I listen to Stax when things are crashing in on me. When life seems pointless, the Memphis soul reaches my heart.

I am crashing bad.

My mind, my essence and my body is in pain and is lost.

Several weeks ago, my brother-in-law committed suicide, leaving my sister and his teenaged daughters.

This is ghastly and very sad, for it was severe mental health issues that push him into suicide.

I have been triggered bad, and gone back to old habits of not taking care of myself or my home.

This weekend I cried properly for the first time, but now my grief just gets bigger and uncontrollable.

It is the triggering that scares me.

It is the exhaustion that wrecks me.

It the anger that confuses me.

It is the connection of my past to thoughts of suicide that saddened me.

I am reaching out, especially to my exited friends, for support, laughter, and love.

I am cannot fully understand trauma, but I can some brief words as a inadequate guide to how I map it.

Trauma is never simple, trauma is not short-term often it is life long.

I can only speak to trauma though my experiences and words from friends.

The important to know is that deep-seated complex trauma fragment the brain and memory.

I cannot remember decades of my life, and parts I may remember are not linear or able to placed into a solid place or time.

The brain remember enough to see and feel what is true.

Most of prostitution and child abuse is repeatative, so the brain holds enough to say this is real, this is an injustice, this should be grieved.

Think of a prisoner in a concentration camp – where every has no hope, every day death seemed inevitable, and every day is the same hellish routine.

Would your brain remember every moment, remember dates or days – or would it all mashed up into one memory with flashes of horror.

Trauma turns turns years of torture and having no hope into what seemed like a week or a day.

Linear time is destroyed.

Trauma makes sleep a mess. Sometimes not resting, sometimes oversleeping.

Sleep can be just nightmares and night terrors.

Trauma is a shadow both night and day.

Trauma is a sign of there being no justices.

Often trauma is deep inside peoples who are considered non-human.

Trauma is a race issue, trauma is carried by indigenous peoples, trauma is the legacy  of war, trauma is in the skins of all exploited by the sex trade.

To understand trauma, it is vital to listen to those that you choose to make sub-human – be that the Native American, the soldier, the battered woman, the exploited child or the whore.

Trauma grows by our silencing.

This is very brief post, more a reaching out.

I wish I could write to the silence and silencing of exited prostituted women, but words have little meaning for our pain and grief.

The silencing is everywhere, from all sectors of society – this silencing numbs exited women into silence.

This is not a silence of compliance – it is the stubborn silence of rebellion.

This is not the silence of the ignorance – it is the silence of knowing too much to find words.

This is is not the silence of agreement – it is the silence of buried fury at your refusal to hear.

I have been a speaker, I write thousands of words to build a route to real change – but most of the time, these these words fall into the well of silencing.

I refuse to fit the stereotype of the exited woman to be heard.

I will not stay struck in the victim role.

I do not speak a sob-story, so you can lessen our lives by placing it into an individual horror tale.

I will connect my abuse back to Roman times and forward till the dream of days where prostitution does not exist.

I will call out all forms of prostitution as torture and rape.

I do not separate out cse, trafficking, or so-called forced prostitution from “chosen” prostitution – it all the same to a punter, so what the point of pretending they are separate.

I do call out every man who make choice to be a punter as a violent criminal and woman-hater.

I will connect porn to prostitution – knowing in the sex trade, prostituted are forced into porn as cheap labour, knowing all punters are driven by porn dreams as they torture the prostituted.

I will never think there is one way to enter to the sex trade, that only certain women or girls can be prostituted. Instead, think to each and every stereotype you know that is your prostituted woman or girl – now, think the opposite, know both are true.

There is no type or one form of push that makes a prostitute – not whilst the sex trade feeds on cash, there will always a market for whatever porn demands that punters could want.

To become prostituted is easy – but to exit is almost made impossible.

These are a few reasons my voice is silenced, for it refuses to give easy answers or to remain a victim.

There are not easy answer for exited women, but that cannot be heard.

Too many Abolitionists and too many radical feminist think there can be easy answers, or a quick route out for exited women.

This is coz there a lack of listening with open minds and hearts.

Instead, exited women have our truths and lives explained to us, our words drowned out by your packaging of how prostitution should be seen.

In this package, our fury is dampened down, our grief is locked away, our many ways to connect are severed, our desire to live fully is made invisible.

We are made into performing monkies, yet again back to knowing we can never be truly human.

Please know part of our silence is a deep fury that our so-called allies cannot or will not allow us to be fully human.

You make us the Other, as the sex trade and punters did.

You do this through patronising, through only listening if it edges on voyeurism or some kind of horror story.

You do this by not paying us for our work, or using our words or work without permission or out of context.

You do this as you speak to our lives in statistics or academic/journalist works without consulting us.

You do this every you make endless stereotypical boxes of what it is to be prostituted, why some is good and some is bad ways to be prostituted.

You do this every time you separate a under-aged prostitute from an adult prostitute, every time you say forced or chosen prostitution.

You do this every time you say words to makes excuses for punters.

I could on an on and on, but fury wipes me out.

My silence is a weapon, not a message of agreement.