Crushed

     I’m a romantic at heart, I think crushes are wonderful things. 

I think that crushes are in themselves lovely moments of appreciation of a person – that’s all though, moments. And I think it important to be able to live in those moments, breathe them in deeply, get the high from them, and breathe them out again. Because a crush simply is just that – a moment. It’s a projection of shallow affection on a person who may or may not accurately reflect the movie reel happening behind your eyes as you gaze at them. 

We’re human, and particularly in this profession we can fall victim to a false sense of attachment that happens when we cum and we cuddle together and all the oxytocin is a deafening harmonic roar trying to torture and trick us into bonding with our mate. Too often it’s perceived of us as sex workers that we are cold and a little dead inside because we separate attachment from intimacy in favour of money. I like to make self-deprecating jokes about being dead inside, but sadly while that might make my life easier, it simply isn’t the case and I do from time to time come down with a crush. And it’s a wonderful thing I get to enjoy in relative safety, a perk of the job, unless I let the oxytocin chorale ruin my rational thought and completely and utterly fuck things up.

 

I may be, as someone once called me, a ‘Boundary Queen’, but it’s not because I feel a need to keep clients at arm’s length, I don’t think of them as lesser or bad or undesirable. Sometimes in fact they’re very desirable, but I’m familiar with the varying bad consequences when it all goes wrong. I keep my eyes open, it’s through my own experience and the many peers who I care for and their experiences, that I set rules for clients, and rules for myself. But did I mention I’m a romantic? I’m not an impenetrable fortress, and along came someone gorgeous, worldly and wonderful  who got under my skin and I gave myself advice that I sometimes give friends - ‘is love worth a chance?’. Sigh. 

 

When someone falls for you first as Petra, or whoever, instead of building something with a person from scratch, you have to start with a dismantling. It’s a reintroduction, you’ve fucked, you’ve held hands, twizelled hair, enjoyed a post coital glow and a contortion of bodies. You've shared a lot without really sharing much at all. You don’t even know their name. You have to reintroduce yourself not as the exotic name that you chose to embody your highest self, you have to say ‘Hi, Kia Ora, my name is actually something my parents compromised on but neither of them actually wanted and I’m not sure it embodies anything other than disagreement and ‘fuck, really thought we were having a boy’’. There is nothing glamourous here. Trying to strip back layers of branding, performative happiness and lack of trauma to someone who has you on a pedestal is difficult and quite awkward. You hold a lot of space for a person, and now suddenly you've got to share yours. 

 

And it goes both ways. Client and provider bring their best selves into a room, each wanting to make an impression, for different reasons. I remember once having a beautiful single-acting client who I enjoyed myself with a crush on, who I later saw at the market with his wife and children – oops. What happens in the room is very present-time – the world outside doesn’t exist and we can be whoever we want to be, and that’s one of the great things about it. But if we cross lines into the personal, you then have to wade through and find the threads of what’s real and what’s not and knit together a new version of events. And once we let someone in, it can be very hard to get them out gracefully when it turns out we weren’t such a great match after all. It’s always been difficult for me to open up to people and if it isn’t right, then someone being under my skin feels less like a warm fuzzy feeling and more like dermatitis. You try to hold on to the explosive feelings from the start but begin to realise it was a spectacular creation of a moment in time, and not built on anything tangible. A crush. A product of a time, place and my professional ability to create chemistry with people.

 

Unbuilding the skyscraper of a pedestal I was on was brutal for me, but also for them. I felt like I could always see the silhouette of a hulking great podium reflecting back every time they doe-eyed me. A lot of that admittedly was my issue, having a sort of imposter syndrome for my own persona, I felt I couldn't live up to that more polished version of myself - 'Petra'. Trying to tear it down led to an inelegant implosion which took them down with it. The truth of it is, as a provider I had a responsibility to set professional boundaries, particularly with clients who are mentally and emotionally vulnerable, and I really hurt someone when I crossed that line. I also hurt myself. A wonderful, kind, generous client and enjoyable crush became a destabilising force for me and ultimately any good I had done for them in my professional capacity was completely unwound by the damage inflicted by our brief chaotic relationship. 

 

I have beaten myself up about many mistakes in my life and thank goodness for my therapist, but I have arrived at the conclusion that while I have regrets around how I handled this situation, I am still human and I don’t think I'm wrong to want to believe that love can be found anywhere. I’m sure it can. But it stands as a lesson to me about why boundaries exist in this work and that it’s not such a bad thing to be a ‘Boundary Queen’. I think I do have a duty of care to clients to protect both of us in this vulnerable position we find ourselves in. I'm not inexperienced, I do in fact know better, now even more.

Crushes are wonderful and I am a warm-fleshed human who may indulge myself in delightful crushes from time to time, but I try to remember and to remind you also, that we are viewing eachother through a present-time lens. Where I am Petra, and you are John/Jane, our feelings are moment-specific, intangible, safer, but magical, nonetheless. 

 

PETRA FOX

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