The Simple Origins of My World 

I grew up in a very, very small, rural, Southern town.

As you might imagine, I didn't fit in very well as a tall, olive-skinned Latina who excelled at everything she did with intelligence and curiosity and innate gentleness; nor because I knew there was a whole entire world out there and I wanted to see it. My actual world was mostly limited to short, inbred rednecks who viewed learning and intelligence and the rest of the world with deep suspicion if not outright hatred. I grew up next to a sundown town.

This is not to pity me. I grew up having to be an army of one, developing competence because no one would back me up or save me, developing confidence in myself, developing my will, slowly learning to accept being an iconoclast, valuing personal freedom above all else (it's the hill I on which I will die).

And as straight A student, of course. Classes were easy to quite boring. An elementary school teacher made me a sweet deal: I could read any book I wanted during class if I could answer any question she asked me during her teaching. If I missed the answer, I had to put down my fun reading and pay attention.

I made this arrangement with every new teacher after this, up through high school, and after that first year, I did not miss an answer. It also helped that I read all my textbooks in the first week of school, so I knew what was in them and what the class was going over and I had an entire year of leisure time to tear through every book in the school library and to start ravaging the public library a couple towns away.

Shortly after this, my mother started going to college and I went with her (I'd dump myself in the library the moment it opened, my mother always knew where to find me when her classes were over). I read Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and Vanity Fair from elementary school on, educating myself on designers and tropical islands and events of note, like Truman Capote's Black and White Ball. I knew who Suzy was, even though at the time I wasn’t able to discern how she made an actual living (socialites simply exist in the ether, dahling).

There was very different world out there. They lived well and valued intellect and beauty and sizzling wit. Black models and models who looked really weird made fortunes off their uniqueness. No one in these pages cared about football or ever mentioned high school like it was some achievement. I didn’t fit in with these beautiful, wealthy people any more than I fit in with the people in my small town, but these jet-setters were much more interesting. (Though sometimes the models were really dumb, like not being able to discern synthetic fabrics from natural.)

Because of my reading, I wanted to go to Vassar or Sarah Lawrence but...my reading didn't quite inform me of the realities of money. My life did, however, and it's done a good job of it, too. (Not that I wasn't capable of winning scholarships, they simply weren’t enough without real family wealth behind me.)

As an escort, I've sometimes made more in a month than my parents’ combined salaries. It's a strange knowledge, a sad and surreal accomplishment. While my parents certainly didn't want me to make a living as any type of sex worker, they also wanted me to make my own way. Like most of us, their wishes are half-granted.

If anyone ever asked me what my dream job was: to get paid $100/hr to read books. That's it. Simple, right?

At least, that was my answer until 2019. Now I have a different answer, a real one, and it involves a camera, with me behind it. (I can bore you with the particulars if you want, when we meet.)

You’d think that I would be trying hard to emulate the life I only accessed through magazines, but no, I never truly have. I like nice things and know what those nice things are. They’re merely the decoration to the life of a jet-setter, not the goal. Their goals are different from mine, always have been.

There are escorts who live a good facsimile of that jet-setter life. I think some mistake the luxury of their clothing for the real luxury of the life they don’t actually get (because they still have to sing for their supper). That sounds snide, it’s not. It’s a mistake I never intend to make. I’m painfully aware of my limitations, particularly in regards to chasing a designer life, and am aware of the dangers of self-delusion.

My next life is one I’ve cobbled together after a lot of thought and my own lived experiences. It will never be a life of ease and effortless flight from private islands to private chateaus. It is, however, the life an artist, one of the constant desires in the back of my mind from a very early age; even before I discovered Vogue.

If I ever attend Art Basel, it will not be on the arm of a millionaire; it will be as an artist, feted, with my work on display for admiration and selling and the booking of future commissions.

Like I said, I do not mistake the wearing of designer clothing for the actuality of living a designer life. I fully expect to work for a living. I expect that work to take me to new places and introduce me to new worlds. This is the natural end result of working in a world where my limitations are fewer, a world more suited to my innate talents.

The artist’s world is one I’ve longed to enter but never held the right ticket. I have it now and want to use it immediately. The door is wide open, I only have to be able to step through it. (My limitations in this world are encumbering that, hence, my current internal struggle.)

The life after the art, if I ever retire, will be to a rural area, wide open spaces, a clear sky, natural beauty, the ocean. I've been all over the world, in some of the world's biggest cities, I’ve spent time in beautiful hotels large enough to house my entire hometown with rooms left over.

But I’m still a small town girl at heart. Everything is always measured from that scale.

Everything is always measured by my need to escape to a new world, until I find a world worth remaining in.