The Other Side: A Memoir

I’m trying to communicate to him that I want to escape. I want him to help me crawl out of my skin. Help me. Up. Out. Help. Out.

That image, of the self, does not belong equally to everyone. As a woman, I must keep myself under constant surveillance: how do I look as I rise from the bed, and while I walk through the store buying groceries, and while I run with the dog in the park? From childhood I was taught to survey and police and maintain my image continually, and in this role—as both surveyor and the image that is surveyed—I learned to see myself as others see me: as an object to be viewed and evaluated, a sight.

Men take my picture and sometimes give me money. They ask me to take off my clothes and then they take my picture. They call it art. They call it nude.

From childhood I was taught to survey and police and maintain my image continually, and in this role—as both surveyor and the image that is surveyed—I learned to see myself as others see me: as an object to be viewed and evaluated, a sight.

The story is a trap, a puzzle, a paradox. Ending it creates a door.

I don’t want to ask them for money anymore, so I work as a stripper to pay for my next semester’s tuition. It’s not hard work, and I don’t actually feel all that slimy about doing it. In many ways, it’s the kind of job a girl like me has spent her whole life training for: there’s the makeup and the costume and the hair, there’s the stage and the way of coiling and uncoiling my body until at least one man wants to fuck me enough that he gives me all his money.

Which is not a failure of memory but of language.