Ten years in and I still can't give you a clean answer to the question people most want to ask. Are you okay? Sometimes I am. Sometimes I'm better than okay. Sometimes I'm sitting in traffic on the M50, thinking about something that happened in work that day, and I laugh to myself. Just a normal Tuesday.
Other times it grinds a bit. Not the sex. The performance. Carrying someone else's emotional weight for an hour, being what they need, holding that steady while also checking the time, calculating whether there's time to shower after, mentally drafting the message I need to send to the next booking. The multitasking is the bit that takes it out of you. Not the obvious bit.
I started at 27. Halfway through a master's in sociology (the irony has not been lost on me) and I needed money quickly. A friend mentioned a girl she knew who was doing it. I met her for coffee. She was wearing a very good coat. That sounds shallow but it was important information at the time. She seemed fine. Completely fine. I took her number.
The first few months I told myself it was temporary. I think most people do. Then I paid off my overdraft. Then I booked a flight to Portugal. Then the course finished and I had options and I looked at them all and I chose this one. That's when it stopped being temporary and became just what I do.
My mother thinks I work in corporate training. I maintain this fiction with the thoroughness you'd expect from someone who spent two years studying social structures. She has, to her credit, stopped asking why I never seem to be in an office.
What I've learned about men in ten years is a lot. More than I wanted to in some respects. The thing that surprises people when I tell them is that most clients are ordinary. Not exciting. Not damaged. Not threatening. Just men who are lonely or bored or who have a wife who's checked out or who are working away from home and can't face the hotel bar again. I'm not saying that to excuse anything. I'm saying it's more mundane than the narratives people bring to it from the outside.
I had a man who came every Tuesday for two years. Financial consultant, I think. He never told me much about himself. What he did, every single time, was bring a book he'd just finished and tell me about it for twenty minutes, and then we'd get on with the booking. After two years he stopped coming. No explanation, just stopped. I still think about him sometimes, not in a romantic way, just genuinely curious about what happened. He recommended some good books.
The thing I'd tell a younger version of myself: your boundaries will shift. Not in a bad way necessarily, but they'll move. Things that felt important at the start will stop mattering and things you didn't think about will become the things you guard most carefully. For me it's time. My time off is mine. I don't see clients outside bookings, I don't answer messages after 9pm, and I take three weeks in summer. None of that was true at the start.
I screen strictly and always have, even before I knew what I was doing. My instinct has been wrong twice and right several hundred times. When someone pushes back on the process I don't try to understand why. I just decline. There's enough demand that I don't need to take risks to fill a diary.
Would I recommend it? No. Not because it's harmful. I think it's less harmful than most of the jobs I could have taken with my qualifications. But it suits a specific temperament and I can't tell from here if yours is that temperament. It suits people who can compartmentalise, who are comfortable with inconsistency, who don't need external validation to feel okay about their choices. It does not suit people who need to talk about their work. Three people in my life know about this. Three, in ten years.
I'm grand with that. Most of the time.