a former lover when he said that he 'found something erotic' about my having worked as a prostitute. I felt so angry and let down and hurt that I immediately began to cry. I confronted him with the reality of my prostitution experience, between sobs, and it was only as I watched the guilt build in his eyes that I could calm down, as I could see him begin to understand the nature of my experience and the monstrous inappropriateness of his finding eroticism in it. I don't hold that against him. I can see what he was doing. He was morphing prostitution into something he needed it to be. He had processed my prostitution past in the way that best suited him and given it the shape and texture of something much more palatable. This is what we do as humans; we process it the way we need to process it and this is true of very many people who give thought to prostitution. As for my then.partner; it was easier, much easier, for him to find something sexy in my past than to confront the fact that the woman he loved had been ritually sexually abused. I am learning now to harness this capacity to interpret things in line with what I want and need; to acknowledge the positives and the signs of moving on that can be found in just about anything, and it really is astonishing that these interpretations can be found in the most everyday and commonplace routines. I was standing recently in the street reading a notice for planning permission and I turned for some reason and saw a man watching me as he walked on the other side ofthe road. It occurred to me immediately (probably because I am immersed in writing these pages) that had I been standing just like this in a place very unlike this, he would have assumed that I was a prostitute. There is a great privacy, the privacyofanonymity, afforded to people as they stand on a normal street. I think you have to have experienced its opposite to fully appreciate it. So this is one ofthe positives ofmy post-prostitution life; this new reality; this new quiet understanding that I am regarded just as a woman. Not a whore of a woman or a slut of a woman or a promiscuous morally.stained or dirty woman; but just as a woman. I had already been a woman several years before I knew what it felt like to be considered one, with no adjectives attached. But this, now that I am finally experiencing it, is a new reality in which I and my new non-prostituted identity have moved beyond the first steps of tentative acquaintance and are becoming intimately linked. It has a calming and peaceful texture, this feeling of just being a woman. I want to hold onto this and to build on it so that I can move closer to thinking of myself in this way at all times, and I hope for a time when I can look at my prostitution experience, but not stare at it, and finally disentangle where I've been from who I am. -~