I got sober less than five months before becoming a teacher, long after I’d stopped selling myself for sex. Three years later, I wrote a piece for the Huffington Post which unapologetically disclosed my history as a call girl on Craigslist prior to my becoming a teacher.
I’d had an opinion, and I wanted the world to know it. I thought speaking my opinion was my constitutional right. I wanted to criticize the censoring of Craigslist’s Adult Services section and defend an individual’s choice to sell sex. Knowing the breadth of my history, I considered mine a profile in courage.
Much of the world, it seemed, did not agree.
I was removed from my job as a New York City public school teacher and reassigned to administrative duties pending an investigation, after which the Department of Education sought my termination. The charges: “Conduct Unbecoming a Professional.” Yet because my article had been published weeks prior to my removal, the timing suggested to me that it was not my writing that had instigated my reassignment but, rather, a front and center headline of the NY Post about me which ran the day I was removed. It read: “Bronx Teacher Admits: I’m an Ex-Hooker.”
I am the type that drives drunk, throws drinks, slaps strangers and hurts feelings. Through drinking, sex and drugs, I pursued pleasure well past the point of “fun.”
A Post reporter, it turned out, had put two and two together, linking my name to my previously published work, including a story I had written in which I candidly discussed the dilemma I faced being a teacher who was also a writer who wrote about my sex work past. From my first day as a teacher, my colleagues at work knew I was a writer and anyone who Googled me—a surprising number, it turned out—knew the content of my work. It was not the controversy it threatened to become, I always figured, because I was appreciated by my administration, well-liked by my colleagues and good at my job. As early as 2006, I had published stories of working as a stripper in college, but not until the piece on The Huffington Post had I admitted that by “sex work,” I also meant prostitution. Even then, I did not consider it a big deal—and for nearly three weeks, it wasn’t. Provocative maybe, but front-page news I was not.
At least I wasn’t until the NY Post reporter showed up at my school—which, my being a public employee, was a matter of public record—interviewing parents and my colleagues, and photographing me with my students.
How dare they? I thought at the time.
Outraged at the circumstances and confident in the rightness of my actions, I sat down with Marie Claire for an interview about the experience. Of all the media requests I had received—from Joy Behar to Dr. Phil—an interview in Marie Claire had seemed the most legitimate. I wanted to be perceived as legitimate. I was proud of my writing and confident in my political points. The charges against me were based entirely on my writing—my record of conduct in the classroom was impeccable! I was furious to have been removed my job and indignant at the circus that had been created.
But then I saw the headline of the story. “What was a nice girl from Ohio thinking?” it read, reminding me (and the world) what had set the media storm off to begin with.
While I have tried to answer this question many times—in other articles, for friends, for potential employers, for people I’ve just met—the simplest answer is that there is no good explanation for why a person like me behaves the way I do.
“What were you thinking?” is not a useful question for someone in recovery.
At least, it’s not a question we’re encouraged to ask of ourselves. In recovery, we are taught to assume our thinking is “upside down.” We are told to keep it simple. “Figure it out is not a slogan” is my favorite slogan of all.
The simple answer is that I wasn’t. Prior to disclosing my past on the Huffington Post, I had been warned. The administration at my school, aware of my writing, kindly asked I use a pen name. My friends had dissuaded me from publishing similar articles before. Teachers at the university where I had earned my degree in education had warned there could be consequences. I didn’t care. I pushed my luck, and then I pushed it some more. I wanted to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. Sometimes when I get this way, there’s no stopping me.
This is a way of reacting to the world that “normal” people just don’t get—and it’s gotten me in trouble before. Ever since childhood, I have been burdened by this audacity—an inordinate belief that I am entitled to say or do as I feel. Such an attitude has its pros and cons. As a woman, I’ve never had a problem taking up space. I raised my hand in every class, eager to participate and confident in my opinion—some might say in love with the sound of my voice. In high school, my motto was “leap—and the net will appear.” This risk-taking attitude led me to attend a college I couldn’t afford; taking out loans I had no intention of ever paying back, and traveling to exotic locales with no reason for being there.
It has also led to some tragic decisions. Having no big picture for myself, I cheated on boyfriends, destroyed friendships, and quit jobs with no backup. To get my way, I would at times do anything—including lie, cheat and steal. I am the type that drives drunk, throws drinks, slaps strangers and hurts feelings. Through drinking, sex and drugs, I pursued pleasure well past the point of “fun.” As my addictions progressed, my balls-to-the-wall behavior became increasingly destructive. By my late twenties, the girl who’d stripped down to her underwear and jumped into the pool at the party was dangerously close to becoming the body found on the side of the road.
At the end of my drinking, my life had hit a wall. I considered myself a writer, and was on the last semester of a graduate program pursuing an MFA. Now it looked as if I wouldn’t be graduating as I had not once met with my thesis advisor and had long ago stopped going to class. Though money wasn’t yet a problem, my career path had stalled. After four months of selling sex, I was virtually unemployable. Working when I wanted to, doing what I wanted to for hundreds of dollars an hour, I didn’t want a “real” job even if I could’ve gotten one.
Beyond the externals, it was the constant, nagging sense of malaise—what I have come to understand as a spiritual malady—that grew hardest to ignore. My wanton selfishness and disregard for others had long ago alienated all my friends. Growing up in a home of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” my family knew nothing about my lifestyle. I was self-obsessed and lonely. I stopped leaving the house. By the end of my drinking, I had developed irrational fears that bordered on phobia and paranoia. I was afraid of dogs and strangers, and of driving in cars. When it came to the real things to fear—my health, my finances, and my future—I told myself I didn’t want to know.
The difference between positive and negative attention has never been entirely clear to me, though in recovery I had learned to re-examine my need to be visible at whatever cost.
Self-disclosure, they say, is at the heart of recovery. For me, getting better meant getting honest. Being honest meant admitting that my drinking—and thinking—was out of control. More than in any graduate class or writer’s workshop, it was as a member of a spiritual community that I learned to share my truth. In recovery, I met people sharing what they described as their experience, strength and hope—people being honest in a way I had never heard before. It was in recovery I learned I was neither alone nor unique. Listening to myself share as a member of a group, I rediscovered feelings and goals that, in my pursuit for money and pleasure, I had shoved aside.
I signed myself out of rehab on my 90th day of sobriety to join the NYC Teaching Fellows. Three years later, I wrote the piece for the Huffington Post. In the interim, I have done a lot of work, and consider teaching a part of that rehabilitation. That said, I don’t claim to be fixed.
Not in my greatest fears or fantasies did I expect the attention brought about by my writing. When I found myself at the center of such a controversy, I didn’t know the right way to react. The difference between positive and negative attention has never been entirely clear to me, though in recovery I had learned to re-examine my need to be visible at whatever cost.
The days following the Post headline were some of the strangest I’ve ever experienced. With paparazzi parked day and night outside my apartment— telescopic lens pointed straight into my semi-parted curtains—I felt violated. Caricatured in the media as having to be either an idiot or an opportunist, I was outraged. At the same time, I felt something else, a familiar feeling that reminds me of an early memory of being maybe eight years old and in my father’s car in the summer. We were driving through the suburbs. The houses were all the same with the same little porches and similar patches of lawn in the front. There was a man in front of one of them, a man probably my father’s age, out watering his lawn. As we drove by, this man made eye contact with me, and he blew me a kiss. Picture this moment: the blue-green grass, the pointed roofs of the houses in the background and this man, the gesture he’s just made, the water pouring from the hose. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times when I picture this moment, I remember feeling angry, violated. The thousandth time, I’m ashamed, feeling that a part of me, however small, enjoyed it.
Not all individuals who sell sex have drug or alcohol problems—or any problems, for that matter, above and beyond what so-called normal people do. Not all sex workers need help—though some do. I needed help, but only I could help myself. For me, the biggest obstacle to my getting help was having to admit that I needed it. Feeling stigmatized as a sex worker and mislabeled as a victim, prior to getting sober I justified my choice to sell sex and denied its consequences. I denied the constellation of problems that working as a prostitute only made worse. Rather than having to answer that difficult question—what were you thinking?—I isolated, keeping my pain to myself.
In recovery, I have come to believe that no one could’ve stopped me or saved me from my bad choices. No one could speak for me. I had to speak for myself. That was the point behind my writing the piece on the Huffington Post, and my purpose in writing about this today: I share my experience because it keeps me honest. Sharing my experience, I have the potential to help someone else.
I could still defend the rightness of my actions: I never disclosed the name of my current employer, I was an excellent teacher, I had been publishing my writing long before I became an employee of the Department of Education. I could go on and on. I won’t. I have learned that being right is less important than being happy. More important than being happy is being safe and sane.
At three plus years sober, amidst a scandal, I didn’t want to drink. But my emotional sobriety—the character I had worked so hard to develop— was undeniably at risk. In the end, I needed to take responsibility for the disruption the situation was continuing to cause the school community, as well as the hurt it caused my family and close friends—not to mention the hurt I had caused myself, which continued so long as I held on. In the end—soon after the Marie Claire piece ran—I resigned, letting go of any legal claims to my job.
When I look back at the Marie Claire interview today, I cringe. In retrospect I see it as contrary to my best sober judgment—not to mention legal advice. As is the way of the addict, I was seeking to be understood. Feeling humiliated, I had failed to stay humble. As a result, the finished piece is less than true. I was not, as I am described in the story’s introduction, actually a “picture of tranquility.” Underneath that angry, tough-girl exterior, I was terrified. And acting from a place of fear, I only made it worse.
Today I understand feelings as indicators of when I have violated my principles. I felt it from the moment I saw the final piece—that piercing sense that I had perhaps done something wrong. That day, I quietly slipped the magazine back on the shelf. I didn’t buy it.
“Oh well,” I remember thinking sheepishly. “At least the picture was flattering.”
Melissa Petro is a freelance writer based in New York. This is her first piece for The Fix.