Though, not by my own hand, my twenty-three years as a stripper had finally come to an end. Unfortunately, somebody had to do it for me. In hindsight, I was foolish to believe that the situation could have ended any other way. Sefra asked me what I was going to do now that the club Vegas Star was gone. She wanted to know if I would like to work at a bondage parlor or a peep show with her. I laughed at her absurd proposition and politely declined her offer. I explained to her that I was practically forty-five years old and was finished working in this type of business. Sefra felt that she couldn’t afford to leave the sex industry. She was four years older than I was and in my opinion, she couldn’t afford to stay in it. Sefra and I talked for another twenty minutes, and then we said our goodbyes. We agreed to stay in touch, but that didn’t happen. Our lives went in two totally different directions. I never saw Sefra again.
8. Living with the Aftermath
I have now been out of the sex industry for approximately five years. After the club Vegas Star burned down, I ended up having to take a fairly low-paying job despite the fact that I was college educated. The fact that I didn’t have any job experience hurt me tremendously. I made a monumental mistake by staying in the business for so long. Reentering a society that I hadn’t been a part of for over twenty years was, and still is, a huge challenge for me. Unlike the average person, I never learned how to support myself outside of the confines of a strip club. Job interviews, scrutinizing employers, and eleven dollars an hour jobs were a foreign entity to me.
Although I am no longer emotionally enslaved by my career as an exotic dancer, my past continues to haunt me every time I fill out a job application or interview with a prospective employer. It’s not easy to have to continually hide twenty-three years of your life. However, I am forced to do this if I want to secure any type of employment. The fact that I will always have to conceal my life keeps me chained to my checkered past as an exotic dancer. Unfortunately, this ball and chain will accompany me for as long as I remain in the workforce. I never thought about this when I first entered into the business. The immediate gratification of making a quick buck was my only concern. Now at forty-nine years of age, I’m paying the price.
Cleaning up the mess that I had made of my life hasn’t been particularly easy.
One of the most difficult challenges that I’m faced with is my indecisiveness about what I want to do for a living. I still feel professionally displaced. I don’t know which way to turn, and realistically, I don’t have a lot of time left to figure it out. The future frightens me, and in some odd way, I’m just as directionless as I was twenty-three years ago. I guess some things never change. On top of feeling professionally displaced, I often ruminate about my past. I can’t seem to forgive myself for making such a poor life choice. It’s difficult for me to justify the years that I spent wasting away in the strip clubs.
Would I do it all over again? If the circumstances were the same, the answer is “yes.” Working as an exotic dancer certainly beat ending up in the streets, regardless of how deplorable I found the profession to be. In hindsight, I truly believe that if I had received the proper psychiatric help as a young girl, the probability of me ending up as a stripper would’ve been significantly reduced. Very few women end up in the sex industry entirely of their own design.
On a more positive note, I consider myself to be a survivor of an occupation that mainstream society considers to be completely incorrigible. I was fortunate in the sense that I never indulged in any type of substance abuse or overt prostitution.
However, this doesn’t make me superior to all the women who did. It just made me different. Practically all of the dancers that I knew had developed some type of self-destructive coping mechanism, myself included.
Although it has been difficult, I have managed to change some of my self-destructive habits. I no longer surround myself with toxic people or remain in situations that I feel could be detrimental to me. I have lots of wonderful people in my life, and a family that is very supportive. God has taken care of me, in spite of it all.
As far as the fates of the people that I had known and worked with in the past, I honestly don’t know. Last I heard, several of the owners and managers of the strip clubs that I used to work at have died. Others have managed to get on with their lives after serving hefty prison sentences. The feedback that I’ve received regarding some of the dancers that I’d known and worked with hasn’t been particularly encouraging. A large number of these women still engage in heavy substance abuse. Others have committed suicide, gone to prison, or have succumbed to full-blown prostitution. Very few of the women that I’ve stayed in contact with have successfully re-entered mainstream society.
I was fortunate enough to be one of them. However, this didn’t mean that I’m entirely out of the woods. I still suffer from depression, but I’ve managed to keep it at bay with the help of antidepressants. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever completely recover from all that I’ve been through. Poor life choices have a tendency to generate a lot of personal baggage, and in the end, there are very few people willing to help you carry it.
Where do I go from here? I’m not certain. As far as I’m concerned, I have only two choices. I can either sink or swim. For the time being, I have chosen the latter of the two. For me, it’s all about emotional survival. Hopefully, I’ve made the right decision. My best guess is that only time will tell.
Psychiatric studies have indicated that a majority of the women who have worked in the sex industry as prostitutes, exotic dancers, or strippers for any significant length of time were more often than not psychologically damaged for life.
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Copyright © 2005
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