The Camgirl Diaries

I used to want to work for NASA, still wish I could, actually. I’m a near genius according to standardized testing, so I probably could’ve. I wanted to be a lawyer, a neuroscientist, a radio dj. A million things, but never a teacher. And never a cam girl. “When I grow up I’d like to be a real big internet ho” isn’t any little girl’s dream. Then I became a teacher. And after awhile I began hating being a teacher. But there isn’t much one can do with a Master’s in Education specifically outside the field of, well, education.

I tried applying for other district jobs but none have called me. I’ve sent articles, or little memoirs, like this, to multiple online magazines. I’ve signed up for real estate classes and completed approximately 4% of the 90 hours. Most of all, I’ve worked as a cam girl to supplement the piddly thing they call “income” given to public school teachers.

Don’t be horrified. It doesn’t like “rub off on” the kids. There are two separate versions of me, and one remains wholly innocent and pure. Hell, it’d be months before I’d have sex with anyone I was dating. But much like Facebook allows believers to become zealots with loud voices, apps and sites for camming do much the same thing. We are all hiding behind screens, utterly dehumanized; it isn’t real per se. So those things we do in that not quite real world don’t taint day to day living. Perhaps, if it was one’s whole career, it would become more pervasive in their life. For me, a part-time cam girl, well I don’t really consider it me. The viewers don’t even know the real color of my hair.

Last night I cried into the mirror for hours. Cried and cried, because no one has been tipping more than my “basic success rate” of $100 a day for days and because one of my sugar daddies abandoned me. Looked into my own mascara stained eyes like something from a movie. The nature of the work is so personal, selling one’s own self, that a lack of success, even if it’s the end of the month when everyone’s broke, feels a whole lot like rejection.

Money is an insidious thing, and once you get used to it being there it’s hard to let go of. Right now, I’m figuring out my life, who I am. Am I going back to school? Moving across the country? To where? Will I buy time as a realtor or could I make a real go as a writer, and be happy? While there’re too many questions to block out and a real, dire needs for savings, I can’t hear myself think beyond the necessity. They say money is the root of all evil. I wouldn’t say sex work is evil in the slightest, but self doubt is. I need to get a thicker skin.

I had a credit card once, when I was much too young to use it responsibly, and found out what that thing called “debt consolidation” is. My credit score is still so bottomed out that at 32 I needed my mother as a cosigner on my car. It’s why I don’t allow myself a credit card. That credit card is what camming makes me feel like; I’m swiped by life over and over and there’s only one surefire way to keep up on those payments. Relying on strangers to want to see me naked. Again, see why it begins to feel so personal?

Occasionally, it’s fun. When there’s a crowd of people paying, or actual friends you meet and chat with. When you feel beautiful as can be in a wig and good lighting. When your family needs something and you can effortlessly help pay. But overall it’s a need, not want, driven industry, which makes it dangerous. People will almost always fight dirty for what they need.