Writing My Ruin

When the world gets too loud, I build someone new.

A name first — something strong enough to hold the pieces of me that are falling apart.

Then scars. Then story. Then reason.

I start cutting fragments of myself into archetypes and abilities,

turning pain into power,

and grief into proficiency bonuses.

Every new character is an operation without an audience —

a scalpel made of lore, sutures of spell slots.

Therapy without the chair.

No soft-voiced stranger asking, “And how does that make you feel?”

Because I already know.

I just need somewhere to put it.

The barbarian is my unspent rage —

a walking pressure valve with a greataxe.

She rages so I don’t have to; takes hits I’ve never been allowed to throw back.

The paladin is my desperate need to believe in purpose —

sworn oaths standing in for boundaries I keep letting people cross.

The druid is the caretaker in me,

the healer who gives everything until she fades into the forest.

And the rogue — the rogue is the girl who learned to survive by staying unseen,

who keeps her trust locked behind sleight of hand and cunning action,

who smiles just long enough to make you underestimate her.

Their backstories are my confessions, disguised as fiction.

Their abilities are my coping mechanisms — rewritten, renamed, made noble by dice rolls.

I give them trauma so I can give it meaning.

I let them fall so I can learn how to write survival without bitterness.

I let them love, even when I can’t.

Each one holds a version of me that couldn’t breathe in this world anymore.

I carve them out, rebuild them, set them loose in universes where healing has rules and pain comes with saving throws.

It’s not escapism — it’s surgery.

A kind of soul triage that lets me keep going.

Cut. Stitch. Roll for damage.

It’s a therapy session where the table is the only place I tell the truth.

People think it’s fantasy.

But every time I fill another character sheet, I’m writing an autopsy report.

Another resurrection.

Another chance to build a body I actually want to live in.

And by the end, I’m not healed —

just functional enough to keep playing.

I'm sitting in bed making printouts.

Flow charts.

Warning signs.

Hyperarousal.

Hypoarousal.

Lists of what helps.

Lists of what doesn't.

Pages explaining what I need when I stop being able to explain it myself.

And I keep thinking...

How the fuck am I only learning this now?

I've always known something happened to me.

I knew my thoughts sped up.

I knew I talked faster.

I knew I overexplained.

I knew I felt this desperate, overwhelming need to fix everything immediately.

I just didn't know there was a name for it.

I didn't know my nervous system was dysregulated.

I didn't know neurodivergence could look like this.

For years I thought it was all trauma.

Heal the trauma.

Process the trauma.

Therapy the trauma away.

Eventually it'll stop.

Except...

Some of it was never trauma.

Some of it was just my brain.

Some of it was both.

And now I'm trying to untangle thirty years of behaviours with two completely different instruction manuals.

One for survival.

One for neurodivergence.

And half the pages look identical.

That's the part that's breaking my brain.

Because now I'm building a manual for myself.

How to recognise the warning signs.

How to pause.

How to ask for reassurance.

How to notice I'm reacting instead of communicating.

How to help the version of me who won't remember any of this once my nervous system decides we're in danger.

It's weird.

Printing instructions for your own brain.

It's embarrassing.

Because these pages make so much sense now.

So I keep wondering why I didn't do this years ago.

Why I needed a therapist to suggest it.

Why I didn't just know.

But you can't know what nobody's ever taught you.

And you can't follow a map you didn't know existed.

So I guess this is me drawing one.

Not because I expect the next storm to disappear.

I've been trying to explain this to people for years, and I still don't think I've found the right words.

It's not the emergency.

I'm actually good in an emergency.

My brain does exactly what it's been trained to do.

It becomes almost robotic.

Not cold.

Not detached.

Not uncaring.

Just brutally efficient.

Observe.

Assess.

Prioritise.

Act.

Every question has a purpose.

Every movement is calculated before I've consciously thought about it.

My own emotions are quietly boxed away because they aren't useful yet.

They can wait.

The emergency can't.

I trust that version of myself.

It's carried me through situations where someone else's worst day depended on me not becoming part of the problem.

The part that gets me isn't the emergency.

It's the emergency that almost was.

The phone call that could have changed everything.

The patient who could have crashed.

The scream from another room.

The split second where my brain decides,

"This is happening."

So it does exactly what it's been trained to do.

The robot switches on.

The adrenaline floods in.

Every sense sharpens.

Time slows down.

Every cell in my body prepares to move.

To fix.

To respond.

Except...

there's nothing to fix.

Everyone's okay.

The patient stabilises.

The phone call isn't what I thought.

The threat disappears.

But all that adrenaline doesn't.

It never got to do the job it was preparing for.

It has nowhere to go.

It just sits inside me, waiting.

Until I'm absolutely certain there's no threat.

Not hopeful.

Not optimistic.

Certain.

And then it ambushes me.

The nausea.

The room starts tilting.

My heart pounds so hard in my ears it drowns everything else out.

My hands shake.

My skin goes clammy.

Every emotion I boxed away comes flooding back in at once.

No patient to treat.

No problem to solve.

No task big enough to burn through everything my body has already committed to.

So I get hit by the wave of adrenaline leaving my body all at once.

It tears through me looking for a purpose that no longer exists.

And by the time it's finished, I'm exhausted.

Not because there was an emergency.

Because my body prepared for one with everything it had...

...and there was nowhere for any of it to go.

I wouldn't trade that response.

It's kept people safe.

I just wish my nervous system knew how to quietly stand down when the all-clear comes.

Watching the first episode of Turned On was genuinely one of the most baffling things I've watched in a long time.

Not because of the sex.

Because of the mental gymnastics.

As someone who's done full-service work.

Who makes adult content.

Who's non-monogamous.

I just kept thinking,

What the ever-loving fuck is happening?

The thing that always fascinates me is that people seem to think the adult industry is full of sexually liberated, radically open-minded people.

It isn't.

It's just full of... people.

People bring their politics.

Their shame.

Their religion.

Their prejudices.

Their insecurities.

Their superiority complexes.

They don't disappear the second you take your clothes off.

I've worked with women in brothels who openly called sex workers disgusting.

While working in a brothel.

I've had coworkers tell the girls' room that we were gross for sleeping with so many random men.

That it was even worse if we had partners.

The irony, somehow, completely lost on them.

Watching this girl gave me exactly the same energy.

This constant, subtle distancing.

"I'm not one of those sex workers."

While making porn.

Then somehow managing to pivot into,

"Find a healthier relationship."

...because somebody else's consensual relationship doesn't look like hers.

That leap is genuinely fascinating to me.

Monogamy isn't healthier because it's monogamy.

Polyamory isn't healthier because it's polyamory.

Full-service isn't morally worse than content creation.

Content creation isn't morally cleaner than escorting.

They're all just different ways consenting adults choose to have sex, love, work, and exist.

What determines whether they're healthy is communication.

Consent.

Honesty.

Respect.

Not exclusivity.

Not how many people are involved.

Not whether money changes hands.

The more I spend in the adult industry, the more convinced I become that respectability politics are alive and well.

Everybody wants to believe they're the good kind.

The ethical kind.

The acceptable kind.

The kind that's just a little bit above the person standing next to them.

And honestly?

That mindset fascinates me far more than sex ever has.

Because if you can sit in a brothel girls' room and tell the woman next to you that sex workers are disgusting...

Or make porn while subtly implying you aren't really a sex worker...

Or tell another consenting adult to "find a healthier relationship" simply because they aren't monogamous...

Then it was never about sex.

It was about hierarchy.

I think one of the most confusing parts of unmasking is realising how many of my behaviours are both understandable... and still hurt people.

That's a horrible sentence to sit with.

Because I don't want my neurodivergence to become an excuse.

But I also don't know how to untangle it without talking about it.

I spent decades teaching my brain to survive.

Masking.

People-pleasing.

Reading danger where there wasn't any.

Reacting before understanding.

Now I'm trying to unlearn all of that.

But what do you do when the thing you're trying to unlearn is the same thing that kept you safe for so long?

How do you explain that without sounding defensive?

How do you take accountability while also saying,

"This behaviour didn't come from nowhere."

I'm not trying to justify it.

I'm trying to understand it.

Because if I don't understand it, how am I supposed to change it?

And the part I keep getting stuck on is that I don't just want to change for me.

I want to learn how to exist in a way that's safe for the people I love, too.

Not safe because I'll never get it wrong.

Safe because when I do, I know how to stop, understand what happened, repair it, and try again.

Not how to become less neurodivergent.

How to become less afraid of understanding the ways it's shaped me.

And how to slowly, painfully, deliberately choose which parts helped me survive...

I think one of the hardest things I've had to admit to myself is that I don't actually know how to identify my emotions.

Not properly.

I thought I did.

I'm thirty.

I genuinely believed I understood myself.

Turns out I've spent most of my life recognising the explosion...

...instead of the fuse.

By the time I know what I'm feeling, my nervous system has usually already convinced itself we're under attack.

Now I'm in therapy learning things that somehow feel both obvious and completely foreign.

How to notice where an emotion sits in my body.

How to tell the difference between fear and rejection.

How to recognise hurt before it becomes anger.

How to pause long enough to understand what I'm actually feeling instead of just reacting to it.

It's strange.

And if I'm honest...

it's embarrassing.

It feels ridiculous to be thirty years old and learning what seems like the emotional equivalent of the alphabet.

But trauma rewires things.

Neurodivergence rewires things.

Years of surviving rewires things.

My brain became very, very good at keeping me alive.

It just never learnt how to let me feel safe.

So now I'm trying to untangle decades of instincts that once protected me but don't always serve me anymore.

Trying to notice before I react.

Trying to stay curious instead of defensive.

Trying to understand myself before asking anyone else to.

It's exhausting.

Some days it feels like I'm trying to rebuild my own nervous system with instructions everyone else seemed to be born with.

But for the first time, I don't think I'm just surviving anymore.

One of my favourite things is that this is genuinely our pillow talk.

Curled up together after sex, instead of talking about anything remotely sensible, we end up planning what our sex life looks like at eighty-five.

It's oddly romantic to imagine being eighty-five and still completely feral for each other.

The couple the paramedics see on the dispatch screen and immediately sigh.

"Ah, fuck... it's these two again."

"Place your bets. Fractured pelvis? Dislocated hip? Or did they finally lose a fight with the Kama Sutra?"

Because apparently, after fifty years together, one more orgasm was always worth gambling with the reaper.

The couple our grandchildren absolutely dread introducing to their new girlfriend or boyfriend.

Not because they're worried we'll say something derogatory or wildly out of pocket.

Because the introductions always start the same.

"Oh, hi darl! We've heard so much about you."

"Grab yourself a beer."

"Here's a plate, don't be shy."

Then the colour drains from their face.

They've just recognised us...

...as the award-winning geriatric porn stars from last week's release.

You'll be asking where your Viagra is.

I'll be asking where I left my dentures.

One of us will be reaching for the Life Alert pendant.

The other will be arguing that we've already come this far, so we may as well finish.

It's completely unhinged.

And somehow...

it's one of the most romantic futures I can imagine.

Because I never pictured fifty years with anyone.

Now I picture fifty years of being completely, unapologetically feral for each other.

Still flirting.

Still making each other laugh until we can't breathe.

Still looking at each other like we're each other's favourite bad idea.

I don't just want to grow old with you.

I know you were trying to protect me.

That's the cruel part.

Because I know your "no" came from love.

But my heart didn't hear love.

It heard rejection.

It heard, "Your body isn't something I want right now."

And I know that's not what you meant.

I know.

But trauma doesn't wait for clarification.

It recognises patterns.

It fills in the blanks before logic has a chance.

I've lived this before.

I've had surgery before.

I've watched someone slowly stop wanting me before.

I've watched desire disappear while I was still lying in the same bed, wondering what had changed.

I promised myself I'd never have to survive that feeling again.

And then I reached for the person I love.

The person I've had countless conversations with about feeling sexually wanted.

The person who knows how much rejection hurts.

The person who knows what it feels like to wonder if you're desirable.

I reached for you.

You didn't have to guess.

You didn't have to initiate.

I was vulnerable enough to ask.

And you said no.

I know it was because you were worried about my body.

But all I could think was,

"Not again."

Not this story.

Not this fear.

Not this version of me lying awake wondering whether surgery has made me something to protect instead of something to desire.

The hardest part is that I know my body.

I know its pain.

I know its limits.

I've spent years learning the difference between discomfort and damage.

I wasn't asking you to ignore my recovery.

I was asking because I knew I was ready.

And now I'm left carrying something I desperately didn't want to pick up again.

That fear that maybe my body has become too broken to be wanted.

Too fragile to be touched.

Too risky to be desired.

I hate that my brain went there.

I hate that it happened so quickly.

I hate that the person I want to feel safest being vulnerable with accidentally woke up the one fear I swore I'd never have to carry again.

Because I don't need sex.

I need to know that you still look at me and want me.

That my scars haven't replaced my desirability.

That my recovery hasn't replaced my sexuality.

That when my body heals, you won't have spent so long protecting it that you forget how to reach for it.

I know that's not what you meant.

I know that's not your intention.

But my heart has lived this story before.

In a couple of days they'll be home.

I've spent two weeks counting down to that.

Now it's close enough to feel real, and my emotions are all over the place.

I want to run into their arms.

I want to avoid every conversation waiting for us.

I want to kiss them.

I want to heal the hurt fractured in a new relationship.

I want to fall asleep beside them.

I want to know whether we're okay.

My trust feels bruised.

My love doesn't.

That's the contradiction I'm struggling with.

I don't want distance.

I don't want another argument.

I just want the comfort of the person who's also been the source of some of my hurt.

I've never wanted someone home so badly.

I've never been so anxious for them to get here.

I know we'll be okay.

I miss the part after the hard conversations and arguments.

The part where words run out

And we hold each other instead.

The worst part about intense emotions isn't the emotions.

It's what they do to my body.

I can feel the exact moment the switch flips.

The conversation ends.

The tears stop.

The adrenaline starts wearing off.

And suddenly my body comes to collect.

It's always there.

Standing in the corner, sharpening the knife.

The pain gets louder.

The fatigue hits like a truck.

My joints start screaming.

My head starts pounding.

My body tears itself apart because I had the audacity to feel something.

That's the part people don't understand.

I don't just pay for heartbreak emotionally.

I pay for it physically.

Every argument.

Every grief.

Every panic.

Every betrayal.

My body treats it like an injury.

And sometimes that's what makes me angriest.

Not that something hurt me.

Booking the relationship therapist felt like a great idea at the time.

Growth.

Healing.

Self-awareness.

Look at me, doing the work.

Now it's the night before and I feel sick.

Not nervous.

Not butterflies.

Properly, physically sick.

The kind of anxiety that sits in your stomach and makes food feel impossible.

The kind that has your heart racing over a threat that doesn't exist yet.

Because I know exactly what I'm walking into.

I've spent years carefully packing things away.

Filing them.

Labelling them.

Stacking them neatly enough that I could keep functioning.

Keep working.

Keep loving people.

Keep surviving.

Tomorrow I have to start opening those boxes.

And I don't think I'm scared of what's inside.

I already know there's grief in there.

I already know there are wounds that never healed properly.

I already know there are memories I've never actually processed, just organised neatly enough that I didn't have to look at them.

What scares me is what happens when I open them.

What happens when I stop holding everything together.

What happens when I start grieving experiences I've spent years surviving.

Because once that starts, it doesn't just affect me.

It spills.

Into conversations.

Into relationships.

Into quiet moments.

Into the people standing closest to me.

I'm terrified of becoming raw.

Of becoming reactive.

Of crying over things that happened ten years ago as if they happened yesterday.

I'm terrified that in trying to heal, I'll accidentally bleed on people who never cut me.

And I'm terrified of what happens when my brain starts digging.

Because I know myself.

I know what happens when old things get disturbed.

I know the nightmares are probably coming.

The flashbacks.

The memories that appear out of nowhere and hit hard enough to steal the air from your lungs.

The dreams that leave you waking up confused, exhausted and feeling like you've already lived through the worst part of your day before you've even gotten out of bed.

I don't think I'm scared of remembering.

I think I'm scared of reliving.

Of spending years putting distance between myself and something painful, only to willingly walk back towards it because that's apparently what healing looks like.

And if I'm really honest, I don't want to do it alone.

I know that's the point.

I know nobody can climb into those boxes and unpack them for me.

But there is something deeply unsettling about knowing you have to willingly walk back into rooms you've spent years trying to leave.

And then there's the thing making me feel the most nauseous.

I've never met this therapist before.

For all I know, they're wonderful.

For all I know, they're exactly who I need.

But what if they're not?

What if I finally work up the courage to start opening boxes I've spent years keeping shut and realise halfway through that I'm sitting in front of the wrong person?

What if I drag all this grief into the light only to discover it isn't safe there?

What if I spend an hour pulling apart things that took years to pack away and leave feeling more exposed than helped?

What if I leave with all the contents of the archives scattered across the floor and have to gather them back up alone?

I know that's part of the process.

I know people try more than one therapist.

I know this isn't life or death.

But my nervous system doesn't seem to know that.

My nervous system is acting like I'm about to walk into a disaster.

Like I'm about to open something that can't be closed again.

Like once those boxes come apart, enough of me is going to spill out that everything crashes.

That my heart rate tanks.

My blood pressure drops.

The lights go out.

Logically, I know that's not what's going to happen.

But anxiety isn't logical.

Anxiety is standing at the edge of a cliff your rational brain knows isn't there.

And the worst part is I don't even feel like I can explain how scared I am.

Because it sounds dramatic.

It sounds silly.

It's therapy.

People do this every day.

People unpack trauma every day.

People find therapists and change therapists and keep going.

Objectively, none of this is a catastrophe.

But try explaining that to the part of me that knows exactly what's sitting in those boxes.

The part of me that already knows which files contain nightmares.

Which shelves hold flashbacks.

Which drawers contain things I've spent years carefully avoiding.

I'm not scared of finding something I don't know about.

I'm scared of finding something I know about all too well.

Tonight it doesn't feel like therapy.

Tonight it feels like standing outside a door with my hand on the handle, knowing that on the other side is every version of myself I've spent years trying not to become again.

I know I'll go.

I know it's time.

I know those boxes aren't going to stay closed forever.

But tonight I don't feel brave.

One of the things nobody tells you about sex work is how often you're hired to be a therapist.

Not a fake therapist.

Not a roleplay therapist.

Just a person sitting across from another human being while they try to put themselves back together.

Tonight a young psychologist booked me.

Works on a crisis line.

Spends his days talking people through the worst moments of their lives.

And he sat there crying over a call from a teenager that ended abruptly.

No outcome.

No closure.

No way of knowing whether she got help.

Whether she hung up.

Whether she survived.

Or whether he was one of the last voices she ever heard.

So we sat there.

And we talked.

About that call.

About the others.

About the people who stay with him long after his shift ends.

About the scars nobody sees because they're hidden beneath professionalism, training, and duty of care.

And somewhere in that time, the weight shifted.

He laughed.

He relaxed.

He looked lighter.

He left carrying less than he arrived with.

And I was genuinely glad.

I still am.

But if I'm being honest, there's a part of me that thinks it's kind of fucking unfair.

Not him.

The situation.

Because grief doesn't disappear.

It changes hands.

People walk into my room carrying things they don't know what to do with, and somehow I become the place they put them down.

I'm not a psychologist.

I'm not a trauma therapist.

I'm not qualified to debrief crisis workers after they've spent their day talking people off ledges.

I'm just a whore.

A whore who has seen more grief than most people realise.

I've held it in my hands while a pulse slowed and eventually stopped.

I've sat with it long after life had left the room because I couldn't stand the thought of someone being alone while we waited for their body to be taken away.

I've watched families receive news that split their lives into a before and an after.

I've carried grief through work with emergency services, through friendships, through loss, through life.

Not because I was trained to.

Because I happened to be there.

Maybe grief recognises grief.

He'll probably sleep better tonight.

I genuinely hope he does.

But now there's a teenager I've never met sitting quietly in the back of my mind.

Now there's another story that wasn't mine yesterday and somehow is today.

And that's the part nobody talks about.

People understand that sex workers provide intimacy.

What they don't understand is how often we provide containment.

How often we become confession booths.

How often we're handed things that are heavy, heartbreaking and deeply human.

And then we're expected to hold them with grace.

Without training.

Without supervision.

Without anyone asking what happens to us afterwards.

Most of the time, we manage.

Because we're human.

But sometimes I sit in my car after work and think:

"Mate, this is actually kind of fucked."

Not because I regret helping.

Not because I didn't want to be there.

But because somewhere along the way society decided that a whore was an appropriate place to leave a piece of its grief.

I've not been sleeping much lately.

Not because of you.

The anxiety was already here.

The insomnia was already here.

You just happened to be gone while it was happening.

And it turns out that when you're awake at stupid hours of the morning, there's a lot more time to notice things.

The side of the bed that stays empty.

The absence of someone's touch.

The absence of their smell lingering on a shirt or a pillow.

The little things you don't think about when they're there.

I don't feel heartbroken.

I don't even think I'm particularly sad.

I just miss you.

I've not been sleeping much lately.

Not because of you.

The anxiety was already here.

The insomnia was already here.

You just happened to be gone while it was happening.

And it turns out that when you're awake at stupid hours of the morning, there's a lot more time to notice things.

The side of the bed that stays empty.

The absence of someone's touch.

The absence of their smell lingering on a shirt or a pillow.

The little things you don't think about when they're there.

I don't feel heartbroken.

I don't even think I'm particularly sad.

I just miss you.

I love you but certainty feels harder to find than it did a week ago.

I love you but I keep circling the same questions and finding no new answers.

I love you but confusion has been louder than connection lately.

I love you but I don't know where to place my trust right now.

I love you but every reassurance seems to arrive with another doubt attached to it.

I love you but I feel further from understanding than I did before.

I love you but my anxiety has had more to hold onto than my confidence.

I love you but I am trying very hard not to let fear tell me what is true.

I love you.