Queer Whore Collective: Crip Whores United (One of Many)
Crip whores united, a WhatsApp message I got from Bella, a passing moment in conversation, but for the first time I felt seen and acknowledged as a whore and a disabled person, crip to crip, whore to whore. I remember thinking oh yeah, true, that's us right? We don't need to go into symptomatic details, we just hope each other has the space has the time to rest, whatever that may look like, Bella if/when you’re reading this, thank you.
Chronic illness, for me, works its way through my brain and into my body, making me feel every aspect of what it's going through. Each step and every anxiety works its way down to my body and numbs me with pain as I prepare to open someone else with pleasure. I’m a sex worker because I can pay for my disability, can predict each flare up like my cycle, working around flare ups like a parent tending to the practical needs of a child. You could say I am tending to myself, being in tune with my body, when really I want nothing more than to one day be totally unaware of every pulse, dull or profound ache that runs through me. SW provides needed disassociation, 2hrs or more being aware of something else, unaware of my immediate safety, meeting the requirements of someone else, for a moment only.
After the booking, going home in the daze and euphoria of being out of myself, pain begins in my ankles working upwards and working from my brain falling down, meeting in the middle, right in the core, a gut punch back into tune with my body. I can't help but feel grateful for that one-on-one temp of momentary forgetting. To be honest though, the turmoil before each booking begins in my head, that’s where the pain is, but it becomes ambient as I work towards hopefully having a regular that can pay for my permanent sick leave.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Civ jobs don't provide this sort of forgetting, there’s too many people to please, civ jobs force you to perform as an able bodied person, silencing yourself and your pain to fit into the cycle of work. At least with most clients they already perceive me as broken. Nothing said about my illness, they just assume that some shattering has brought me here, when actually what has brought me to sex work is avoiding the pain of performing. That mental perversion I felt I had to practice in order to meet the criteria of work, front of house work, front of the world work, big smiles, no collective, probably no union. That was painful. I could feel it in my body.
As I mentioned before, I predict each flare up like a cycle, whether or not it's a terrible experience with a client, I know that not long after I’ll feel it in my body, opiates will fill in the gaps in work as they fill the gaps in my CV.
If I ever want to return to a civ job could I fill my cover letter with the gaps filled by all the opiates and whoring? Nah we’re not quite there yet.
Anyway, back to my cycle of work and flare ups, the flare ups come on either as a combination of stress and bad meals or some kind of mental/physical exertion. I’m meticulously aware of whatever state I get into, then I work according to that, basically working to ensure that income exists during the kind of flare ups which make talking hurt, moving impossible, and communication nonexistent. My work exists online and off, my in-person clients, on a schedule, fairly regular, and in moments of physical impossibility which I feel slowly building over a period of weeks or months, I do a big client day (my sick pay). Then online work reassures me during physical impossibility: I can still exist as a worker in my disability. I’m not made to feel disposable or useless, I still work, and exist. I don't disappear in the narrative of being unusable.
“Of course it’s difficult, but it’s the only thing that allows me to exist with my disability without judgment, I can honestly hold the key to my survival somewhat outside of capitalism,”
Though on the other hand, some days at work the pain will just hit me straight in the gut and I may still push through to work enough to get my leave. I’m currently having a deeply vague memory of a client thinking I was reaching orgasm when really he was leaning on my bad knee, god it was so painful, but I went with it, my poor fucking knee, he came sooner rather than later though thank god. Jesus, I mean it’s not funny in writing, though pity is not what I need. Just some acknowledgement that this is and will always be my life, it’s chronic, it’s with me, it isn’t all of me, but it is both my shadow and my light and I can still afford the things that support my illness and other parts of my life. Where else is that possible? Like, totally possible, where there isn’t some sort of sacrifice to be made, or some sort of performance to be done to please the workforce. By all means I’m performing in SW but sometimes I can turn it into an orgasm, and I can go home, on sick leave, with my sick pay, that can actually pay.
I can return to work when those moments of impossibility begin to subside. During those moments I’m in complete isolation, feeling financially secure, but still isolated. Coming out of it is overwhelming, overstimulating, an anxiety specific to these feelings emerges as I slowly get back to regularity. I’m constantly in this motion, in and out, in and out, anxiety subsides, pain comes it becomes impossible again the impossible ends and for a moment I am anxious and overstimulated by the build up to a stranger, to their touch, overstimulated by the ways I have to keep safe and protect myself, this is work, and in alot of ways this work protects me, my body the rota and only my name doing the shifts, no threat of having someone else come in to replace the work I am incapable of doing, because I know when I am incapable, but here this incapability doesn't completely destroy my basic need to survive.
Of course it’s difficult, but it’s the only thing that allows me to exist with my disability without judgment, I can honestly hold the key to my survival somewhat outside of capitalism, through my pain, through the impossibility, the anxiety and all the whatever else it is involved in this cycle, though capitalism does threaten my sick pay on a daily basis, I mean, it threatens all (sex) workers.
Words: Raf
