For much of my adult life, intimacy has been part of my work. I’ve been paid to listen, to touch, to flirt, to fulfill fantasies, to keep secrets, to make someone feel wanted—and sometimes simply to make someone feel less alone.

I’m also a Black woman, which means desire has rarely been neutral territory for me. I know what it feels like to be looked at and interpreted before I am actually known. To be overlooked in public and intensely desired in private. To be fetishized, projected onto, and occasionally treated as though someone’s idea of a Black woman has arrived in the room before I have.

Sex work placed me directly inside that contradiction.

After years of being a professional girlfriend, I’ve learned that the people who pay for intimacy aren’t necessarily people who can’t find sex, dates, or partners. Sometimes what they’re looking for is much harder to find: attention without distraction, affection without ambiguity, somewhere to be honest about what they want, or simply the experience of being completely considered for a few hours.

The work has changed what I believe about loneliness, transaction, desire, race, and perhaps most of all, love.

WHO PAYS TO BE LOVED?

I have been paid to love people.

I know how that sounds.

Depending on what you believe about sex work, you might think the operative word in that sentence is paid.

I think it’s love.

There is this assumption about the kind of man who pays a woman like me. He must not be able to get women any other way. Maybe he’s unattractive. Maybe he’s socially awkward. Maybe he’s lonely, desperate, incapable of getting laid, whatever.

And sure, I have met lonely people.

But one of the things this work has taught me is that loneliness rarely looks the way we expect it to.

I’ve met lawyers, professors, executives, widowers, husbands, travelers, men with demanding careers and almost no time to date. I’ve met men who were socially awkward and men who could charm an entire room. Some of the most beautiful, gregarious men I have ever met have been clients.

And every once in a while, even after doing this for years, someone will walk through the door and I’ll catch myself thinking, Woah, what’s this guy doing here?

Then I have to laugh at myself because why wouldn’t he be here?

Even I have absorbed the stereotype that a man who is attractive enough, charming enough, successful enough, whatever enough, shouldn’t have to pay for intimacy. As though being desirable means all of your needs are automatically being met.

It doesn’t.

Being able to get a date doesn’t mean you’ll get the date you want. Having sex doesn’t mean you’ll feel close to the person you’re having it with. Being attractive doesn’t make you immune to loneliness. Having options doesn’t mean any of those options offer the particular experience you’re looking for.

Sometimes the man sitting across from me could very easily find someone willing to sleep with him for free.

That simply isn’t what he came for.

I remember a widowed professional who had already known partnership and love, but now had little time to navigate dating and a particular kink he didn’t feel comfortable casually disclosing. I’ve met people whose lives were consumed by their work, who were brilliant in the environments they understood and yet completely lost in the social choreography of dating. I’ve met men passing through Los Angeles who weren’t looking for a girlfriend or a future. They wanted company for the night, intimacy without the expectation that it had to become something else, and then they were going home, back to their lives.

Different people. Different lives. Different needs.

So when people ask why anyone would pay for something they could technically get for free, I think there’s a more interesting question:

What exactly are we assuming they’re paying for?

Sometimes it’s sex. Of course it is. I don’t need to turn every appointment into some profound meditation on the human condition.

But sometimes someone hasn’t been hugged in months.

Not fucked. Hugged.

Sometimes someone wants somewhere to say the thing they’ve never been comfortable saying aloud. Or explore a kink without wondering whether disclosure will change how someone sees them. Or be held. Or feel desired. Or spend a few hours without having to be whoever the rest of their life requires them to be.

And sometimes they simply want someone’s undivided attention.

WHAT MONEY MAKES EXPLICIT

Of course the relationship is transactional.

Someone is paying for my time, and I am choosing to rent that time to them. They’re paying for my affection, my attention, my expertise, and whatever else we’ve mutually agreed will happen inside that time.

That’s not the revelation people think it is.

What surprised me after years of doing this work wasn’t how transactional intimacy could be. It was how much genuine humanity could exist inside a transaction.

There is something incredibly clear about it. We know why we’re here. We know how much time we have together. We know what has and hasn’t been agreed to. No one has to spend the evening pretending not to want what they very obviously want.

Conventional dating, in comparison, can be incredibly ambiguous.

You meet someone and immediately begin negotiating without acknowledging that you’re negotiating. Do they like me? What do they want? What do I want? Should I text? Am I being too available? Do they want sex? A relationship? Sex while pretending to want a relationship?

Everyone is trying to decipher everyone else while also trying to appear as though they aren’t deciphering anything at all.

Maybe this is part of why I understand transactional relationships so well. I like clarity. The boundaries are clear. There are things I will do and things I won’t. There is an exchange neither person has to pretend isn’t happening.

But clarity is not the same thing as coldness.

A transaction doesn’t necessarily eliminate intimacy. Sometimes it simply removes the ambiguity around it.

DESIRED, PROJECTED ON, AND ACTUALLY SEEN

Being a Black woman made my relationship with desire complicated long before I ever started doing sex work.

There is a strange experience in being overlooked in public and intensely desired in private. In feeling invisible in one room and hypervisible in another. And in realizing that sometimes the person desiring you isn’t necessarily seeing you at all.

They’re seeing whatever they’ve already decided a Black woman represents to them.

I’ve experienced this in dating too. I’ve been fetishized. I’ve been overlooked. I’ve had people project an entire personality onto me before I’ve said enough for them to actually know who I am.

And then there is this strange thing that happens in my work.

Quite often, I am someone’s first intimate experience with a Black woman.

I occasionally joke that I’m curing a little racism one client at a time.

Obviously, I don’t actually believe sleeping with a Black woman cures racism. Desire and prejudice can coexist perfectly well. Fetishization itself is proof of that.

But I have watched what happens when someone’s idea of me has to encounter the reality of me.

Maybe they expected me to be intimidating. Maybe hypersexual. Maybe dominant. Maybe cold. Sometimes I don’t even know what they expected. I can just feel the moment when whatever picture they constructed starts becoming more complicated.

Because now we’re sitting across from each other. We’re talking. We’re laughing. I remember something they told me earlier. They tell me something they haven’t felt comfortable telling anyone else.

Suddenly, I’m no longer an abstraction.

I’m a person.

And I think intimacy can do something interesting there.

It is easy to project onto someone you haven’t actually encountered. Intimacy makes abstraction harder.

Not impossible. Harder.

You can fetishize an idea from a distance. It becomes more complicated when that idea is sitting across from you, remembering how you take your coffee.

That doesn’t mean intimacy magically dismantles prejudice. People are perfectly capable of fetishizing someone they’re intimate with. But it has taught me something important:

Being desired and being seen are not the same experience.

I’ve been desired plenty.

Being seen has been much rarer.

I CAN BE PAID TO CARE AND STILL CARE

One of the reasons I’m good at what I do is embarrassingly simple: I actually care about people.

I listen. I remember things. I notice hesitation, nervousness, the little shift that happens when someone finally relaxes. I want the person sitting across from me to feel comfortable, wanted, considered.

That doesn’t mean I’m attracted to every client I’ve ever had. I’m absolutely not.

There have been people I’ve seen more than once where the chemistry simply wasn’t there for me. They probably never knew that because I’m a professional. I’m not going to make someone feel undesirable because I don’t happen to feel chemistry with them.

That doesn’t mean I abandon my boundaries. A crossed boundary is a crossed boundary. A no is still a no.

But I can still care about someone I don’t desire.

There is performance involved in my work. There certainly is. I won’t insult either of us by pretending otherwise.

But performing a role doesn’t mean every emotion inside that role is fake.

I can perform attraction and genuinely care about the person I’m touching. I can know our time has an expiration date and still want them to feel safe with me. I can be paid to listen and still care about what they’re telling me.

I can be paid for my attention and still actually be paying attention.

And once I understood that, I started thinking differently about love.

We like to imagine that real love is completely spontaneous. That if you have to consciously do something loving, somehow it becomes less authentic.

But so much of ordinary love is intentional. People listen to their partners when they’re tired. They show up when they would rather stay home. They hold someone who is crying when they don’t know what to say. They choose tenderness even when tenderness isn’t the first spontaneous feeling that arrives.

We don’t call that fake.

We call it care.

So why are we so certain that money automatically contaminates it?

I’m not saying every interaction I’ve had with a client was love. Some were purely transactional. Some were boring. Some were wonderful. Some were difficult. Some people I genuinely enjoyed spending time with. Some I would never have chosen to know outside of work.

But I’ve also experienced moments of extraordinary tenderness with people I barely knew.

A bottle of champagne. Fruit and chocolate on a hotel table. Someone resting his head against my chest as I stroke his hair. Someone finally saying the thing he’d been terrified to tell anyone.

We both knew these moments had expiration dates.

I’ve started wondering why we assume that makes them less real.

Maybe we’ve confused permanence with authenticity.

WHAT BEING PAID TO LOVE TAUGHT ME ABOUT BEING LOVED

There is an irony in being a professional girlfriend that I haven’t quite figured out.

I know how to make people feel loved. I’m much less familiar with what it feels like to be loved that way myself.

Professionally, intimacy makes sense to me. I know how to create room around another person so they can soften. I know how to make someone feel wanted. I know how to give someone enough attention that they can tell me something they may never have said aloud before.

Personally, intimacy has always felt considerably more difficult.

My relationships rarely follow the traditional dating script. True romantic attraction is rare for me, and feeling genuinely seen by another person has been rarer still. Perhaps years of doing this work have made me less willing to accept something that only vaguely resembles intimacy because I know how much attention another human being is capable of giving.

I know what I give.

And I want it too.

I want someone curious enough to notice me. Someone who remembers the small things. Someone attentive enough to notice a change before I have to explain it. Someone who asks another question instead of waiting for their turn to speak. Someone who can sit with me without making me feel like I’m competing with everything else happening in the room.

These aren’t extravagant gestures.

They’re many of the same things people have paid me for.

And perhaps that is one of the stranger things this work has given me: I’ve spent years renting out something I’ve struggled to find for myself.

Affection. Presence. Touch. Attention.

Maybe that’s the strangest thing this work has taught me about love: I learned its language before I ever learned what it felt like to be spoken to in it.

And, strangely enough, the work gives some of it back to me too.

There have been periods of my life where I receive very little physical affection outside of clients. So yes, there have been times when the intimacy inside my work has been comforting for me too.

I’m being paid.

I’m also human.

Both things can be true.

MAYBE LOVE IS SOMETHING WE DO

Maybe that’s ultimately what being a professional girlfriend has taught me: human relationships are much more complicated than the categories we use to make sense of them.

Paid doesn’t necessarily mean fake.

Free doesn’t necessarily mean genuine.

Sex doesn’t necessarily mean intimacy.

Intimacy doesn’t necessarily mean romance.

And love doesn’t necessarily require permanence.

So when people ask why someone would pay for something they could supposedly get for free, I think they’re asking the wrong question.

I no longer look at someone who pays for intimacy and immediately wonder what must be wrong with them.

I wonder what they need.

Maybe they want sex. Maybe they want touch. Maybe they want to feel desirable. Maybe they want to explore something they’ve spent twenty years hiding. Maybe they want a few hours where they don’t have to audition for affection.

Maybe they just want to feel close to another person.

There is no single answer because there is no single human need.

After years of being invited into these incredibly private spaces in people’s lives, I’ve become less interested in judging desire and much more interested in listening to what it’s actually asking for.

The same is true of love.

I don’t know if I believe anymore that love belongs exclusively to the relationships we’ve decided are allowed to claim the word.

Maybe love isn’t only the person who stays. Maybe it isn’t only the relationship, the promise, the marriage, the history.

Maybe love is also something we do.

Maybe sometimes it’s the quality of attention we offer another human being while they’re in front of us.

And if that’s true, then yes—

I’ve been paid to love people.

And sometimes, I did.

Lately, I have been thinking about the number four.

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I thought becoming a stripper was proof that I had failed. It turned out to be the beginning of an education I never knew I needed.

For a long time, I couldn’t talk about my time as a stripper without crying.

Whenever people asked, I’d tell them the same thing: it was one of the worst experiences of my life. And at the time, that was true. There were nights when I’d uber home just before sunrise, stand in the shower until the water turned cold, and scrub my skin raw trying to wash away something that had nothing to do with soap. If I wasn’t dancing, I was lying in bed doomscrolling or staring at the ceiling, wondering how my life had unraveled so quickly.

But memory is a strange thing.

It doesn’t just preserve the past.

It rearranges it.

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For the first time in my life, I heard the words I’d been waiting to hear.

“I’m proud of you.”

She was my Uber driver.

During the ride, we talked about life. I told her I’d recently manifested something I’d wanted for …

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I didn’t realize it would be a dealbreaker.

He hands me a breakfast sandwich. It’s warm, still wrapped, the paper slightly translucent from the grease.

Bacon, egg, cheese.

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T…

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About the contradiction. About what doesn’t quite align. About the gap between image and behavior.

But almost no one is talking about the pattern underneath i…

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I don’t trust men.

I don’t believe in the systems that taught me to center them.

And still—somewhere in me, there is a version of my life where I marry one.

That’s the contradiction.

And I’ve stopped trying to resolve that.

Okay… Deep breath.

This is a little uncomfortable to admit.

I am a misandrist.

I’ve felt this way for quite some time, long before I had the language for it. I avoided saying it out loud because I don’t want to be reductive. I didn’t want to be the person who grouped people together out of bitterness.

But at some point, avoidance becomes it’s own brand of dishonesty.

So here it is.

When I say I’m a misandrist, I don’t mean I hate every individual man.

I mean I don’t trust the system that produces them.

Despite being pansexual. Despite having consistently harmful experiences with men. Despite being non-monogamous and deeply skeptical of traditional relationships.

I still fantasize about marrying one.

Not because I want to be chosen.

But because I might end up choosing one.

I even have a folder one my phone—basically a private vision board— of the kind of man I might end up with.

It’s embarrassing.

It’s cliché.

And it’s real.

Groomed to Center Men

I was raised in an environment where everything revolved around a man.

My mother called her husband — my abusive stepfather — her God. We served him first at dinner. We weren’t allowed to look at him in the eyes.

That wasn’t love. It was fear disguised as devotion.

Even as a child, I resisted it. I felt the wrongness in my body.

And still— I internalized it.

I became the very thing I was rejecting.

The emotionally available one. The agreeable, accommodating one. The one who constantly gave at her own expense and called it love.

That script ran so deep, I didn’t even realize I was following it until recently.

The Moment That Shook Me

About three years ago, I came across a TikTok of a woman saying something simple:

“I love men. I think they’re great”

She said it so causally. Like it was obvious.

And I froze.

Because if someone had asked me that same question—Do you love men?— my would be completely different.

That moment unsettled me more than I expected.

Not because I felt guilty.

But because I had to confront the gap between what I heard and what I actually felt.

Sugar Dating Was My Wake-up Call

Before I entered that world, I couldn’t conceptualize being cared for.

I thought my role was to give.

To serve. To support. To hold space. To be the therapist in lingerie.

I poured endlessly—and received crumbs.

But in my first arrangement, something shifted.

For the first time, I experienced what it was like to be provided for. To be held in a dynamic where care was explicit, not implied.

It wasn’t perfect. And I wouldn’t recommend it without strong boundaries and self-awareness.

But for me, it was clarifying.

Since then, traditional dating has felt… dishonest.

There is a kind of entitlement in it. A vagueness. An expectation of access without responsibility.

At least I transactional dynamics, the terms are clear.

There is also another layer to this that I don’t always know how to talk about.

I’m a sex worker.

My ability to survive—at least in part—is tied to male desire. To being wanted. To being chosen, even if temporarily.

And there’s something deeply unsettling about realizing that you can be intelligent, creative, capable—and still find the most reliable way to pay your rent is through male validation.

Not because it’s the only thing you are—

but because it the thing the world most consistently rewards.

It forces a kind of dissonance—

to be critical of the system, while still having to participate in it to survive.

And then there’s the performance that comes with that.

I’ve learned how to flatten myself in real time.

The moment I say something too thoughtful—to observant, too me—I can see the shift. Their eyes glaze over. The energy changes.

And I’m reminded again, what I’m there for.

Not to be known.

Not to be understood.

But to reflect something back to them— to make them feel seen, desired, important.

It’s a strange kind of invisibility.

Being looked at constantly… and still not being seen.

At the same time— there is a part of me that genuinely loves the performance.

I get to exaggerate parts of me that don’t always have space in my public life.

A heightened version. A more embodied, expressive, indulgent version.

It feels like freedom, in a way.

But it’s not free.

There’s always an exchange happening. A trade-off.

Because the same space that lets me expand is also the space that requires me to edit, to curate, to stay within what’s desirable—what’s consumable.

So I’m constantly moving between those two states.

Expression and reduction.

Expansion and performance.

And I don’t think I’ve fully reconciled what the costs me yet.

And what unsettles me the most is that, even knowing this—

even feeling it over and over again—

the version of my future I sometimes imagine still includes a man.

Not as a client.

Not as a transaction.

But as a partner.

A husband, even.

Someone I wouldn’t have to shrink for.

And I don’t know what to do with the fact that I still want that.

The One Man Who Complicated Everything

The first man I ever loved in his 60s.

We met on a dating app. He was roughly 40 years my senior.

We met for dinner, and I remember being caught off guard by how easy it felt.

The conversation flowed in a way that didn’t feel performative. It felt… familiar. Like I was catching up with someone I already knew.

The next day, we got on a three-way call with the financial department of an art school I had attended.

And he paid off my student debt.

Just like that.

From then on, he continued to support my growth in ways that felt quiet but consistent.

He wasn’t particularly affectionate. He didn’t say much.

But I always felt cared for.

And that mattered more than anything he could have said.

He never asked for sex.

I chose it.

We weren’t in a traditional relationship, but what we had was real. Mutual. Safe.

He didn’t restore my faith in men.

He complicated it.

Which, in its own way, was healing.

The Romantic I Can’t Quit.

Here’s the part I can’t intellectualize away:

I am a romantic.

I love love.

I fantasize about intimacy in ways almost cinematic—soft lighting, the auditory sparkle of cherubs singing in the backdrop, the recognition of being seen without having to perform.

And I know the history.

The original concept of marriage wasn’t built on love. It was built in property, alliances, and survival.

Romantic love, as we understand it was constructed later—mythologized, aestheticized, sold back to us.

I understand that.

And still—I want it.

The Letdown

I went on a date recently with someone who looked exactly like one of the men in my manifestation folder.

Henry Cavill is in there, for context.

And this man—shockingly— looked just like him. Maybe even better in person.

For a moment, I let myself believe it.

Like, oh—so this is how it happens.

As I sat across from that beautiful man, in that beautiful restaurant, I couldn’t help but notice this persistent, sinking, feeling settling into my gut.

We laughed, flirted for several hours…

And nothing .

No depth, no pull. No sense of being met.

And just like that, the spell was broken.

I remember leaving not heartbroken— just irritated.

Like maybe the thing I’ve fantasized isn’t rare.

Just… not real.

What This Actually Is

The longer I sit with it, the longer I realize this ain’t just about men.

It’s about exchange.

About what give, what we receive, and what we’re taught is worth trading in order to feel safe, desired, chosen.

In my work, that exchange is explicit.

It’s named. Negotiated. Understood.

But outside it—in dating, in relationships, in the fantasy of love—

the exchange is still there.

It’s just less honest.

And maybe that’s what unsettles me.

Not just that I’ve had to participate in systems built around male validation—but that I’ve learned to see them clearly.

Because even in my most romantic fantasies— the ones where I’m fully seen, fully chosen, not performing, not shrinking—theres still a man at the center of it.

A husband. A partner. Someone I imagine building a life with.

And I don’t know what to do with that.

I don’t trust men.

I don’t believe in the systems that produce them.

I’ve seen too much, experienced too much, and understood too much to pretend otherwise.

And still—

there’s a version of my life where I marry one.

Not because I believe in him.

But because I haven’t stopped believing in the feeling.

If you’ve ever held two conflicting truths at once—one in your mind, one in your body—you probably understand this more than you’d like to admit.

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When I look at it now, I realize it captured the exact moment I thought I was finally becoming a woman.

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But time is experienced—and distributed—very differently depending on class, culture, and access to leisure.

This essay traces how April became a joke, why January never felt like a beginning, and what it means to live in a world where time itself has become a privilege.

I don’t celebrate New Year’s on January 1.

I’ll go to the party. I’ll raise a glass. I won’t ruin anyone’s fun. But I don’t feel the beginning people insist is there. January has never felt like a start to me—it feels like winter, like holding, like endurance. A continuation of survival rather than a threshold into something new.

My New Year begins in April.

That instinct came first, long before I had language for it. I didn’t make resolutions in January. I didn’t start new projects. I didn’t declare reinvention in the coldest, darkest part of the year. I waited. I planted intentions when my body felt ready—when things actually began to bloom.

At first, that was just how I lived. Then I started asking why.

The Calendar Is a Compromise, Not a Truth

April doesn’t feel symbolic to me. It feels physiological.

That’s when my energy shifts. That’s when my body actually begins again. Historically, this wasn’t unusual. Before calendar reforms, much of Europe recognized the New Year in late March or early April, aligned with the vernal equinox—when light returns, travel resumes, crops are planted, and life visibly changes.

January 1 is a bureaucratic beginning, not a biological one.

Even the months reveal the misalignment. October comes from octo, meaning eight. November from novem, meaning nine. December from decem, meaning ten. The calendar we use today is a stitched artifact of empire, religion, and administration. Useful, perhaps—but not natural.

Time did not begin as something to be counted.

It began as something to be noticed.

How New Year’s Led Me to Question Time Itself

Somewhere along the way, my discomfort with January New Year’s led me to something more personal.

I don’t celebrate my birthday either.

I don’t remember deciding not to. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t fear of getting older. It just never felt aligned. Something in my body resisted the idea that my life could be measured cleanly in annual increments.

I’ve always loved studying language—especially etymology. I’m fascinated by how words carry their histories inside them. And at some point, I noticed something that wouldn’t let me go.

My birthday is in October.

October.

The tenth month of the year.

A word that comes from octo—eight.

That disconnect bothered me more than I could explain at the time. Why was my life being marked by a month whose name no longer matched its place? Why was the calendar misaligned with its own language? Why were we all pretending this made sense?

I didn’t frame this as critique back then. It was just a quiet noticing. A sense that something had been shifted, renamed, reorganized—without ever being reconciled.

Looking back, that was the beginning of my curiosity about time.

Time Was Once Tracked by the Body

Many Indigenous cultures marked time through cycles and events rather than numbers. One example is the turtle shell used by some Native American nations: thirteen larger sections representing lunar cycles, and twenty-eight smaller markings corresponding to days.

Thirteen moons.

Twenty-eight days.

A calendar aligned with tides, agriculture, menstruation, and rest. Time wasn’t abstract—it was relational. It followed the body rather than commanding it.

Which makes our current arrangement feel especially dissonant: we live inside a system that demands constant output while severing us from the rhythms that once regulated human nervous systems.

Time Is the Real Luxury

The most valuable thing you can own isn’t money.

It isn’t a Maybach.

It isn’t a nine million-dollar Aquanaut.

It’s time.

Not scheduled time.

Not measured time.

But sovereign time—time that belongs to your body.

Time that moves at the pace of digestion, grief, desire, creativity, and healing. Time that expands when you feel safe and collapses when you don’t.

You can be wealthy and still live in temporal poverty.

You can own everything and still feel rushed, hunted, late to your own life.

Luxury objects are proxies.

Time is the thing they’re pointing at.

Time Is Stratified Before Anything Else

We have to understand that the working class, the poor, and the wealthy experience time in fundamentally different ways—and that this difference is not accidental.

Time, as it is constructed and distributed, is the most valuable thing a person can own or experience. And it is allocated unevenly, by design.

The working class is trained to experience time as scarcity. As urgency. As something always running out. Hours are rigid, monitored, extracted.

The poor are often given time without autonomy—time to wait, to comply, to exist in suspension.

The wealthy and elite, by contrast, experience time as spacious. Flexible. Protective. Their days stretch and contract. Time becomes something they inhabit rather than something that controls them.

These differences don’t just shape schedules.

They shape nervous systems, health, perception, and access to the future.

The 8–8–8 System Was Never for the Wealthy

We’re taught the 8–8–8 system as if it’s universal and humane:

Eight hours of work.

Eight hours of leisure.

Eight hours of sleep.

But the wealthy don’t live this way. The ultra-wealthy never have.

The 8–8–8 system governs the working class—the people who must live inside the clock. And even then, the math doesn’t work.

Those eight hours of “leisure” don’t exist.

They’re consumed by commuting.

By preparing for work.

By showering, dressing, packing, recovering.

By decompressing from stress intense enough to hijack the nervous system.

What’s labeled leisure is really maintenance.

There is no lingering.

No spaciousness.

Only recovery.

Time, the Nervous System, and the Addiction to Exhaustion

This is also a nervous system issue.

Living inside the 8–8–8 system wires the body toward hypervigilance. There is always something to prepare for, something to recover from, something at risk if you slow down.

Urgency becomes normal.

Cortisol becomes familiar.

Exhaustion starts to feel like virtue.

There was a point in my life when I worked multiple jobs at the same time—sixty, sometimes eighty hours a week—wearing my body down completely. I was running on fumes and cortisol, and I genuinely believed this was the right way to live.

More than that, it was addictive.

Being exhausted made me feel necessary.

Being busy made me feel valuable.

Being hypervigilant made me feel like I was contributing something to society.

I mistook survival for meaning.

What Regulation Made Possible

When my life changed—when I left that environment—I could finally see it.

This doesn’t work for me.

I am more productive when I rest.

More creative when I have space.

More useful to others when my body isn’t braced for survival.

I don’t thrive on extraction. I thrive on synthesis. On thinking, creating, solving problems, and building containers where other people—often deeply dysregulated—can feel safe enough to return to their bodies.

This is the work I do now.

I teach.

I guide.

I help people understand their nervous systems so they can live embodied lives.

And the truth is, I work maybe ten to twelve hours a month.

If my earlier self saw my life now, she would have called me lazy.

But I live better now than I ever did when I was working myself into the ground. My nervous system is calmer. My health is better. My life is more spacious. And it continues to grow.

The difference wasn’t discipline.

It wasn’t hustle.

It was orientation.

Midnight in a Six-Million-Dollar House

I almost didn’t go to the New Year’s party.

But I did. And there I was, standing in a six-million-dollar house, surrounded by entrepreneurs, investors, people who move capital and build companies.

As the countdown began, I didn’t join in.

Not to make a point. I just didn’t want to participate in a ritual that didn’t feel real to me.

Everyone counted—ten, nine, eight—phones out, champagne ready. A collective agreement that something was ending and something else was beginning.

And all I could think was: How do they experience time?

I don’t know the answer. I’m not as established as they are—not yet. My relationship to time still carries strategy and uncertainty.

But I know this: people who live like this do not experience time the same way most people do.

They don’t need a countdown to feel permission to begin again.

They don’t need January to reset their lives.

Time bends around them.

And standing there, not counting, I realized something quietly clarifying:

The ritual isn’t for them.

It’s for those of us who need permission to hope.

Why April Fools Weren’t Foolish at All

When calendar reforms moved the New Year to January 1, many people continued to celebrate in spring—because that was when life actually changed.

They were mocked for it.

They became April fools.

Those aligned with seasonal time were reframed as backward. Authority replaced instinct. Abstraction replaced sensation.

Blooming wasn’t metaphorical.

It was biological.

April Is My New Year

Not because I reject time.

But because I refuse to let it be defined only by systems that benefit from my disorientation.

April is when things bloom.

Historically. Biologically. Personally.

It’s when movement returns.

When energy reorganizes.

When the body says now.

And that’s enough evidence for me.

Take your time with it.

That’s the point.

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I used to think there was something I was doing wrong.

There’s this quiet cultural rule that says intelligence and beauty aren’t supposed to coexist. That seriousness needs a certain look—neutral, restrained, a little joyless. And that if a woman is visibly desired, she must be compensating for something.

I’ve never really fit that rule. But for a long time, I tried to negotiate with it.

When I started sharing more intellectual work—writing, reading, thinking out loud online—I kept getting the same advice. If you want to be taken seriously, post less sexy photos— maybe take down your OF page. Tone it down. Make yourself easier to categorize.

It was always framed as practical. Strategic. Almost caring.

But it never felt neutral.

It felt like being asked to split myself in half.

What struck me wasn’t the advice—it was how familiar it was. I’ve been hearing versions of it my entire life. That my presence is confusing. That my body complicates my authority. That my intellect risks being mistaken for performance.

The solution is always the same: choose.

What people don’t like to admit is that the very things I’m encouraged to soften are the same things that sustain me. And I don’t just mean financially. I mean existentially.

Not everyone is unsettled by a woman who is perceptive, cultivated, and embodied. Some people are drawn to it. Historically, they always have been.

Once I started looking at it that way, a pattern became impossible to unsee.

This anxiety didn’t start with social media. It’s old.

Women who collapsed intellect, beauty, and power into a single body have always made people nervous. Rarely because they were wrong—but because they were hard to place.

Think of Cleopatra. She wasn’t remembered as a strategist or a ruler. She was remembered as excessive. Erotic. Dangerous. Sexuality became the explanation for her power because it was easier than admitting a woman could govern competently and command desire at the same time.

That same logic followed women into modern intellectual life. Simone de Beauvoir—one of the sharpest thinkers of the twentieth century—was never allowed to exist only as a mind. Her work was persistently reframed through her sexuality, her relationships, her body. As if sexual autonomy somehow contaminated thought.

And then there’s Marilyn Monroe. People love to romanticize her suffering, but rarely take her intelligence seriously. Her reading habits, her discipline, her self-awareness are treated like trivia. The “dumb blonde” was never a truth—it was a containment strategy. A way to make a perceptive woman safely consumable.

Between them lived the courtesans. Women who moved through courts and salons not as ornaments, but as intermediaries. They were chosen not just for beauty, but for wit, discretion, literacy, and presence. Patronage wasn’t about being kept—it was about being recognized.

From the outside, this has always been misread.

Support gets framed as indulgence. Desire as diminishment. Intelligence as incidental.

But proximity to power has never meant passivity.

What it has offered—then and now—is margin. Time to read. To write. To travel. To think. To build. To create platforms and fund projects that don’t survive well in systems obsessed with speed and productivity. Care work has always required infrastructure. Mine just happens to be visible.

There’s another layer to this that I can’t leave out.

I’m Black.

And that changes how all of this is read.

Black femininity has never been granted the luxury of neutrality—especially when it’s soft, intelligent, and visibly attractive. There’s a long history of Black women being framed as inherently sexual, not in a way that honors desire, but in a way that strips it of humanity. Sexuality exaggerated, interiority erased.

So when I’m visible, embodied, and articulate, the scrutiny multiplies. What might be read as confidence in someone else gets read as excess in me. What might be curiosity becomes provocation. What might be authority becomes attitude.

And when I look around for mirrors—other women who look like me doing this kind of work—I don’t see many.

There’s also the fact that I’m fully tattooed. My body reads as hard, intense, maybe even aggressive to people who don’t know me. And the irony is that it couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m soft. Delicate. Deeply feminine. My nervous system is tuned to nuance, not aggression .

That mismatch confuses people.

A woman of color, visibly sensate, tattooed, thoughtful, and emotionally precise doesn’t fit the scripts we’re used to. So people reach for the closest story they have. They project hardness where there is tenderness. Performance where there is sincerity. Sexuality where there is presence.

It’s not that they see me too clearly.

It’s that they don’t know how.

There’s also a major lack of representation for women who look like me in the fields I occupy—women who think publicly while using art, sensuality and eroticism in a way that isn’t performative. Not exaggerated. Not curated for consumption.

Just integrated.

There’s very little language for eroticism that is quiet. Grounded. Self-possessed. When women like me appear in intellectual spaces, we’re expected to neutralize our bodies. When we appear in erotic spaces, we’re expected to perform them.

What I’m doing doesn’t fit neatly into either box.

My sensuality isn’t a costume. It doesn’t feel separate from my being. It’s part of how I move through the world—how I listen, how I read, how I think. It’s not there to provoke. It’s there because it’s honest.

And honesty, when it’s embodied, makes people uneasy.

There’s another part of this that people assume should bother me—but doesn’t.

I don’t mind that strangers can type my name into a search bar and find me engaging in… group horizontal gymnastics. I have friends scattered everywhere—people who know different parts of me in different cities, different contexts, different moments.

There’s a strange freedom in that.

Maybe it’s because I’m an orphan. When you don’t grow up with a traditional family, you learn early that you belong to no one in the conventional sense. No lineage to protect. No inherited audience to perform for.

You become known without being owned.

There’s something quietly powerful about that—being visible without being claimed, intimate without being possessed. Anonymous, but still seen. Seen, without having to belong to anyone’s idea of you.

That kind of freedom changes how you relate to intimacy. It makes room for connection without enclosure. Recognition without captivity.

We don’t seem to struggle with this idea when men do it. Men leverage networks, proximity, and access all the time. We call it ambition. Strategy. Vision.

When women do something similar through beauty and presence, the tone changes. Suddenly it’s scandal. Suddenly it’s suspect.

That shift isn’t about morality.

It’s about control.

People sometimes try to insult me by pointing out that I have an OnlyFans. I’ve never found that particularly offensive—especially when, if you ask men what they’d do if they were women, the answer is almost always the same.

We still don’t know what to do with women who refuse to fragment themselves—who are both sensate and serious, desired and discerning. So we simplify them. Reduce them. Pretend they’re accidental.

They aren’t.

So yes, I am a philosopher.

And yes, I have an OnlyFans.

Those two facts don’t cancel each other out. They only feel contradictory if you still believe femininity and rigor are opposites.

I don’t need everyone to agree with how I live or work.

I just need it to make sense.

And it does.

We’re living through a moment where collapse and routine coexist without friction. People sleep on sidewalks. Protests turn violent. Families are pulled from their homes. And still—emails get answered, lunch gets ordered, life continues. This essay traces how small, everyday scenes widen into systemic crisis, how apathy becomes a survival strategy, and what it means to care in what some call the Fourth Turning, when history forces change but refuses to slow down.

“Every day I watch the terror grow, and every day I have to work, run errands, do chores—how to describe that contradiction, and how to survive it.

Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon.”

— Franz Kafka, Diaries

A few months ago, I was walking to get lunch when I noticed a man lying on the sidewalk. He wasn’t moving. I stopped and watched his chest, trying to see if it rose or fell, but I couldn’t tell. For a moment, I wondered if he was dead.

What unsettled me wasn’t just him. It was the people around him.

They stepped over his body without breaking stride. No one slowed down. No one looked twice. Their eyes stayed fixed ahead, as if the space he occupied had already been mentally erased. So I called an ambulance.

While I was on the phone, a man nearby asked if that’s what I was doing. The responders asked me to describe the man’s condition, the location we were at, etc. They asked me if I could perform CPR.

I said no as I didn’t know how. The man on the ground was covered in substances I couldn’t identify, and my body froze—not out of indifference, but fear. Fear of exposure. Fear of being attacked. Fear of the intimacy of touching someone everyone else had already decided not to see.

I asked anyone who passed by if they could help. They all shook their heads, avoiding eye contact and kept walking.

I waited with him for forty-five minutes when the ambulance arrived. He was very combative, refusing help and eventually, they left. They drove away and left him there. I stood for a moment, said a quiet prayer over him, and then I went to lunch. I spent eighty dollars.

That was the moment the contradiction became impossible to ignore. I had just left a man on the sidewalk and walked directly into a space designed for comfort, suffering and pleasure existing back to back with no transition in between. This is the road we live on now—catastrophe and consumption sharing the same block.

At first, it shows up in ways that feel almost mundane. Homelessness everywhere. People who can’t afford food, medicine, rent—basic necessities of life—occupying the same sidewalks as luxury storefronts and office buildings. You learn how to register it without stopping. How to keep moving.

But the longer you pay attention, the harder it becomes to believe these are isolated failures or personal misfortunes. The scale widens. What starts as visible poverty turns into visible force. People pulled from their homes. Protesters beaten, arrested, disappeared into systems that offer no clarity and no timeline. Bodies injured in public in ways that feel less like governance and more like brute suppression. Violence that is blunt, improvised, and increasingly mercenary.

What disturbs me most isn’t that it’s shocking, but that it isn’t—not anymore. There’s a brief spike of disbelief, followed by the familiar internal pivot: Right. Of course. We are outraged, but what else is new? We’re watching people lose their lives in ways I used to associate with history books, not daily footage. And somehow, it all folds into the texture of everyday life.

Many years ago, I was walking home from work around ten PM, I realized six men were circling me on the sidewalk. I remember thinking, very calmly, Am I about to die? I ran up to a Starbucks that was closing, pounded on the door, demanding to be let in. A woman who was mopping the floor let me inside briefly, then told me I had to leave. I stood outside, shaking, trying to decide what to do next, until another employee saw me, didn’t ask questions or cite policy, and drove me home.

What stays with me isn’t only the fear of that moment, but how arbitrary safety turned out to be. Protection wasn’t guaranteed by systems or institutions. It came down to whether a single person decided to intervene.

And then, just as quickly, life moved on anyway.

After that night, I still had to wake up the next day, go to work, run errands, answer messages. There was no pause, no collective acknowledgment that something had happened. The expectation was continuity—to metabolize everything alone and keep functioning.

That expectation felt like its own kind of violence.

Just like I had to continue my day knowing the man I’d waited with was probably still lying there.

Kafka wrote about the strangeness of tending to ordinary life while wars were unfolding elsewhere. What disturbed him wasn’t violence itself, but continuity—the way life insists on proceeding uninterrupted. That sense of coexistence—of chores and catastrophe sharing the same space—feels inescapable now.

There’s a theory known as the Strauss–Howe Fourth Turning, which suggests that history moves in cycles, and that roughly every eighty years societies enter a crisis phase, composed of four intervals lasting about twenty to twenty-five years each—periods in which institutions fracture and contradictions surface all at once. If that framework holds, then what we’re living through now isn’t a string of isolated emergencies. It’s the crisis itself. No one knows how long it will last—only that eventually it will give way to another “High,” built on whatever survives this moment.

What unsettles me is how this begins to reproduce itself—how trauma becomes cyclical. I think often about people decades older than me, and the way they talk about the present. Their desire to return to “how things were”. Their insistence that stability once existed and could exist again if we just went back. I understand that impulse now. Not because the past was necessarily better or more just, but because trauma narrows imagination. When the present feels unbearable, familiarity starts to masquerade as safety.

Regression isn’t ideological—it’s physiological. Under sustained stress, people reach for what feels known, even if it was unequal, even if it depended on privilege, even if it excluded others. Not because it worked for everyone, but because it worked enough to let them function. That’s how cycles repeat. Not through ignorance, but through exhaustion.

Today there was another protest. I watched the footage afterward—crowds, chants, police lines—and then, inevitably, the day continued. People went to work. Bought groceries. Answered emails. Logged on. Logged off. We’re all protesting in our own way now: some in the streets, some by withdrawing support, some by deleting Amazon, some by conserving energy just to survive. I don’t ask whether one form of protest matters more than another cynically. I ask because I wonder whether any of us can sustain this indefinitely.

I feel torn by the life I live.

I am, by many measures, deeply blessed. My life is cushioned with beauty, autonomy, pleasure, and access by my own creation. It has its own struggles, but it is undeniably insulated in ways many lives are not. That awareness doesn’t resolve anything—it sharpens the question. Am I doing my part? Or am I doing the wrong kind of work?

I stay informed. I pay attention. I try to translate care into action where I can. But I don’t know where the line is between meaningful contribution and self-erosion—between care that is grounded and care that becomes ego, or a slow disintegration of my own internal integrity. I don’t want my concern to turn into performance. And I don’t want survival to require indifference.

Because I can’t save the man on the sidewalk. I can’t help the elderly man I pass every day who is clearly unwell and clearly alone. I can witness. I can feel. But I can’t intervene in most of the ways my empathy demands. And when care has nowhere to go, it stops being virtuous. It becomes injurious.

Lately, I’ve been wondering whether apathy is always cruelty, or whether it’s sometimes containment—a way people protect themselves in a world that asks us to hold more than we can carry. I don’t want to be numb. But I’m beginning to understand why numbness can feel necessary.

Maybe the question isn’t whether apathy is right or wrong. Maybe it’s how to care without disintegrating. How to let care become something sustainable—something that can move outward instead of turning in on itself.

Kafka didn’t resolve the contradiction. He simply named it.

Germany declared war.

Swimming in the afternoon.

And maybe that’s where we are now—living inside a collapse that hasn’t finished collapsing, while the world keeps moving, whether we’re ready or not.

I Am a Bad Friend is an essay about misalignment—about being known of but not with, about entering the world with your heart open and learning what it costs. It explores neurodivergence, visibility, and the quiet grief of never quite knowing where you belong.

I’ve started to accept something about myself that feels socially unforgivable:

I am a bad friend.

Not in the dramatic way. Not cruel. Not malicious. I don’t betray secrets or disappear when things get hard. I’m a bad friend in a quieter, less legible way. I forget to respond. I don’t miss people the way I’m supposed to. I don’t experience nostalgia the way others describe it. People drift out of my life and I don’t chase them. Absence doesn’t register in me the way it seems to for others.

For a long time, I didn’t think I was capable of missing anything—or anyone.

When people talked about longing—about the ache that follows someone or something once it’s gone—I understood it intellectually, but not viscerally. I knew what missing was supposed to feel like, but I didn’t recognize it in myself. Absence didn’t pull on me. It cleared.

Then I experienced 2022.

And suddenly, I understood.

What I didn’t realize at the time was how much faith I had folded into that year.

2022 wasn’t just presence—it was exposure. It was the year I decided to come into the world with my heart fully open. The beginning of my yes year. The first time I made a real obligation to say yes to life, to opportunity, to being seen without rehearsing an exit. It was the year I launched Dahlier. The year I trusted that if I showed up honestly and consistently, something would meet me on the other side.

I didn’t say yes because I was fearless. I said yes because I believed openness itself was a form of intelligence.

When things didn’t unfold the way I imagined, it wasn’t just disappointment—it was disorientation. What hurt wasn’t only uncertainty, but the silence that followed. The lack of acknowledgment. The absence of recognition. The realization that I had made myself visible in a way that wasn’t being held.

When that year ended, it wasn’t just joy that disappeared.

It was trust.

The year after, I shut down internally. The openness that defined 2022 became something I learned to contain. The following year was worse—not because it was louder, but because it was emptier. Effort began to feel naïve. Hope felt unprotected.

That’s why I miss 2022 the way people say they miss someone.

It was the last time I entered the world without armor. The last time I believed that saying yes would be met with reciprocity. The last time my heart stayed open without consequence.

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