Today marks 14 years since I escaped.

Well, I’m pretty sure. I had graduated high school the weekend before, and I know that it wasn’t more than a week later that I got in my truck and turned onto the highway and left for good.

I’ve never intentionally celebrated this day before now. I’m not sure if it’s because I just wasn’t ready to acknowledge this escape, or if it was because I was too busy trying to establish my own sense of safety and freedom. Until now, after living much of my life since on an autopilot fuelled by the desire to stay free, it hadn’t felt necessary. To stop and face it and say, ‘on this day’…well it’s not easy for me. It’s much more comfortable to live numb to the reality that had something to survive and escape in the first place. Over the weekend, I struggled with the fact that, although this is a positive moment to remember, it is also trauma, and traumatic anniversaries are painful.

There is another more engrained difficulty which I did not foresee when I decided that I would honour this day. That’s what I want to write about now as a way to mark my first celebration of this event.

The power to just ‘be’

Lots of people in the world are ‘workaholics’, and I don’t claim uniqueness in this matter. I am a self-aware workaholic for a number of reasons: distraction, perfectionism, loneliness, and a genuine love for what I do. But this anniversary, and forcing myself to stop, pause, acknowledge it and stop working for just one day…brought another reason to mind. As a survivor of exploitation (I was both labor and sex trafficked), and as someone who had to orchestrate their own escape, it’s not easy to just stop and rest. When I was being exploited, I wasn’t allowed to rest of my own accord (nor did I feel safe to do so). In fact, it’s an instinct that’s forced out of you (by both you and by your abusers — it’s a joint effort), and it’s not necessarily a given that you would know how to snap out of this mode once free. Moreover, the fact that I was able to escape can be mainly explained by my ability to work hard towards it, relentlessly.

Then, afterwards, when I found out that I have talents and am capable of achievements, well, my ability to persist and not rest became a trademark of my own constructed self-identity. I turned my seemingly inhuman capability to work myself past utter exhaustion into a socially-acceptable ‘superpower’. My sense of self-esteem had come largely from my ability to work hard, and I translated this need into a ‘strong work ethic’. Society’s glorification of achievement melded well with this, and I have thought that if I just work hard enough, all will be well. I will stay free and safe if I just put in the effort.

When I was exploited, I lacked the power to stop, rest, and just be a human. When I was free, I lacked the knowledge and ability. This Freedom Day, I am acknowledging this difficulty by telling a bit of my story (there are trigger warnings (written as TW) for readers who need them), taking a look at how my inability to rest has affected me, and pondering ways to grow past this.

‘Force’ has multiple meanings (TW)

At the height of the sex trafficking, I was taken to various locations, mainly hotels, but also to other seedy places. I had no control over the process of getting to these places, and usually had no clue where I was in relation to anything familiar. Therefore, I couldn’t get away. This inculcated in me a sense of immersion in what was occurring: my whole world became, for that time, whatever small room they had found and the things I was forced to do there. There was nothing else in the world for me at the time, except…that.

Regardless of the type of thing I was forced to do (either see clients or be filmed), it was relentless. The filming was more so, because they had to get things just right, and I had to act in just a certain way, often more than once, in order to do the job properly. This can get physically exhausting, especially as after certain things, continuing is painful, and these filmings took ages. Not that that mattered to them — they were out for a profit and I was the commodity. As long as I could stay awake, it was on. When things became far, far too much, I’d feign sleep, or just dissociate into it. Sometimes this worked and they would stop and give me a break. With clients, things were a bit easier. A client got a specific amount of time…and if I could resolve things quickly, I could get a break earlier.

Sometimes, if I had done something exactly how they (both clients and traffickers) wanted, a nap was the reward. I lived for those naps. I focused on earning them. They became the goal: ‘just a little further, just a bit more, and it will stop and I can sleep’. Sleep was a haven because I could escape what was happening; not everything I was forced to do was physically tiring, but it all was psychologically taxing, and sleep took me away from it. This became an incentive for me to…do my job well, and to work really hard at it.

The other incentive was what would happen if things didn’t go as planned. I would be punished. These punishments were terrifying, and I thought during them that my life was in danger (sometimes, it was). The thing that triggered them was when I couldn’t bring things to a physical resolution (for myself or the client). Part of these punishments involved relentless assault until I was able to do so, which only fuelled my need to work harder. So I would push myself so hard in order to get it all over with.

It’s really difficult to acknowledge that not only was sex forced on me, but that I was part of that forcing. That I pushed my body past any human limits in order to give my traffickers and clients what they wanted. It taught me to ignore my physical signals of ‘this is too much’ or ‘this is painful’ or ‘I am exhausted’. Given my young age, this ability to push myself and ignore myself became second nature.

Endless Work…No Matter What

Physical work, when I was older, was equally as exhausting, but in a completely different way. We were very poor, and my mother was not adept at finding sources of income. We also lived in a dilapidated, pest-infested, work-in-progress house. Much of the work of renovating and maintaining the house fell on me, as well as assisting my mother in keeping up our meager income. This happened when I was homeschooled, and it happened during high school too, from the moment I got home from school until I went to bed. Weekends. Summers. Holidays.

At home, I had to work endlessly on home improvement projects. Sanding the (lead-based) cupboards and re-painting them for endless hours (and no protection). Digging out the buried and impacted bricks in the backyard to clear the ground for a flowerbed. Digging a sludge-filled trench to clear the sewage when the plumbing broke. Mowing the half-acre side yard that the house came with, in the height of Texas summer, with a manual lawnmower and no breaks. The jobs my mother had me do to help out with income were equally backbreaking. I worked at a local stables, mucking out stalls and pushing loads of horse manure for entire days. Carrying many gallons of water in buckets that I could barely lift. In the winter, after the owner had come back in from a fox hunting trip, with their saddles and bridles and boots covered in clingy mud, my job was to sit in the stables (with no heating), scrubbing the mud off the leather until the owner could pass a white-gloved hand over it and not get a smudge on the glove.

It didn’t matter that I would get injuries. Those were disregarded: one must keep going. When my fingers would go white and numb from scrubbing tack in the freezing weather, taking a break was ‘lazy’ and I ‘lacked physical toughness’. I had to get half of our half-acre lawn mowed before I could sit down for a break, and if I took too many water breaks, I was chastised. When I broke my leg, the only thing that brought my mother to take me to the doctor was the fact that, after two weeks, I still couldn’t do any housework or chores. My mother had a saying, that I ‘was obsessed with breaks’ and ‘needed a better work ethic’. If the equipment with which I worked broke down or wasn’t functioning, I wasn’t helped. I was yelled at, and told to deal with it. It didn’t matter that I had joint problems (I was later diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and have dislocated most of the joints in my body). If a joint slipped, push it back in and keep going. Don’t be lazy. And it didn’t matter that the occasional job I did outside of the home resulted in someone paying me: if my mother had failed to get enough money that month and if my father’s child support wasn’t enough, she’d steal it. Since it helped feed me (kind of), I had no right to complain.

Slowly I adopted this mindset for myself here too: keep going. Don’t stop. Numb yourself to your body and distract your mind. I got extremely good at running long fantasies in my mind to keep myself occupied — I built whole worlds in my head, and lived out entire fictional lifetimes, in order to stay sane from the mind-numbing work.

Of course it goes without saying that I used these ‘skills’ to help me orchestrate my escape, get my degrees, and establish my career. Later, when doing my Masters degree, I dislocated my thumb in the library after catching it on a loop on my backpack handle. My response? Push the joint in, get some tape to keep it a bit more stable, and keep writing the essay. I don’t think I even took any painkillers.

Learning to Rest

After 19 years of the above, is it any wonder that now as a free adult, I struggle to stop and regulate myself? To take care of my body and mind? It seems that if one hasn’t been exploited in this way, one doesn’t realise that self-regulation is a skill, at least it is for me. This skill involves multiple facets:

1. Learning to listen to your body. During my time in exploitation, I could not afford to listen to my body. If I was too attuned to my physical sensations and cues, that would have prevented me from doing the very things I needed to survive. My body became a liability, and so I dissociated from it. It’s been a process to learn how to feel again.
2. Learning to listen to your mind. Equally, my mind could either function as a tool for survival, or a liability. It is all about how you channel your thoughts, feelings, and impressions. I grew to mix up consent with obligation, to the point that even during the sex trafficking, I could trick my mind into thinking that this was something I wanted (what I truly wanted was safety). I looked forward sometimes to the hard work at home – focusing on the satisfaction of a good job, rather than the mental and physical pain. I have had to take time to learn that wanting a break is…well…a good thing! It’s natural, and not a sign of laziness.
3. Differentiating hard work from overdoing it. When you are in slavery, there are no limits. Your body is a commodity, and the limits are set by your exploiters not for your well-being, but to preserve their commodity for future use. But now my body is my own. Now, I can engage in self-care just because I want to — not as a strategy to make me a harder worker (believe me, this is a tempting mental trap too!).
4. Embracing just ‘being’. It is ok to just exist. One does not have to be doing things all the time. One does not need to be productive at all hours. This is the one thing that I find most beautiful, and most challenging, about Judaism. We have, for 25 hours out of the week, a time of absolute rest. It is very difficult for me, with my background, to allow myself to fully engage with that. It’s very difficult for me to just take a day off, and do absolutely nothing productive.

This first celebration of Freedom Day, I’m trying to engage with the long-neglected side of me that can embrace just existing for the sake of existing. No productivity. No pushing myself. Just enjoying my experience of the world as it is. I can do this now, because I am free.