Letting Myself Fall Apart

On Rest and Continuing the Fight

Now more than ever, being kind to ourselves is apropos. Now, more than ever, it’s fucking hard as shit. This past year was the hardest, most challenging, wonderful, exhilarating, draining year of my life. I started my first job where I am getting paid a living wage. A job where they know my past and don’t care. A job I’ve been at for more than a year now. A record for me, given my public writing on sex work and criticizing the anti-trafficking movement.

I went to the White House to participate in a Biden administration testimony to how SESTA impacted my life as a sex worker…

Greetings. On behalf of the members of the Working Group on Human Trafficking, we appreciate this time to highlight the steps that the U.S. government must take to address trafficking.

I am a sex trafficking survivor and a former sex worker and I never even considered seeking help from law enforcement for the rape and exploitation committed against me because I myself was a criminal. The last time I was raped by a customer, I was too afraid to go to the hospital for Plan B or PEP, an anti-HIV medication taken for 28 days after nonconsensual sex with a stranger. I tested myself for months, for both pregnancy and HIV, praying I was not pregnant with my rapist's baby or HIV positive.

A testimony in which the Cabinet member from the Department of Justice walked out in the middle. The rest of the Cabinet looked like I had just taken a giant shit in the middle of the room as I cried and tried to choke out the recounting of my personal trauma and the ways these people’s choices impacted me. They were uncomfortable. Later, I was to find out they were critical of me for talking about a personal story and being “too emotional.”

People told me, many times, oh you think you will make a difference going to talk to these people? They don’t care. I think that’s kind of irrelevant. Making people uncomfortable creates a visceral embodied reaction and a visceral memory that they will remember. I don’t believe it’s ever for nothing, even when people “aren’t listening.” That was my rationale, anyways. They can ignore me and be shitheads, and that’s their legacy. I can go and try to change the world for sex workers, and that’s mine. And many of my SW comrades’. Now more than ever, I can see the importance of speaking truth to power and how AFRAID power is of us.

I flew to DC, did this, flew back to Seattle to get my mom, then flew back to the East coast to NYC for my first every art show for a piece I had been working on since 2021. It’s a series of several dozen photographs of the places in which the victims’ bodies were found. Not all of the victims were sex workers or trafficking victims, but the vast, vast majority were. The Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway, upon being interviewed by the King County Sheriffs Office on his arrest in 2000 was asked, why did you target prostitutes? He answered, “because I knew no one would care.”

It is a heavy project to carry. I was expecting people in NYC to be mean about it, ask dumb questions, etc. Because it seems that makes things easier for people to stomach violence against sex workers and the realities and complexities of trafficking. I had to really push myself to be external. To talk to people, be outgoing. It was ana amazing experience.

My mom fell ill soon after I returned and I had to care for her full time while working full time, organizing art shows, working on my Wall Street Journal article, and just doing life. The good things were almost as exhausting as the more difficult and challenging things. It’s hard accepting good things. I know this is the case for so many trauma survivors, cause how do we know we can trust them?

A man I loved also broke my heart. Abandoned me. I have never loved anyone in twelve years. Just him. Life doesn’t care. Love doesn’t care. God doesn’t care.

It resounded in my ears that I am an out sex worker, and no one will ever love me. That my choice was activism over love, family, normalcy. Yes, I know what you’re going to say. You can have both! Not when you’re an out sex worker writer under your legal name with more than 30 publications on your experiences as a prostitute. I chose this, and not that. And sometimes it haunts me. I am a liability. Men, women, everyone looks at me and they all choose not to know me. They all choose the life I didn’t choose. So they can’t choose me. And me choosing them doesn’t matter.

I fell into a huge depression in November. I don’t regret the choice. Laura who was not an activist could have never existed. But no one told me the more you reach your dreams, the more years of sobriety, the more years putting your own health first, the more you feel like you have lost everything. I’ve lost everything that’s familiar. And this was a choice. I’m no victim. But I feel a deep sadness. The world is a deep wound right now, and I don’t know what to do. I want to make the world safer for all of us and make a difference, and now more than ever I feel like my life path has no point, and yet is the biggest point of all. What could matter more right now than activism, however you want to define that. Personal, familial, collective, and so on.

I’m going to Tokyo in exactly one week for my first international art show. Maybe that’s activism? It doesn’t seem like enough. My two dreams as a kid were to be a “feminist hero’ (whatever the fuck that means) and to travel the world. So for me, being married or having kids was never a fundamental part of the equation and yet I feel so much grief at what could have been. Am I a woman still? Should I get this hysterectomy? I’m 40 this year. Am I a woman still?

I took time to rest in January, and it wasn’t enough. Will it ever feel like enough? The fight is so personally taxing and we don’t talk about this. I love seeing mutual aid, cause mutual aid kept me alive when I could barely keep me alive.

I’m ramping up again and I’m nervous. The fight has never been harder in our collective lifetimes. This is unprecedented. I feel daunted already, and yes, a little hopeless. Activists can feel hopeless. We just can’t stay there.

Today I have to work, but I’m excited to go see an Iranian film at the independent movie house tonight. My dog sleeps next to me. Sweet lil baby who was a rescue and tripod and total grumpy old man to rival Walter Matthau. I went to the library yesterday and picked up my magical holds and smelled the familiar smell of old pages and paper mites. I bought a Valentines day ‘bouquet’ of my favorite Tootsie Pops and a useless small fluffy pink heart pillow I love but is too small to have any utility. As I write, my essential oil diffuser emits the energizing smells of peppermint, lemongrass, and tea tree. And you are here. Reading this.

That gives me hope.

-L