Tanya J: Sexing, Scoring and Away from Home

My typical day...is a 30 -48 hour day and then a big 15 hour sleep.  Sometimes it starts at 7-8pm sometimes it starts at 3am...it really depends on so many things- where I am, who I'm with, how im working at that time (ie from the street or online), if I wanna go score, or if I have any specific plans. So even if i do very different activities or stick to wildly different times from day to day- I'm usually trying to take care of myself and people around me while working towards my own goals (making money, learning new things and trying to change some of the fucked up things in the world)  I use heroin basically every day..or at least I have done for the last 4 or So years... And I travel a fair bit - for work and to visit friends and family ...even when I don't plan on it I still end up moving around a lot.  A lot of the time its almost like there's this feeling that I'm being moved on or I'm about to be moved on. On the street in Narrm [Melbourne] police will issue sex workers and our clients "move on notices " if they think we are loitering with intent to solicit...and even if I dodge them, I see a regular client get told to move on & if he's seen in the area again its a 24 hour ban. And even if I rent an apartment there is this feeling of "how long will we last here" - places where sex workers and drug users have hung out for years keep getting gentrified so fast- and now im in Europe I similar things happening everywhere I go- in Amsterdam, in Oslo, in London...

Most days I spend a few hours texting/talking to potential clients and filtering through time wasters, and other people I get a bad vibe from.. And maybe on average I do one job a day.. Sometimes I might do three quickies (10-15 minute car jobs) in an afternoon,  other times I might do 3 bookings all week (and hopefully they are 1 hour or longer or otherwise I end up with no drugs and real sick hanging out)

But when work is really quiet it goes from good to double bad coz I'm not only broke but also going thru withdrawals for heroin and often also coming down off uppers ...but I'd rather have good times and some shit than just the same boring  same thing again and again. I enjoy being outside my comfort zone or challenging myself in different ways.

How do you travel over borders so much with a habit?

I have info and things on my devices but I just be vague and send heapsa texts but in trying to avoid extra risks .  I don't carry shit on me, they drug test everything I have twice for residue, question me for 3 hours as it is. It's like its better to be sick for 24 hrs than risk like everything when people are making fairly active watch. But anyway, finding shit, i dunno I think its easy in street based work ..either I find people somehow or I know enough people or place to go to then ask then to ask people  for things .. Like these days I just travel back and forth from Stockholm to Australia. I can get OST sometimes like methadone but I try avoid that now its easier being sick 24 hours than getting off and on methadone

I like to read a lot about history, take notes and share stuff with friends or my partner. If I don't make music or write poetry or spend time reading/listening to oral histories ...then I kinda sink down into a depressive hole... I need to do things like this to keep some hope in future or to distract myself from tendencies to be overly pessimistic & cynical

A big part of me taking drugs ( injecting heroin and smoking ice) is to find time and create the kind of mental state I want to be in to focus or relax or enjoy doing those kinds of things to the max... And also to treat myself and enjoy the money I earn from sex work- as a kind of investment in myself and how I feel.

If you murder someone, even yourself, make sure you know what you are doing.

Is suicide just a RESET button? A Facebook friend of mine recently asked me if I had heard of Teal Swan. I had seen a few of her videos but there was something about her presence that was kind of cold and dark, as if she represented a dark energy that I couldn’t really pick up on. She has a huge cult following and says things like “Suicide is a reset button and Death is delicious.” Of course, I didn’t know any of this when I was watching, I read about what she is now known to be about in an article calling her the Gucci Guru. Her words never really captivated me and I found myself distracted with other things while multitasking housework and listening to one of her YouTubes like I usually do many other speakers. I told this friend,”I had never felt really drawn to her. She’s kinda dark. I like her intro cartoon though.” I said, trying to come up with something nice to say. This friend used to come to me during times of suicidal ideations before I drew a boundary and said that I couldn’t hold space for it anymore and that she needed to call a crisis line or seek professional help. I’m sure that she clung to me for a while because I offered a different perspective on suicide that wasn’t usual from a friend in need. I had recently lost a former student of mine to suicide, which was indeed sad because she was so young and surely she was full of light and the furthest thing from seeming suicidal when I knew her. I asked my Facebook then,”Is suicide a conscious choice? Do you support your loved one in making this choice?” and this spurred off a lot of reactions from people, many whom I had never heard from before on my timeline. Some people seemed disturbed that I would even bring up such a topic for discussion. I was really interested in hearing what people thought, especially since Star had just killed herself. Star was a young queer girl in the Gay Straight Alliance club that I started. She was a trailblazer and someone I would describe as truly aware of the choices that she made and a young woman who was fully in her power. For me to see her as some kind of victim just didn’t sit well with me, but the truth was I couldn’t tell with accuracy since I hadn’t actually interacted with her since high school. Suicide most definitely hurts the people around you and creates havoc financially and mentally for your family and everyone else who has to deal with the pieces that you left behind. But such is death. The same pieces are left when someone is shot and killed by a gun wielding teenager in a movie theater or school campus. Because I don’t have a strong conviction AGAINST suicide I imagine people who may be depressed and suicidal feel comfort in that state as they are probably well over tired with hearing the same rhetoric. My advice to my recent friend was similar to a friend getting an abortion. If that is your choice, make sure you understand the choice you are making, and make sure not to fail at it. Nothing worse than these attempted suicides where the person has to be committed and or have permanent scars because a bullet missed or some poison permanently damaged their internal organs. If you are going to murder someone, including yourself, make sure that you have planned it in a way that doesn’t leave a mess for someone else or yourself to deal with. It sounds easy for me to say of course. I can only speak from my biased perspective. When I felt suicidal, I did want things to get better. I was on a slow course of destruction, just putting myself in harm’s way, just begging to be hurt and killed. I took whatever drugs were put in front of me and just swallowed substances without knowing what they were, who was giving them to me and what the consequences might be. I traded sex for a bottle of pills that I hoped was Oxycodone and instead it ended up being Vicodin. I downed about 5 and then ended up throwing them all up for hours over the toilet. It was a weak half assed attempt. Maybe I was saved by a divine force, maybe I was lucky. The plan I had was to overdose on oxycodone, but I only tried that once. I can’t really tell you how I started to slowly move away from the desire to die, but I did. In recent messages, this FB friend tells me she isn’t suicidal anymore and I say,Good. Is it bad to say, that I support people where they are at? Saying suicide is a reset button or that death is delicious is just another radical perspective put out there. It definitely condones it as something “not so bad” which is possibly where Teal and I may be on a similar wave length, although I see my stance as neutral. People we know who are addicted to drugs are seen as slowly killing themselves, so I suppose in all my years of working with drug users is how I arrived where I am. People have their time to die and their time to live. It wasn’t my time to go, else, the pills would have killed me because they would have been the “right” ones. But, turns out the “wrong” ones were the right ones and I can look back at this from a keyboard and sigh, not of relief but just reflection.

Breaking Good or Bad?

He came to me through my print ad.  I had a deal in the weekly newspaper of LA that never to failed to double its investment every time I ran it despite this business being supposedly all internet based, there still are people who don’t have smart phones or know how to use a computer.  These numbers are dwindling but I seemed to have found a worth while niche for myself regardless.  Because I had already been through hell and back with too many drug addict late night clients, I had for the last four years working started to screen all of my clients and charging more per hour.  My screening before was really based upon whether they sounded fucked up on the phone and if they asked me “Do I party?” was an automatic disconnection.  Even if I did love to do coke with my clients, any person who asked me if I partied was guaranteed trouble for me based on experience.  I started to see only professional working men.  Men who weren’t afraid to tell me the truth about who they were and what they really wanted from their hearts, who weren’t afraid to confess that their hearts were broken and needed healing.   I now had a screening process which required an internet name  and phone number search and verification of government ID.   I have one memory of an addict from my pre-screening times who blew his rehab money on me and more heroin but came to me in a way that was anything but dangerous, so I do have some good words to share about those times.  When I laid close to his heart,  I could feel the drugs pulse through his body so strongly that I got a contact high without any needle penetrating me.  I can’t do IV drugs, it takes a skilled phlebotomist and a butterfly needle to get a blood test from me and I have more than once been the recipient of having an unskilled nurse miss a bunch of time and create purple blotch bruises all over my arm and hand where they finally used a vein.  On the night that I held the rehab ditcher, his heart was injecting into me, and it felt like love.  

I held my rehab ditcher for hours in his doze off until the sun rose and I left.  But this wasn’t my current client.  I had screened him on the phone based on the story that he told as he was one of the founders of one of the hugest LA festivals that everyone and their mother knew the name of.  He had brought in Jane’s Addiction and the Chili Peppers and probably started his journey somewhere around there with the rest of them.  His name was confirmed listed in the Wikipedia history of the festival and matched the name on his ID and the depth of knowledge that he had about music festival history which I also ask casually when I screen people for truth or lies.  He had just move home to live in the home that he grew up in, where his mother lived in the back. In my current need to be safe and sane in my work I eliminated anyone who told me they used crystal meth.  I had put this in practice for at least 4 years since my last interaction with a user was chasing one such down the street with a stun gun because he was trying to stalk and harass me.  The client in front of me, we’ll call him Henry seemed calm and sweet.  He was in his fifties and face showed the aged wrinkles of years of rock and roll living.    He soon confessed to me that he was a lifelong addict and always had trace amounts of meth in his body, even as he stood before me.  I appreciated and felt his truth.  I went with him to the local bank to withdraw my fee which would cover my time for the next twelve hours as well as paid for me to eat well in a nice restaurant because, a 12 hr session requires a meal and rest break.  It was a large chunk to say the least, but none of these sessions that I did for these guys do I retain any sense of guilt for.  I never manipulated what I was offering, they came to me willing and wanting something else beside the equally as unsober hostess for their addictions which they probably had grown tired of spending money on by this time in their lives.   I hoped I was a catalyst to some kind of change.  I can never be sure what I effect I have had on the lives on any of my clients.  I can not even base it on their words of affirmation or adoration even as those could also be lies.  

Crazy Sexy Mental Illness Accountability

It is truly amazing the human capacity to withstand pain and repeat cycles of violence before breaking.  Some fucked up relationships can go on for decades.  But the lab rats when left alone with heroin laced water will always overdose and die.  At some point the mind inside the user’s body decides NO MORE.  Either by death or detox, something finally gives.  It is a slow suicide.  Even calling it that is a catch phrase that rings true to me when i describe being suicidal to people.  I would do whatever drugs clients did or put in front of me.  I once traded sex for pills from a pimp.  I was trying to get Oxycodone but he gave me something weaker.  Vicodin.  I can’t commit suicide with Vicodin!  Or maybe it is possible but i just ended up throwing up for half a day.

Is suicide a choice?  Do you support your friends in making this choice?  Is it like when a friend gets an abortion?

I posted this on my Facebook.  People convinced me it was not a choice because it was a mental illness.  No sane person would make this choice they said.  I thought back to fucking that pimp (not my pimp) for those pills.  What was I thinking?  That it would take just 3 to OD on oxy for me and I could die alone and unnoticed because the world as I knew it was pointless.  My narrow tunnel of darkness was a form of mental illness I reasoned.  My logic was indeed skewed.  I felt at the time that I was “trying to become a drug addict” because at least a downward spiral would count as having “direction” since most of my depression at the time was the result of having lost an identity around being a sex worker founder of an organization, getting arrested and jailed and feeling like my life had no direction.  The feeling that being denied the right to work a teaching job was a good reason to give up entirely on any future.  Mental illness.  No sane person chooses addiction.  Or do they?

Lily Fury wrote to me and many others on Facebook personally apologizing for the Bambi Ortiz fiasco in which she created a digital character or three that represented all of the social justice rainbow spinning a fundraiser for a victim raped by a NYC cop story that pulled the heartstrings of many people workers and non workers in the sex worker rights community, who has been in the last five years working hard to implement social justice into the organizing structure with conscious visibility and its own form of affirmative actions which would show up in events, conferences, marches and media campaigns like Bambis.  Bambis photos were sexy.  So was Harmony, her Latina persona.  So was the Asian one she created too.  She would pull my bisexual sweatshirt strings towards her full lips and whisper about the good times we could have if we were alone in New York City on my next visit.  Haha it was all from Lily pretending to be women (plural) of color).  I fucking donated to her and I didn’t even have the money for my own rent.  I was promptly refunded after this whole shit was uncovered but the whole community was outraged as they should have been.  The campaign had gone viral and she had effectively embezzelled a few thousand dollars.  I don’t know what happened to the money, but she would be posting happy white sand beach photos with her tribe and girlfriend “sorry not sorry” as the caption in bold during the uncovering of the fiasco.  Mental Illness. Narcissism.  

“I’m sorry.  I’m bipolar and have schizoaffective disorder.  I had just been incarcerated and was in heroin withdrawal in a terrible state of mind.  I’m continuing on my journey of self growth for my daughter.  I know what I did was fucked up and will always regret it but unfortunately I can’t go back in time.  I can only move forward and learn from my mistakes to be a better person.”

The rest of her blog, like the rest of her writings are well written literate pieces, explaining the situation in a transparent recap, step by step from her brain to our community.  Lily asked to add me into a sex worker group on FAcebook.  Bambi Ortiz never personally reached out to me, but Harmony and her Asian persona had.  I even tried to forward a media interview to one of her personas!  

“No thank you.”  I said.” I do not think you should be organizing sex workers.”

“I’m not,” she said,”It’s just a support group.”  

She was gathering up who were still willing to be her allies.  I was speaking to her on FAcebook.  I hadn’t blocked and unfriended her.  I told her I forgave her and wished her the best, but she and her crazy are the reasons I continue to stay away.  Like an abusive ex.  Don’t.  Call.  Me.  I’ll.  Call You. NOT.