fool’s errand: a lenten journey part 1

I could feel the sweat start to drip down the middle of my back as I practically ran down Atlantic Avenue, desperate to check the Goodwill lest I find a better deal, but terrified that the bounty I left at the Salvation Army would be snatched right out from under my nose. No more than two minutes later I arrived, only somewhat heaving, and a cursory glance around the store floor told me they didn’t have what I was looking for. I turned on my heel and left, a hurried panic arriving from some depth inside of me that was equal parts consuming as it was baffling. Why the fuck was I running through downtown Brooklyn, my breath clouding in front of me in the freezing temperatures? Why did it feel like it mattered so much? Why did it matter so much?

The whole drive home I felt euphoric, as if I had finally conquered some lifelong battle I had been fighting. I left an excited and only slightly embarrassing voice note for a friend that I had done it, found what I was looking for after weeks of searching, flipping through musty racks of old clothing across several states. All along the answer had been right in front of me. I dropped my loot off at the tailor down the street from me to fix the small tear in the sleeve that had given me exactly $100 worth of bargaining power with the clerk at the charity shop. Not a bad score.

Only a day later I was back downtown, picking up a bag of empty bags from another friend as I prepared for a photoshoot at the end of the week. There was laughter in her voice as she showed me what she had to offer—I thought you didn’t care about all this stuff. There was no hesitation in my response—I don’t, I quipped blithely, stuffing down the memory of my sweat-soaked hair after running back to the Salvation Army, my card getting declined at the register and having to split the payment up over multiple debit and credit cards, desperate to have the floor-length, rabbit fur coat that sat on the counter, finally within my grasp. It’s just the marketing, you know?

When I woke up the Friday of my shoot I was dismayed to discover that my hair was still damp inside its rollers, and did my best to salvage the look I had been preparing. I took the subway into the city and felt self-conscious in my fur coat, a giant pink Agent Provocateur bag sitting on the seat next to me, despite the fact that I had never been inside one of their stores. Though I knew the reality of my situation I felt embarrassed as I rode the train with my neighbors. I felt the need to apologize and explain: “Look, I don’t really have money, this is just a show! I got this coat at a thrift store, I promise, I’m not rich.”

The shoot itself went smoothly, and I enjoyed it immensely. At the end of 2024 I decided if I must spend hundreds of dollars of my hard-earned cash on the revolving door of photoshoots, that I was going to have fun doing it, and prioritize what I wanted, as opposed to what I thought would be most marketable. We ended in the Waverly diner, sneaking pictures, drinking coffee, and bonding over our shared interests. When I boarded the train back to Brooklyn I realized the stark difference I felt between being in lower Manhattan and being in my own neighborhood. In the village not only was I not the only woman in a fur coat—mine was undoubtedly the cheapest, the least nice. Compared to my own block, where I looked like a regular fish out of water. Or worse, a rich white woman in a low income neighborhood, a faceless gentrifier in a place I had called home for almost a decade. I thought about the complexity of this as I stared out at the city’s skyline from the window of the D train. I thought about my mother buying her first-ever new set of furniture when I was 10 years old and she was 42—how she had to put it on a Rooms-To-Go credit card and it took her two years to pay it off.

As a sex worker of a lower-class background, I am used to the conversations we have about class drag. The things we do to elevate ourselves in the eyes of our clients, make it seem like we were always a part of their world, that we belong there. There are levels and layers to this, of course, just as there is a wide spectrum of class and income levels in the clients we see. I was not destitute growing up, nor homeless, and I had many privileges that others did not. We were decidedly not rich, but rather slipped in and out of the lower middle class as different financial obstacles appeared: braces not covered by insurance, a lost job, an unexpected car accident.

Most of my career as a sex worker, if I were to call it that, has had a distinctive blue-collar tint to it. There were no aspirations of class ascendancy, no thoughts of using sex work as a way to really make money, or catapult myself into another income bracket. I was simply living and working, paying my bills and praying that the any forthcoming disaster would cost me less than a thousand dollars. Now I am looking back and identifying the steps that led me here, trying so hard to look like I was something I didn’t believe myself to be, nor could I ever truly embody.

For me it began when I raised my rates and entered the infamous “high end escort” market—no longer just a prostitute, I had to prove myself worthy of my own luxury price tag. I added to my closet a few nice dresses, a pair of new heels, some fake gold earrings that didn’t turn my skin green. Eventually I added in a Coach bag, bought on ebay for 50% off. A client gifted me some perfume and delicate gold jewelry, so I added those to my repertoire and looked for more of both to put on my wishlist.

Ah, the wishlist. A thing so seemingly benign, yet which had morphed into a hidden dragon lurking in the recesses of my psyche. In the slow moments I found myself scouring the internet, looking for beautiful and expensive things to add to it in the hopes that a client would buy them for me. By the end it had a pair of ballet flats for $600, earrings for $200, various dresses that cost more than $500 even though the patterns were so simple I could have sewed them myself.

A few days later I stared at the proofs from the photographer I felt an uneasy sense of disconnection and realization, as if I were looking at a stranger but coming to understand that the stranger was me. To suddenly see that you have been turning into a person you never intended to be is a horrible feeling, one that makes the skin itch with discontent. The problem itself was not the photos—taken out of context they were a joyful moment of dress-up with a fun thrift find—but that they existed against a backdrop of desire that had been building in my heart and hungers for more and more and more.

When you are a sex worker who advertises online there is a constant pressure to perform. The photoshoots with the new clothes, the fancy lingerie that tears if you even look at it the wrong way, social media posts of costly dinners, the continuous need to prove that we are desireable and in fact definitely worth the (sometimes) thousands of dollars it costs to spend an evening with us. You’re both a drag queen and an influencer, selling yourself as a magical idea—a lifestyle accessory that blends in perfectly with Armani suits and elegant hotel suites.

Even I have said it over and over—that unfortunately these are just things we need to do in order to make money. And as people whom life has generally served some pretty hard knocks, it’s not hard as a sex worker to justify almost any behavior in service of the hustle. The thing was, though, that I had started drinking my own Kool-Aid. The distinction from before: that I didn’t really want these things—that they were just for work—began to dissolve, and in the private hours of my life I found myself looking around and mentally calculating all the upgrades I somehow needed and felt entitled to. New couch. New shoes. New curling iron. New jewelry. Another perfume. New grill out back. New coffee maker. A $500 perm to make my hair slightly wavy for three months. Luckily for my sanity and my bank account, I was able to stop myself at the rabbit fur coat.

How quickly the tendrils of desire can take root and change the direction of our lives. Living in the United States, the mecca of material consumerism, these things are impossible to avoid. Our entire society is structured around spending money—shopping is our religion, each storefront another decrepit church filled with overpriced plastic and assorted petroleum byproducts that will all, ultimately, end up in the ocean.

A few days after the sweaty thrift store incident, the Christian reading group I had been attending ended, and we discussed if we wanted to pick another book on theology and have another session. (We had just finished reading The Cross and the Olive Tree: Cultivating Palestinian Theology amid Gaza, which I highly recommend) After a brief discussion the weeks of Lent were decided on, and with hugs and well wishes we parted ways for the holidays.

I haven’t observed Lent since I was 21 years old, attending an Episcopalian church in Virginia. I have no recollection of what I gave up that year, or if I was successful at it, but the idea of Lent piqued my interest, and sent me down a cascading series of thoughts that led me to where I am now, writing this, dutifully planning my vision for the six weeks between February and April that are known as Lent.

The Temptation of Christ is detailed in three different gospels of the bible, and describes the forty days Jesus spent fasting in the desert, confronted with the devil. The first was bread out of stones, to break his fast. The second was the pinnacle of the temple, wherein he told Jesus to throw himself down to prove himself the son of god. The third was that of the mountain, when the devil told Jesus that all the kingdoms would worship him, if he himself would worship satan. Jesus persisted against these temptations, and returned to Galilee to begin his ministry. This is not the only significant forty day period in the bible: in the Torah Moses spends forty days on Mt. Sinai in communion with god, after which he returned with the ten commandments.

There are several theories about the exact beginning of Lent, but it was incorporated into the liturgical calendar around the 4th century, and thereafter christians have been invited into a period of sacrifice, prayer, and almsgiving to echo Jesus’ time in the desert, when he was offered all the riches the world had to offer and turned them down.

The wheels were turning, and it was only a few short days later when the inspiration struck. Despite my not being any sort of official christian, I wanted to take part in the upcoming Lenten season. It would serve as a useful structure for the spiritual and material changes I was trying to incorporate into my life. I knew what I wanted to give up: excess.

Excess. A slippery snake of a word—alone it could be nothing, or almost anything. Excess could be buying that new jacket when your closet is already full, or eating seventeen chocolate cookies when maybe three or four would have sufficed. It’s the belief that we should always be moving in a linear upward fashion, that if we had more, then we would be happier. The more I chewed on the thought, the more I liked it. I had been feeling the tectonic plates of my spiritual life shifting since November, and knew that it would only intensify in the new year as I approached by birthday in February and my 9th house profection year.

For six weeks I would observe the three pillars of lent: prayer (justice towards god), fasting (justice towards self), and almsgiving (justice towards neighbors) and find ways to give up the excess that had taken up lodging in the various facets of my life.

This diary entry is but the introduction, the beginning of the catalogue that I hope to keep throughout my weeks of abstention. Already ideas have sprung to mind and I, ever the list keeper, have been dutifully writing them down, creating the scaffolding that will hold me during my metaphorical time in the desert. One that I already incorporated was taking down my wishlist, as I couldn’t stand a digital record of all the things that I “wished” for, therefore cultivating a desire for endless amounts of luxury goods when in reality I already live in abundance—lucky enough to have every single material need met. Nor did I want to simply outsource the behaviors I was trying to avoid to my clients. And I could think through every purchase, ruminate on whether or not it was a need or only a desire, and even though only buy things second-hand.

Overconsumption affects us in many ways—spiritually, financially, and also environmentally. I think of the mindless waste that exists in our world today, the way we buy and consume and throw away things with ease; the grief of our changing climate is one that defies words. I don’t want Shein hauls or even Louis Vuitton bags that end up decaying in the Atacama desert, or a to buy a new iphone and to have my old one disposed of by exploited workers in Asia, the physical tolls of such labor which has yet to be fully understood. It’s true that company executives are at fault for selling these ideas to us, but that didn’t mean I had to buy into them anymore.

When enough is never enough, what we’re left with is the lonely ache of desire, and the suffering that trails it like a hungry dog. If I am blinded by my incessant perceived need for more material things, I miss out on the sacred that already exists all around me. What change could I solidify in my life in these six weeks? Who could I be at the end of it?

Sometimes I forgot that I am not above reproach—as if my status as a sex worker or an anarchist or an abolitionist somehow shields me from the pitfalls that plague “normal” people. I forget that I am suspectible to materialist propoganda just like that rest of the world, and that our beliefs must be practiced, not only preached. And if we’re not careful, what begins as subversion can easily become subsumed by the capitalist beast, and before you know it you’re on TikTok selling overpriced courses about how to make money as a sex worker, envious of another girl you saw on Bluesky because she has a client who gives her Louboutins and you don’t.

It seemed only fitting that I picked one of my new photos to accompany this journal entry, and I went with my favorite. I’m sitting on the stoop, surrounded by empty shopping bags, my fur coat pooling around me like soft water. There’s a coffee cup in one and, and a filterless cigarette in the other. I look beautiful, but I can help but smile at the foolish thought that I would ever look like I belonged in the upper echelons of society, fur coat or no. The imprint of where I am from is marked indelibly on my skin just like one of my many tattoos. My form of class drag will never not be just a trashy. And class drag, if we’re not careful, can transform from a costume to a true aspiration—the fear that I might somehow lose out on money if I don’t perform the way I am expected to can shape my decisions and turn me into someone I am not interested in being. But I don’t have to say yes to all things that are offered to me, and I can trust in the prosperity all around me. Trust that I am allowed to be exactly who I am without sacrificing my livelihood. And when I open my eyes, I can see the bounty all around me for what it is.

I am not an ascetic, nor do I seek a life completely abject from all the niceties the world has to offer. I believe in comfort, and I believe in quality, I believe in carrot cake and nice leather boots. And does Fat Tuesday not come before Ash Wednesday? Perhaps the indulgence is an essential part of the cycle to understanding the value of abstention, of giving it all up. Maybe we need to experience the gluttonous feeling of excess in order to understand the value of simplicity, the virtue of moderation and truly intentional living.

The illusion that luxury offers is weak, but enticing—those ad executives certainly are experts in their trade. But once I peeked behind the curtain, saw the wizard in his naked desire for power, it felt impossible to do anything but plan my own divestment from that world in all the ways I could. I did not want, at the end of my life, to be left only with a few crumpled dollar bills and a wretched, covetous heart. The process is imperfect, and ever-incomplete. One person cannot change the whole world, but in six weeks, maybe they can change their whole life.