Speak to That Pain

It is the middle of the night, and I am listening to Northern Soul, and trying to ignore trauma.

I could say I feel low, depressed, restless, unable to sleep – but that is just the surface.

No, trauma is a rat gnawing at my will to go forward.

Trauma is the laying in bed and sleeping, only to wake physically wrecked.

Trauma is running on a hamster wheel on and on and on.

I thought maybe writing may help.

May help my body to know satisfying rest.

May make the rat saying I just a failed experiment, what is the point of my work, my wanting to have a future, my reaching for some friends or community.

I thought if I wrote, with Northern Soul hitting my heart, I would speak to this pain and not run away.

So, this post is an experiment, a flow of consciousness.

A reaching into what trauma means to me as an exited woman.

I write to that pain, to get you readers to know why you must keep fighting to free the prostituted.

Know a small part of our pain, and that may armed you for the long fight for abolition.

I write to my trauma, for I want my readers to know why there can be no half-measures about our freedom.

Harm reduction is not good enough – for that is just to patch up the prostituted then send them back to torture.

Reform is only worth if it, if the long-term goal is full abolition of the sex trade.

Each and every moment, the prostituted class are being murdered, being raped on an industrial scale, being torture in all known methods – so it is too late for half-measure.

I speak from a place of multiple rapes, gang-rapes, mental/physical/sexual torture, and knowing it is to be made nothing.

That is the place of trauma that I have to hold each and every day.

I have learned to close all visual memory – the sights I have known and lived through, I have no interest in replaying as pictures again.

But I may see nothing – but every cell in my body carries the sickness and hate that put into by punters.

I had no ownership of my body.

How can I own the holes in my body as fists, penises, objects rammed each and every one?

How can I own my own voice when it stuffed with penises till it lost all hope?

How do I own my own sexuality when so hate, so much pain and so much death was associated with forced orgasms?

Trauma for the prostituted is full of gaps and silences.

The gaps of stolen memory, lost time, lack of hold of what happened.

How can I remember how many punters raped me – when numbers only become a blur?

I know I counted to 300, but that was a very small number of what destroyed me. I know I can never how many men raped me, only that rape was so normal that I could know it was rape.

How can I record the locations I was tortured in?

Only know many rooms become the same, that being fucked against walls and in subways was not strange, that I still do not like posh hotel rooms.

I have learnt to accept that I will many holes in my memory – I can grieve that lost, feel fury at the hate and violence that made my mind erase so much of my life.

These holes are a major spur for me to be an abolitionist. For I no more of the prostituted to have to live with having to block out their realities.

This post is relatively short, but I hope it a rallying cry.

Remember to place the voices of the prostituted to the front – and hear their trauma, don’t run from it.