I worked as an escort

It's like having sex 5–7 times a day that you don't want. Someone comes to your apartment, gives you money, goes to the shower. While he's in the shower, you hide the money; he comes back, and you chat for about five minutes. Sex happens, also in about five minutes. You chat again. You go for a second round. He goes to the shower. Sometimes he books another hour.

Adventurous, full of adrenaline, with a kind of psychological strain. I've accepted my experience and have now consigned it to oblivion, because I've taken from it everything I could. And I quit. If I could turn back time, I wouldn't have started — it definitely wasn't worth it.

Working as an escort was pure fun and play for me. Strangely enough, I remember that stage with pleasant feelings. I never encountered violence or any negative consequences. I was just over 20, I loved sex and talking to people — and that's what I did, so I have nothing to regret.

I was a student, I lost my tuition-free place and had to pay for my studies. A friend who was constantly traveling "with her boyfriend" told me about escort agencies. They do a photo shoot of you, buy you tickets, and there you are in Paris, Milan, Rome or another nice European city. We went on my first tour together. Renting an apartment is cheaper that way, and it's easy to talk clients into a duo. And it's not as scary.

I was 23 and studying for a creative degree. And at some point I thought: I love sex, why not earn money from it? I sent my profile to agencies and got a reply. The agency owner came to have a look at me. He never once touched me, and he spoke respectfully and calmly. He said their main rule was: if you don't like something, you have every right to just get up and leave. If a client seems strange, if a client asks you to do something you didn't agree on — you just get up and leave. Your well-being and your health are the priority.

In my case, it's more like an equals sign.

My escort experience almost always involved sex. But there was one time a client invited me not for sex at all. He was an elderly Japanese man, and he paid for a whole night. He told me his life story, showed me photos of his wife, who had died ten years earlier, and of his daughter, who works as an artist at Miyazaki's studio. He had come to the country for a woman he met online: he fell in love and flew to her, but she blocked him. He pulled out several huge bags and said: "I chose you because you're petite, like her. I bought her so many gifts, and now I don't know what to do with them. Take them, it hurts me to look at them." So I left him three hours later with four huge bags of clothes and electronics, and he never laid a finger on me.

It didn't affect me at all. My boyfriend didn't know. My husband doesn't know it happened. If he finds out, so be it. Some people have had 10 boyfriends, some 100, and I've had about 3,500, and they all paid me in euros. So what?

I remember believing back then that if I ever had a relationship, it would only be for money. But later a healthy relationship came along, and during that period the escort work stopped. Then, after the breakup, there were occasional escort episodes.

While I was working, I was dating a guy who later went to work as a male escort himself, so it wasn't a problem at all. And most of the girls at the agency had boyfriends or husbands, and they were fine with it.

I quit after a situation where I got cheated out of my payment. That happened when I was already seeing clients rarely, and only regulars at that. I never managed to get any real benefit from the money I made: it didn't come to that much, and I immediately blew it all on alcohol or clothes; saving it never worked out. Going back to normal life was hard: for about 6 months I was getting used to living on my parents' money. The work at the start of my career paid little. Sometimes it was just funny: I'd work out that I could earn in half an hour what I made in 3 days at that job.

I worked for almost three years. I left because it got boring. I realized I had seen it all, I had lived through every experience that interested me — and I moved on. Nobody held me back; girls generally left the agency without any trouble. And they always kept the right either to come back or just to call and say, "Listen, I need money right now, I'll take two or three clients."