When I was 17, something in me flipped. In the midst of a turbulent senior year after an otherwise standard, uneventful and rather boring adolescence, I found myself more isolated than ever. Until then, I prided myself on being an unproblematic, studious and friendly teenager. I was innocent in almost every sense of the word. However, after a dreary year filled with disappointments in my personal and academic life and the abrupt end of my first romantic relationship, I felt dejected. I withdrew from my friends and family, rapidly lost weight and was frequently missing class and dropping the ball on all my assignments. When the simple act of putting a spoonful of cereal to my mouth felt too daunting and demanding to handle, pumping out essays like I used to and attending my sports practices and recitals was asking too much.

Spending the better part of my time alone, left to my impulses, rather inexperienced and desperately craving validation, I quickly found myself swiping through dating apps. Logically, I understood the dangers of what I was doing. However, as a shy kid and after spending much of my life feeling kind of invisible, I craved nothing more than for someone to be infatuated with me. Once the pickup lines, likes and flattery started pouring into my direct messages, I was hooked. There was no reasoning with myself after that. Without any real intention of meeting up with anyone, I initially thought of it as a harmless way to have fun and seek out validation from strange old men on the internet. However, when I received an offer to sugar baby for a wealthy and attractive older man, my impulses got the best of me once again. I started off with sending nudes in exchange for money and escalated from there. With constant validation and the money to back it up, I began to see myself for the image I was projecting — a confident, bold and pretty young girl profiting off of the inevitable sexualization and fetishization that all young women, but especially women of color, experience as we come of age.

Problematic and risky as they may have been, my ventures brought me a new sense of confidence. For the first time in my life, I knew I was beautiful and I could prove it to myself. It felt good to be wanted. It felt good to place a monetary value on my desirability and know that people were willing to pay that fee. It felt good to have a secret. While at school I struggled to socialize, connect with others and stay motivated and interested, I finally had an identity and depth to my character outside of being a good student and a “nice girl.”

Entering my freshman year of college with newfound confidence, I decided to leave my antics behind as a thing of the past. However, as I struggled through my first semester, reckoning with the aftermath of rape and repeated sexual assault, I turned back to sex work once again. This time, as a coping mechanism. Something about the transactional nature of physical intimacy between a sugar baby and sugar daddy nullified the intensity of the act for me. “Regular” sex would often trigger PTSD episodes and require emotional labor on my behalf as well as my partner’s. In an already vulnerable and intimate act, I felt exposed to my core, bearing my deepest trauma to college boys who, more often than not, immediately dropped their advances and turned cold upon witnessing my emotional distress. When someone put money on the table first or sent me a Venmo payment, sex became business as usual. The emotions and triggers became easy to sideline and compartmentalize, and I no longer risked emotionally distant and unempathetic partners.

While I am by no means a policy expert nor am I claiming to be, from my experience I understand that a lack of systemic protection leaves sex workers (who often already come from marginalized communities) highly vulnerable. I have no regrets for the experiences I had as a sugar baby and the things I learned along the way. However, four years after the fact, I can’t help but lament my loss of innocence and growing up faster than I needed to.

I didn’t enter sex work out of economic necessity. The validation, money and older male attention became addictive for me. I genuinely enjoyed it because it made me feel beautiful, valuable and wanted. It eventually became a more palatable way for me to experience physical intimacy and touch, like something to check off a to-do list rather than a replay of a deeply traumatic and dehumanizing life event. However, my experience was not without its flaws. I usually kept my loved ones in the dark as to my whereabouts. This coupled with the lack of any official forms of protection, I often risked severe physical danger and would frequently find myself in highly uncomfortable situations. Men would often believe that since they were paying me, they were exclusively entitled to my time, attention and body. Sometimes they believed that if they paid me enough, I would perform any sexual act they liked without any regard to my own comfort level, consent or boundaries. I walked a fine line between meeting their wishes and respecting my own, out of fear of what would happen to me if I angered them. I also quickly learned that infatuation is not always a good thing. It often preceded stalking and unhealthy, obsessive attachments.

Ultimately, the majority of my “work” as a sugar baby didn’t even involve sex. More often than not, I was paid to simply listen, offer emotional comfort and be a shoulder to cry on. Through my sugar daddies, I learned that the isolation I felt at 17 was not a unique experience. In the modern world, a lot of people feel removed from society despite being fully immersed in it. Most people desire companionship in some form or another. However, the demands of a full-time job, getting one’s life in order and the bustle of daily life leaves us feeling distant from those around us. It’s not hard to see how this sense of isolation could draw men to seek out a paid relationship that involves physical contact and emotional intimacy — especially when our culture makes men feel scared to appear vulnerable to those closest to them.

Although I have left my sugar baby days behind, my experience with sex work continues to impact my life. While by no means do I perceive my experience as a flaw in my character or life, seeing it as necessary to become who I am today, I struggle greatly with communicating this experience to others, often choosing to treat it like a footnote in my life. I toe the line between fearing that slowly revealing the truth about my past will scare people away or change their perception of me. On the other hand, I am afraid that being honest about who I am from the start will draw immediate judgment, pity and lack of respect from those I seek close relationships with. I honestly don’t know how to stay true to my past without risking my present. Having grown up a shy and bookish kid, I struggle with fitting this perceived promiscuity with a sweet, gentle and otherwise innocent demeanor and identity. In many ways, my experience with sex work has whisked me right back to that sense of isolation and distance from the rest of the world and the rest of the people in my life that I tried so hard to shed many years ago when I first found myself taking Venmo payments for sex.