I’m going to try to enjoy it.

I had this professor in college. He was so old, and I had the biggest crush on him. He was divorced with five kids and lived alone in an apartment with a cat. I puzzled over how such an amazing person could live such a sad home life. 

Now I think totally differently about Dr. Collins. There are so many much sadder ways to live. Like how most people do. 

Tonight I had the weirdest feeling. I felt strongly that I’m going to be more at peace with being single later in life than I am now. Just like my life is nowhere near as sad as I worried it would be, I feel confident it won’t be as sad as I currently imagine it. But I could not look at that future in that moment without feeling sad. 

As I was walking into my apartment tonight I heard a man say to a woman who may or may not have been a full-service sex worker, “I want to put my dick and balls in you.” I looked at her to see if she seemed to need help and she seemed fine so I went inside. I’m in full and absolute support of sex work. But I felt yucky about the encounter. I didn’t like leaving her outside with him. This is why I oppose SESTA/FOSTA. I want her to have the tools to negotiate with and vet clients online. I want to save her from being vulnerable to police and rude or violent clients and harassers. 

As I walked up the stairs I thought about how, to the extent most people think about sex work, this is what they envision. A woman alone outside, maybe protected by a pimp. They don’t think about my version of sex work. My experience with sugar babying was 99% being taken out on nice dates and having nice sex with nice men and then getting hundreds of dollars. Even when they weren’t nice they were tiresome, not violent or harassing. 

I want everyone to have the opportunity to have the experience with sex work that I had. Or a different one if that’s what they want. But a safe, consensual one. 

The frustrating thing about the way other people see things is that I know I can’t ever fully escape it. My first ideas about love and sex and money and partnership were given to me by my peers, parents, pastors. And I can work my whole life to take those ideas and hold them up to the light, compare them to the evidence and reason. And it will influence how I think. But how I feel is so much harder to change. It’s slower to change. It’s deeper. 

Sometimes I wish I could push fast-forward. Today my friend sent me Marginal Revolution on the unintended consequences of criminalizing sex work. I want to push fast-forward to when everyone understands that criminalizing sex work makes it less safe but not very much less common. And I want to push fast-forward to when I’m more at peace with not following the life script my peers, parents, pastors gave me. But the joy is in the journey. So I’m going to try to enjoy it.