The First Time I understood What I Was

I went to massage school green. I mean really green. Naive enough to think a business card and a good technique was the whole job.

They let students take their own clients once we hit a certain point, just to build hours. So I did what they told us to do. Posted where they said to post. Started booking men. And then something strange kept happening. They'd book once, and I'd never hear from them again. Over and over. I started to panic. I had an aunt out of state and I remember genuinely thinking about giving up on LA and just going to live with her, because I couldn't make the math work.

A friend of mine, a tarot reader, invited me into a house in Culver City where a handful of women worked. A stunning redhead. An exotic beauty. A blonde. The owner. Me, brand new and barely holding it together. One night it got dark and everyone else had gone home, and I sat there crying, convinced I was about to fail out of my own life.

One of the girls asked me, Are you doing the ending???

I didn't even know what that meant. When I found out, the whole room burst out laughing at how clueless I was. I went home that night and thought about it. And once I learned, the clients started coming back.

That was the beginning. But it wasn't the real beginning.

Years later I was living in a beautiful old loft downtown, the kind of building with real history in the walls. I had a little dog, and most evenings we'd walk to a nearby park. My dog fell hard for a bichon that belonged to a woman who looked like she'd wandered out of a totally different life than mine. Tomboyish. Unbothered. The kind of woman who looked like she belonged at the beach, not doing what she actually did for a living.

Turned out she was a dominatrix. Old school. Korean, trained in New York, successful in a way that had nothing to do with what I understood success to look like at the time. She asked me once, in that dry way of hers, if I was tired of being nice.

I laughed. I didn't have an answer yet.

She invited me to a party. A successful man had requested something specific: five black women, one very particular request. I remember putting on the harness that night with the other women, all of us standing around with cocktails like it was any other gathering, easy conversation, nothing strange about it yet.

Then she came out.

The tomboy from the dog park was gone. In her place was a woman in stilettos who moved like she owned the air around her. My mouth actually fell open. I didn't know a person could transform like that, could hold two entire selves inside one body and let either one out depending on the room.

I won't describe everything that happened next. But I'll tell you what happened after.

I sat in the corner with a whiskey, one big ice cube slowly melting, and my hand was shaking. Not from fear exactly. From trying to process what I'd just watched, what I'd just been part of. I'd never seen anything like it in my life.

I went home. Sat quietly with my dog in my bed, still turning it over.

And I realized I liked it.

I liked the taboo of it. I liked the leather, the presentation, the ritual of becoming someone else for a few hours. I liked the contrast most of all, being an ordinary woman moving through an ordinary world all day, carrying a secret nobody could see on me. I'd always been that way, honestly. The one who didn't follow the rules quite right, who trusted her own instinct over whatever everyone else said made sense. It used to look reckless to other people. Turns out it was just early.

That night was the real beginning. It opened a door into a world where nothing shocked me anymore, because I'd already seen the full range of what people carry and crave and hide. I've been in rooms since then with people who never flinched at anything, no matter what the room held. I learned from them. I don't flinch either now, not at most things. That's exactly what lets me hold space for someone else's secret. I already know how big the range is. Nothing about you is going to surprise me.