Diary of an Escort: Why I Write

I lead two lives, and in neither of them am I allowed to speak of the other.

That is not a complaint. I chose this, and I would choose it again. But it has a consequence people rarely talk about: there is not a single person for whom both are true at once. In one life, the evenings are missing. In the other, everything else that makes me who I am is missing. I am forever sorting, and I have become so practised at it that most of the time I no longer notice.

This diary is the first place where I do not have to sort anything. That is the real reason it exists.

What People Imagine

I know both pictures outsiders paint all too well. One is the picture of quick, sad money. The other is champagne and penthouses, an Instagram life with better lighting. Both contain a grain of truth and are otherwise made of projection.

Reality is less dramatic and stranger. It consists of long weeks in which nothing happens, and of single evenings so dense that I carry them with me for weeks. It consists of choice — my choice. You say no more often than yes, and every no is the price for a yes meaning something.

Nobody who takes this profession seriously is on call.

There is one sentence I hear more often than any other, and it usually comes late, when the room is dark and the formalities of the evening were shed long ago: That is not how I imagined it.

It is never meant as a complaint. Every time, it sounds like a confession. It took me a long time to understand that it says less about me than about what the men arrived with — and that almost all of them arrive with a picture nobody has ever checked. That, too, is a reason to write. Somewhere it should be written down how it actually is.

What I Want to Write About

Not about the profession. There are guides for that, and the agency writes its own.

But about what nobody else writes about: the before, the after, the in-between. The drive at two in the morning through a sleeping city. An enquiry where I know by the second sentence that nothing will come of it. The moment in front of a strange door when I pause, every single time, even though I know what awaits me.

Those are the places where this profession actually happens. What happens in the room afterwards is the part everyone can imagine anyway — and the only part that does not interest me in the telling.

My Rules

I have given this diary a few rules, and they are not negotiable.

There will be no names — not even one for me. No exact dates, only months, and everything I tell happened longer ago than it sounds. No hotels by name, no restaurants, no view from any balcony; a place reveals more than any text.

What is written here is condensed. Several evenings become one observation, several thoughts become one entry. What was lived is real. The frame is not always, and that is deliberate.

One thing I cannot promise, though: that nobody will recognise anything. Whoever was there for a particular story knows he was there — no omitted name changes that. I write so that strangers cannot place anything. Honestly, that is as far as it goes, and I write anyway.

Perhaps it is not even one woman writing here. Perhaps we are several. I deliberately leave that open, because the uncertainty is part of the protection. The voice stays the same. That is all I promise.

How Often

Irregularly. Every few weeks, unannounced, and only when there is something I want to write down.

A diary that appears every Tuesday is not a diary. And I do not know myself which entry comes next — that depends on what happens and on what stays inside me long enough that it has to come out.

Because that is how this works: I do not write down what I have experienced. I write down what does not go away on its own.