In the peak of the pandemic my own little world cracked open unexpectedly. It resulted in me packing up my things, leaving my girlfriend, and moving to a new city. It’s a story for another post, but the grief of leaving so abruptly sent shockwaves through every part of my body and life. I was off the deep end of change and I was kind of a mess.

The only two constants in my life were AA and dancing. This (much more expensive) new city had so many more 12-step meetings, and significantly bigger stripclubs (that were still operating, masks and all!). So even though nothing made sense and I felt very lost, I had two unchanging spaces to hold me through.

My days were focused on grieving and healing. And my nights were spent dancing.

The move happened so quickly that I had only enough money to leave and get set up in an overpriced basement suite. I had zero savings and I had been dragging around old credit card debt for years. Thanks to little to no work in the first two years of COVID, I had accrued even more.

So a couple weeks after getting set up, I started at a new stripclub. I set myself three goals: 1. clear that debt for once and for all, and 2. save an emergency fund. 3. be gentle.

And so it was at this time, unbeknownst to me, that a kind of spiritual experiment began in the stripclub. It was at this time, with my life turned upside down, that my healing journey with money began.

How it started

I’d always had a solid get-ready-for-work routine. But now, for care of my fragile state, my pre- and post-club routines and rituals became critical anchors.

I had to shift my body, mindset, and emotional state for the club. I had to put on a different kind of armour, and swap my daytime blues to a kind of intuitive nighttime prowess. This was an intentional process.

What I began to notice was that the clearer my energy was arriving to work, the more clients I seemed to attract. And not just quantity of clients, but quality.

Let me say this again: the better I took care of myself before and after work, the less exertion or performative labour I had to muster, and the more cash would flow to me.. with ease.

~~~

My entire stripper (and artist) career up to then was all about the grit, hustle, an grind. This new club new life new me challenged that. Was it just New Girl luck? (because we all know that’s a thing). No. Months go by. And every time- busy or slow- I was surprised at how much I was earning.

On a random Tuesday I’m bringing home the equivalent of a good weekend in my old city. I’m working half the hours, sober as a whistle, totally within my boundaries, and honouring my tender capacity!

Am I having fun? Sometimes. Is it because of the city and customer demographics? Yeah for sure, big factor. Is the crisis of the pandemic generating tidal waves of loneliness? Hundred percent. Can I show up and leave when I want? Yes, and that helps a lot. Is the club well managed? Surprisingly, for its size and reputation, yes. Am I a cutie and good at what I do — even in the days where masks were mandatory? Yap.

But still. After familiarizing myself in this new club, making some friends, finding my flow, and tracking these results…I started to pay more attention to what was happening.

Goodbye lack

I start passing on the tables who looked like they had money to blow, and pursue the ones that I feel a small, but curious pull towards. I’m still persuasive but not as buttery. I am unapologetic. I am less concerned with chasing bills than connecting authentically (which, ultimately, led to more bills).

To be fair, after a decade of stripping you know your sweet spot. I had a crystal clear ‘ICP’ and knew where my charm was most potent. But this club was triple the size of where I was before, and that meant a lot more dancers on the floor. What one might think of as ‘competition’.

On the contrary! The more the merrier, I thought.

A group of rowdy guys come in, let the right girls have them.

I am not striving, not stressing, not chasing, nothing to prove, not a competitive bone in my body. I’m not a ‘debbie downer’, but I’m definitely not trying to get the party started.

I’m preserving my energy, I’m discerning who to exchange it with, and for what. I am a sad girl in 8-inch pleasers, probably a little out of place for my state, but still showing up as my best and truest self in my fave red lipstick.

On busy nights, I would perch at the bar and wait for customers to come to me. And they came! Okay - not all walk-ups are winners–its true–but if I didn’t want to dance for them I would tell them I’m waiting for someone else. Not a lie. And almost always, someone else, someone more aligned, would catch my eye and make my night through good conversation, respectful participation, and the kind of realness that I was also showing up with.

And sometimes the vibes weren’t aligned after all, and after a few songs we’d part ways. It never felt critical to cling or keep clients going. I always knew there’d be somebody else. I was relaxed. I wasn’t experiencing lack there.

Something else that had changed (in all areas of my life) was that I had a very hard time lying. (I think it’s a byproduct of sobriety and spiritual awakenings).

Safety first, of course, I wasn’t sharing vulnerable information. However I was like, unable to stretch the truth and time in ways that I would before. But you know what? Customers appreciated the transparency, and would even show it by extending our time, leaving generous tips, or coming back just to see me.

This also meant that if I was dancing or sitting with someone I didn’t like, I couldn’t stick it out. I would politely excuse myself or end the dance. No reason, no drama, just a clean nope, not for me, goodbye.

For the two years I worked there, I didn’t have any troublesome clients or negative experiences.

And most importantly: money flowed my way!

I certainly wasn’t the highest earning or hardest-working dancer. I could have made more if I was more assertive and aggressive on the floor, or if I was a little more wild and fun and free –but at what cost? My limited energy, my heavy heart, my tender body. I was showing up as best I could with what I had at the time. I was following my gut and I was practicing a mindset of abundance — and it was working for me.

This sober, mindful approach to stripping came to feel less like a frosty flake performance, and more intentional– akin to experience design, facilitation and coaching. The skills that I had cultivated there became more clearly defined: intuition, active listening, presence, boundaries, play. Not only was I making great money, but I was strengthening critical relational skills that would be the foundation of my future career.

The outcome ~~

I cleared my debt. For the first time in years I put aside an emergency fund. A year later I’d saved enough to spend a winter in Brazil with my new girlfriend (who became my wife that same trip!). After that I went back to school, and started a whole new career.

The lessons from that time in my life have taken time to sink in. Although related to money, it was so much more than reaching my financial goals.

I learned that when I took care of my body and spirit, when I trusted myself, I could be present enough to make decisions that weren’t from a place of people-pleasing, manufactured competition, or scarcity.

When I said no to what wasn’t for me, and said yes to work that was in alignment with my energy, capacity, and values – more than enough money flowed to me. And with an ease and grace I hadn’t experienced before.

This left breathing room in my day to day, which I dedicated to recovery, rest, and flourishing in the new life I was creating. Today, my life is unrecognizable to what it was in 2021.

The club is a microcosm ~~

In writing this, I realize I’m still running the same experiment with my business: keeping my side of the street clean, staying spiritually fit, trusting the right people will find me, showing up as I am to do my best. It’s been challenging! I’m still learning.

The club had legible power dynamics, the transactional rules were clear and backed by the establishment. The feedback was live, and I was counting my hard earned cash at the end of every night. Entrepreneurship feels like a bigger stage with higher stakes and no bouncers, house mom, or a community of amazing women by my side. But a decade of sex work set me up for this in so many ways. I wouldn’t trade it for any degree or CV.

The strip club is a microcosm: capitalist, power-twisted, paradoxical. A miniature world of modernity, for better and worse. Within it, I learned that tending to my body and spirit wasn’t separate from making money…it was the very thing that made it possible. It was the most tenderhearted time of my life.

And yet, it was also the most abundant.

Subscribe now

It was mid November. I was dog-sitting, walking little Kobe through the neighbourhood in the dark, listening to an audiobook about money and witchcraft that had me both rolling my eyes and secretly returning to hear more of.

I was tired. Financial stress was making it hard to honour the slowdown-full stop my body needed. Hanging with Kobe was giving me joy, but I felt like a lone wolf stuck in fear loops, longing to find my pack and purpose. My mental health was shaky, spiritual hygiene low, and the winter was a mirror with its increasingly darker and colder days.

At one point on the walk I paused to take notes from the audiobook, which was quoting self-help writer Byron Katie. A few blocks later I came across one of those little neighbourhood free library boxes.

Inside were three books: one was Loving What Is by Byron Katie, which I had just taken notes on (!?). The next was Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ timeless Women Who Run with Wolves (noted!), and the third was The Energy of Money by Maria Nemeth - a ‘spiritual guide to financial and personal fulfillment’.

I couldn’t believe it. I stood there on the sidewalk, looked up at the bright moon and barely visible stars, and let out a little welp of wonder.

The last four years have been, in terms of my financial life, a Tower card1 situation.

I got married and merged finances with my wife, (which literally no one talks about so it felt like this adult moment that was both exciting and totally unclear how to do).

I stepped away from professional acting– which felt like pulling the plug on a major life dream (and meant no more paycheques from voice or on camera gigs).

I left stripping– which took way longer to make sense of than I could have ever imagined. I had spent years knowing I could make fast (not easy) money. Losing that certainty (and the creative outlet it played in my life) opened the gates to a waterfall of financial stress and a surprising identity crisis.

I went back to school full-time and took out student loans for a program I didn’t really understand… or at least didn’t know what role or job I’d come out the other side with.

For the first time in a long time I was financially dependent on somebody else. Someone who worked really hard, had her financial shit together, and trusted me to meet her there. It activated a very deep discomfort with receiving, with not producing, with not knowing my numbers. I had to get real about the ways I engaged with money.

For most of my adult life I avoided my bank account. I tracked my balance and spent my money based on feelings rather than facts. I had no financial structures or systems in place, minimal financial literacy, and zero confidence when it came to math — which, turns out, is a common pattern among women and femmes because of the gendered messaging we absorbed about who belongs in the STEM world.2

I had embodied all these conflicting stories about money: it was bad to want (but essential to have), rich people didn’t deserve their wealth (but somehow I would be a ‘good’ rich person), working hard should mean earning more (but it rarely did), having less was virtuous (but I had expensive taste)… and this is just naming a few!

Like all of us, my relationship to money was shaped by my family and environment as young person. Then add in friends, lovers, partners, socio-cultural narratives, the political-economic landscape of the times, the systemic failures of modernity, inherited ancestral stories…it’s loaded. And despite all living in a society where we have to engage with money in some way or another, money wasn’t something we talked about openly in my circles (except complaining about being broke and its corruption, that was okay, encouraged actually). Money talk was shady and shame was always lurking around the corner.

But it was really during my unconventional career journey where my money sense got most twisted:

• making a total of $2000 for three months of 80-hour work weeks if we were lucky with grants (going into debt to make professional theatre)

• receiving $15k for a one line radio commercial that said nothing of substance (one hour of work in the recording studio)

• earning $1000 in two hours because I am a good listener and look great in red lipstick and lingerie

And then add in the absurd cost of living in Toronto...nothing added up. Just pure confusion all round. How is anybody doing anything? In this economy, how are people not stripping? I’d wonder every single day.

So I read some personal finance books to learn more, but the standard advice never landed because it always felt like the budgets and mental models weren’t built for the flux gig economy and edge systems that I was working within. Which was frustrating, but made sense because my financial history, habits and beliefs weren’t going to be sorted out through budgets alone. They lived in my body and nervous system.

The big feelings and embodied reactions that were activated by my shifting financial landscape were too loud to ignore. So I started paying closer attention, recognizing that the discomfort was an (annoying) invitation to grow.

Around the same time, I was interviewing for jobs and building the foundation of Becoming Futures. Negotiating salaries with potential employers and my rates as a coach and consultant. At this point my wife had been carrying us for three years with multiple jobs. Por l’amor de deus, she deserved a break. We had bills to pay and were about to spend another winter in Brazil. I felt desperate, and was fighting everything in me to not just f it all and go back to the club (which would have been fine, except I was determined to put my niche Master’s in Strategic Foresight to use.)

Anyways, here were these books, in a box, on a dark winters night when I felt lost af. It was personal. A total HigherPower moment. I ran home with Kobe, cracked open the Energy of Money, and got to work.

Since then, my hyperfocus has been on this process. I adjusted my Gemini antennas to all things money: money+body, money+energy, money+systems, money+decolonizing.

I even started to see a therapist who specializes in financial trauma.3 I’ve been over here getting real cozy with my financial wounds, taking lots of deep breaths, designing my own cute and lifestyle-aligned finance systems, nurturing my nervous system and shifting my mindset towards new, compassionate stories about money, agency, and worthiness.

Ultimately, I want to heal my relationship to wealth so hard that I’ll be able to support others who might feel similar ways. Specifically Body Spirit workers—which I am currently building a case for in my 12th House life, aka behind the scenes research and writing.

But I wanted to share this story because it’s personal, obviously still in process, but... I also think it’s working. I’ve noticed changes in my life. I’ve been so inspired that I designed a course that weaves in tools and frameworks specifically for those of us who might not see themselves reflected in the personal finance books. I’m integrating this approach into my coaching and consulting practice, and I’m curious to learn how it lands for others.

Since it’s still evolving, all the more stories and insights help. I’d love to hear if any of this resonated, or what your journey to wealthcare has been—let’s talk.

until next time 💄

Share

Subscribe now

In the strip club, customers arrive wearing masks and carrying mini-agendas. Some are looking for what does not exist. Others know exactly what they’re there for. But for all, it’s a playground of possibilities, and dancing with the unknown is half the pleasure.

Performers, meanwhile, are shape-shifters and master facilitators. We co-create experiences, melt time, and read a room the way a musician reads a crowd. We clock body language, drink choices, watches. Once in conversation, we’re listening for cues: what version of ourselves does this person need? The girl next door? The therapist? The dominant motherly figure, the party vixen or the brat with good banter. Maybe it’s the free spirit they wish they’d met in their twenties, or a version of the ‘one who got away’.

Technically, we are selling lap dances by the song. But the social architecture around those dances—the reading, the becoming, the attention-holding is 90% of the work. That’s what makes so stripping difficult. It’s not the dancing on stage naked part that’s exhausting or intense, its the prismatic social game.

This is definitely emotional labour: the analysis, the anticipation, the energetic attunement. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term in 1983 to describe “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display that is sold for a wage.” She was writing about flight attendants and bill collectors. She could have been writing about us.

But emotional labour only captures part of it.

What happens in this work goes deeper than feeling management, it draws on something I’ve been calling Body Spirit Labour, the intersection of physical presence and intangible depth: energy, intuition, erotic-creative force, identity itself. The whole self as the primary tool of production.

What a client thinks they’re paying for is the surface of something much larger. What we’re selling is the lifetime of experience behind the performance, the hours of preparation before it, and the days of recovery that follow. We are simultaneously the worker, the work, and the capital. This puts us in company with artists, athletes, healers — anyone whose identity and presence are the offerings. But sex work makes it unusually visible, and unusually unacknowledged.

So what is Body Spirit Labour actually made of? I’m still mapping it, but here’s what I keep coming back to:

Presence. Not just showing up, but the capacity to arrive in a room, in a body, in a moment, and make that feel like somewhere worth being.

Physicality. The body as instrument, not just appearance. How it moves, how it holds tension, how it opens, closes, defends and heals. Years of training and stories and systems live in a stripper’s body, whether we name them or not.

Creativity and intuition. Every interaction is improvised. We are reading and responding in real time, teasing out stories, navigating power dynamics and boundaries, adapting, anticipating, playing. This is a creative, strategic and highly intuitive job.

Relational intelligence. The ability to make someone feel seen, held, met and enchanted…without losing yourself in the process. This is perhaps the most underestimated skill in any care or service role.

Courage. To show up night after night, in an industry that doesn’t always protect you and is steeped in stigma. From seducing a stranger to sticking up for another stripper, dancing is not for the faint of heart.

The capacity to navigate complexity. Within ourselves: the emotional and energetic management this work brings up: across boundaries, identity, lifestyle. Relating to others: confronting bias, nuanced power dynamics, and authenticity within a capitalist backdrop. And around us: an industry with real structural failures, stigma, and risk.

These aren’t just components of stripping. They show up in other lines of work that requires embodied presence and energetic attunement too, like wellness practitioners, athletes, performers, caregivers, healers. But the language for this kind of labour has never quite existed. It gets flattened into “emotional labour,” romanticized, or ignored entirely. When it comes to stripping and sex work specifically, it sits at the intersection of everything culture has refused to take seriously: women's labour, the body, sexuality, intuition, care, pleasure, the erotic as creative force and flow. Any one of those alone gets dismissed. Together, they've been rendered invisible. That's why the language hasn't existed. Until now.

Body Spirit Labour is my attempt to name it more honestly — and to start a conversation about what it actually costs and what it can create.

More on each of these soon.

image credits: HER Body Landscape, cosmos.so via @princi.design

This talk was given in May 2025 at a TEDx event organized by my graduate program1.

It was assumed, reasonably, that speakers would present on their year-long research projects. That was my original plan too. I had applied to present a talk on designing for impermanence in the performing arts, which was a safe and good topic.

But about two weeks before the event, I knew I had to tell a different story. Whyyy.

Sleeves up, tummy knotted, I begin. Writing, sweating, rewriting, rehearsing, clarifying, panicking – all while at a futures conference Lisbon. Plus, I had also been hired to coach the other eleven speakers. It was not a chill time.

On the surface, I was flustered about the usual things: getting the words right, finding relevant research, learning my lines.. but the real stress was coming from somewhere deeper. I was bringing a vulnerable part of myself into a much larger circle. It felt like facing a dragon I’d been hiding from for a long time. I was doing the very thing I am advocating for in the talk. Necessary, but scary.

The moment felt full-circle, too. When I applied to this graduate program three years ago, I was just learning how to highlight my skills as a theatre artist within a different context. Writing bios within the arts programs already made me cringe. Putting together CVs for an institution or other industry entirely made me cry (and sometimes still does). Even the modest application requested for this Masters program summoned a storm of insecurities.

In my letter of intent, I went back and forth endlessly: should I be honest about being a dancer? (I was still a full time stripper at this point). Should I be real about what it’s taught me? Proud, because I am? Will this hurt my chances? Will I be taken seriously?

These weren’t isolated anxieties about outing myself, they were built up and learned symptoms of stigma. Over the years I’d learned who to share certain information with, and I noticed how even micro-disclosures would change how I was perceived. Researchers call this kind of careful sharing ‘selective disclosure’ and note that many sex workers build alternate personas to stay safe while absorbing less of the stigma directed at their work2. Unsurprisingly, in my Montreal bubble, it wasn’t a big deal. Lots of artists did sex work to make ends meet. It was common. In Toronto, at least at the club I worked at, only a handful of dancers I knew were professional artists.

In the end, I decided to include it. Fuck it, I thought:

Six months later I found out I’d been accepted, and what I’d come to learn as I jumped back into the education system was that nobody actually cared. I slowly began sharing bits and pieces of my story in this new environment. Sometimes directly, sometimes discreetly. I was testing the waters…listening for what would come back. Almost expecting some form of rejection or judgement.

Brené Brown said, “Don’t walk through the world looking for evidence that you don’t belong, because you’ll always find it.”3 I agree with her, except that it didn’t happen that way for me. By naming it myself – floating it out there on my own terms – I was doing a few things at the same time: I was owning my story so it couldn’t be used against me, and I was filtering spaces for belonging. I was feeling out how this identity, often misrepresented and judged, landed in a room that wasn’t made up of sex-work positive queers and artists, but government and NGO workers, UX designers, engineers, futurists, people across cultures, ages, and industries. Sociologists describe this kind of self-authorship behaviour as not just refusing stigma, but actively redefining what counts as a respectable life; while narrative therapy calls it building ‘alternative stories’ that sit beside the dominant script of shame and secrecy.4

The thing is, I did belong. My experience belonged. My ideas and feelings belonged. We all did.

It’s worth saying that being an arts university, this school tends to attract more liberal students. And in my field, futurists and designers are usually already operating at the edges. I wasn’t walking into a church or board room. Still, I owe a great deal of my courage – and my coming out – to the culture of that program, the professors, and to my amazing peer cohort. Outside of my own experience, my disclosure in the classroom sits in a long lineage of sex workers narrating their own lives on their own terms. I am hardly leading the way.

I remember once my colleague (a friend) asked me, “Do you think it’s important that people (in a professional context) know you were a dancer?” The question surprised me (smugly I thought, ah ha! There it is! THERE IT IS!) because I felt like I was doing the opposite, that I was still toeing the line between explicitly outing myself and making nods towards it. But I answered him honestly: yeah, if it comes up. I said, if people ask about the last decade of my life, yes! How could I not? Being a dancer shaped me, and like all my other choices, it led me here, to who I am today.

It was in the stripclub that I mastered energetic exchange, intuition, facilitation and safety. It’s where I understood that different truths can coexist in all shades of relationship. That we are all connected. It’s where I practiced presence, patience, performance, and porosity. Where I experienced hard lessons on pleasure, communication, shame, privilege, money, labour, care, freedom, and power.

It’s hard for me to watch this talk without seeing imperfections (and re-living my stress), but I am proud what the opportunity asked of me, and how it allowed me to release and resist stigma I had internalized.

Recent work on stigma resistance suggests that everyday acts of telling our own stories – especially about stigmatized identities like sex work – can slowly reshape the norms that make some lives unsayable5. And while it can be healing, it is not just personal catharsis. It’s part of a larger, messy process of redirecting, replacing and redefining stigma in public life.

My hope then, and now, as I share it here, is simple: that even one person might watch this and feel a little less pressure to edit themselves, a little more permission to trust what they already know, and a little more room to believe they belong, just as they are. Because they do.

Welcome to Body of Work.

This is a space I’ve been moving towards for a long time, and it means a lot that you’re here.

For nearly two decades, my livelihood has depended on the direct use of my presence, body, identity, creativity, intuition, and relational skills — first as an actor, then as a stripper, and now across my coaching and cultural design work. I am calling what I’ve exchanged, lost, given and sold as my work, body-spirit labour. This publication is an inquiry into what that kind of work is, what it costs, what it creates, and what kinds of language, systems, and mental models help make it generative, dignified, and alive in its beautiful messy complexity.

I’ll be sharing stories and reflective essays drawn from my experience as an artist and sex worker, examining the economies of performance and care, as well as the systems and power structures that shape and challenge them.

At the heart of this work are three core questions (with adjacent questions around them):

1. What is actually being exchanged when our bodies, identities, and erotic-creative life force are the source of income? This includes the energy we give, visible and invisible labour, and the ways time, attention, and availability function as currencies.
   

2. How do identity, visibility, and stigma shape our sense of worth? What does it take to unbraid work from self-value without losing material stability?
   

3. What kinds of structures support body-spirit workers? What futures become possible when their practices and offerings are designed around care, capacity, and change?

As with most creative initiatives, I don’t know exactly where this will lead…all I know is the time has come for it to happen. 🌱

To begin, shortly after this post goes up I’ll be sharing the TEDx talk I gave in May. It’s a great introduction into why I believe this work matters. I speak about how body-spirit workers hold many of the essential skills for shaping futures grounded in intuitive intelligence, relational flexibility and creative resilience (the very same that the so-called ‘leaders of tomorrow’ are scrambling to relearn with their corporate-clenched bodies). Heh heh.

Welcome! Click subscribe & stay tuned!

Image by Delfina Carmona