PART 10: RUBY

February 2020, Melbourne

So, I'm just sitting in the car. I've arrived a little bit early for volunteering. Every Wednesday morning I do three hours of volunteering with a homelessness charity. Um, I might not mention the charity, because, notoriously, some charities don’t like sex workers. I might just keep that one on the down low.

But anyway, I'm sitting in the car, I’ve arrived early, and I figured now was as good a time as any to start these recordings. So hopefully, you can't hear the rain in the background too much, because it is absolutely persisting down outside. Quite a lot of my volunteering revolves around me being outside. So, I'm interested to see whether I'm just going to get drenched for three hours, or maybe the rain will let up.

But anyway.

So as far as like, the big thing that's happening for me this week, it’s very non sex work related. But I guess it's all like, linked. So, tomorrow morning, I've got a really big job interview, it's the final round of interviews for a relatively prestigious arts/events management role that I really, really want. It's full time, paid relatively well, which means, realistically, I won't be able to go into the club as much.

Look, I probably only work two nights a week. I've really only worked two or three nights in the whole, like four years, that I've been dancing. For a number of reasons; but mainly I've always been studying while I've done it. So, in my first two years, I was doing my masters. And I graduated from that. And then for the last few years, I've been doing my PhD, while I've also been dancing on the weekend.

I find it's like a really nice balance of me being able to have like quite a lot of income, while not putting a lot of time into it. Like as I say, like two days a week for me, puts me at a pretty comfortable earning capacity. That's definitely not indicative of the whole industry. So, I feel really lucky that I can do that. But I guess I'm at this kind of crossroads in my life right now, where this really exciting job has come up and like, the last interview’s tomorrow, fingers crossed that I get it.

That sort of sets me in a trajectory of my like arts management career, that is a really, really solid trajectory. But I'm probably going to have to stop dancing if I want to pursue it. Because I am still doing a PhD full time as well and full time work, full time PhD, and like part time dancing, or like 20 hours of dancing a week is probably not going to equate to a sort of functional life.

But, you know, it's not this thing where I'm like, ‘Oh, yay, now I finally get to get out of the sex industry’. Like, I'm really, really sad about it, actually. I guess, I started dancing at a time when I was really suffering from really severe depression and it really helped me. Not to say that my depression doesn't still flare up quite badly from time to time… Anyway, I'm here talking like I've already got the job. For all I know I definitely don't. And then as soon as I realized I don't have the job, I'll probably be complaining about dancing again, and how my knees hurt and how my feet hurt and how I have to spend $100 a week on Chiropractic and Myo therapy just so that I can walk.

But anyway, you'll probably find out in the next diary, I guess.