/siberia/ - Off-topic

I literally can't do this anymore.

Backstory: I started doing sex work when I was 19 back in 2010. I became an anarchist as a teenager and hung out at infoshops during my high school years. After I went off to college I began doing SW, largely because I viewed it as a way to make money that didn't involve wage slavery. Many of the other anarchist women I knew (both cis and trans) were SWers and introduced me to the whole culture. I loved every minute of it. I got to work on my own terms with no hierarchical domination by a boss. I could decide my own schedule. I could say no to clients I thought were creepy or oppressive. I wasn't paying taxes to the settler-colonialist AmeriKKKan government. To me, and many other anarchist comrades, sex work was anti-work.

During my time as a SW, I was able to finish college and pay off my student loans in no time at all. I was able to pay my rent in a city where rent prices are through the roof. I was able to contribute to paying for my friends' and comrades' rent, student loan debt, medical bills, legal bills, HRT, bike repair, ADHD medications, and many other things involving mutual aid. Between 2014-2017 I was making more money than I knew what to do with. At my "peak" I was making $2k a week. It was an incredible experience. And best of all, I felt like I was actually engaging in anarchism. I wasn't being a hypocrite when it came to my values. I was telling the capitalist system and the state to fuck off and showing that my body or my will couldn't be dominated. All of that changed when the pandemic hit. I couldn't serve clients anymore due to the lockdowns. But the biggest problem was something even worse. Around this time began the growth of OnlyFans. I saw how more and more people fully integrated into the colonial-capitalist system were starting OF accounts. So I started one too, and I started making money, but it was nowhere near what I was making as a SW previously.

And this is exactly why I'm thinking of quitting SW. OnlyFans has essentially done to SW what AirBNB has done to housing and Uber has done for public transportation. But the worst part is, OF has made SW no longer subversive. SW was originally a way for marginalized and colonized folx to break out of wage slavery and become their own boss, and also to reclaim control of their bodies from the colonial-imperialist-YT supremacist-capitalist-patriarchal cistem. Now, every single suburban white girl starts an OnlyFans the day she turns 18 in order to make a few extra bucks. In fact they're now ENCOURAGED to start one. There are even Hollywood celebrities, big-named influencers and YouTubers who have OF accounts, people who already make loads of money yet feel the need to take money away from people who are far more oppressed than them. And they now have the nerve to call themselves "sex workers" because of it. Look at all the top creators on OF and you'll notice how the vast majority of them are colonially attractive, white, cis, able-bodied and have what a eugenicist would determine as "good genes." What was once the domain of the marginalized, queer, neurodivergent, colonized and internally-colonized has now become the domain of the colonizer.

So, to put it lightly, I can't do sex work anymore. There is no point. Even if I was still making thousands of dollars a month it doesn't feel worth it anymore. Not when OnlyFans has gentrified SW and the subversive quality of it is completely gone. I feel mentally abandoned.

My problem is, I have no idea how I'm going to survive now. I literally can't get a "real" job in retail or in the food industry. I spent 15 years of my life as a SW and don't have the experience for anything else. I've never made a resume. I'm autistic so I can't look customers in the eye. I'm also ADHD so I can't handle tasks very well. My AuDHD also gives me a strong sense of justice and I often feel like I'm too moral to be working in capitalism. And on top of it, I'm chronically ill so I'm constantly low on spoons and spend about half my day in bed. I dread having to go back to live with my mother, because she's 72 years old and would force me to be her caregiver even though she knows I'm disabled myself.

Any comrades have advice for this gal?