This book is dedicated to my mother Lillian. Who always told me "Life is not about learning to weather the storms, it's about learning to dance in the rain!" β I love you mother, thank you so much for all you've done to help me become the person I am.
Chapter 1
My name is Jessica Fox. This is not my real name, but for reasons of anonymity this is the name I've chosen for myself. I share these stories with you as therapy of sorts. I suffered from exhaustion at work, had a breakdown of sorts and finally was forced to take an extended vacation from the law firm I work for. Yes, I'm an attorney. I'm fully aware of how most of society views my profession. This view is also one of the factors that brought me to my therapist. She became my dear friend and helped me through a very difficult time in my life. I'm finally back to living and loving life again and for that I will be forever in her debt. I will change her name to Dr. Davis for the sake of story telling and anonymity.
My recovery back into normal life was almost a six month process. Dr. Davis, getting me to talk openly told me that 'confession was good for the soul'. She assured me that absolutely anything I confided to her was in the doctor / patient confidentiality category. Short of running bamboo sticks under her fingernails, she would share my information with no one, for any reason. I began to open up on our first visit. She came to the conclusion after my second visit that I had pent up guilt for things I've done that was tearing at my soul. She gave me homework. (I had told her I like to write) I was to write my confessions down and bring them to her on every visit. I returned home after this assignment and poured myself a drink. A huge load was removed from my shoulders simply being away from work. This sort of thing happens regularly in my profession. Mine was a rather complicated and drawn out reason. My law firm had no problem giving me time off. My cases were doled out to my fellow attorneys and a junior attorney was brought on to pick up any other loose ends and take on the simple cases. I had nothing but time to keep me company. I sat at my computer and stared at the screen for quite some time before I began to type. Once I started I found it hard to stop. I began writing down all the things I'd been keeping inside me that I shared with no one up to this point. Dr. Davis was right. The act of simply writing it down was a medicine unto itself. It felt good to confess. It also felt good to be writing again. At work I wrote every day, but they were legal briefs and such and completely boring. Still I tried to write with style and flair. At one point in college I was a journalism major. I loved to write. I would write about anything I felt strongly about. But a professor told me mediocre writers are a dime a dozen and the pay is terrible. He convinced me to change majors to something that would provide a decent income. I changed my major to law. I'd been a star on the high school debate team. Something I did on a dare, a joke as it were. I was one of the popular girls. It was suppose to be an initiation of sorts into some sort of club. It turned out that I loved it. I loved to argue (just ask my mom) and here was a perfect outlet to unleash a pent up intellectual hunger. I became the debate teams 'ringer'. We were in a national competition and came in 5
th
in a line up of 50 teams.
A good line right now would be "and I never looked back." But that would be a lie. I had been looking back. Had becoming a lawyer been a big mistake? Maybe yes, maybe no. It certainly did provide a nice income, no doubts there.
I printed out my first week's worth of confessions for my next session with Dr. Davis. After handing them to her I felt almost overcome with shame. She was about to read some extremely personal and (what I felt were) shameful things about me. Things I've never shared with anybody before. EVER. She asked me what was wrong and I began crying. So began our second session together. She didn't read my confessions while I was there. Instead we talked about shame and guilt and forgiveness of ones self.
The next afternoon my phone rang. It was Dr. Davis. She had an excitement in her voice. "Jessie, your writing skills are very good. I mean really! I thought I was reading a wonderful erotic novel! You might be in the wrong profession dear! As for the content of your stories (this was the first time she referred to them as 'stories'), well, we have some serious talking to do. I think I know the root of a lot of your issues." She never referred to them as problems, always issues. Our next session, I brought more confessions / stories. During our conversation that afternoon she did a bit of confessing of her own. She said she had found herself fantasizing about my stories when her husband and she were making love. That, shortly after reading my first story she masturbated. Her telling me THAT put all sorts of new shit in my brain to feel bad about, and I told her this. That began the catalyst for analyzing my current issues.
I felt I was a raging slut. I thought I might be a nymphomaniac. I felt I was probably an alcoholic and drug addict . . . all these things came pouring out and to the surface. Dr. Davis assured me she had extensive experience dealing with people who suffered from these things, and I was not any of them.
I felt I was a raging slut: I tried to count one night, the number of people I'd had sex with in my life. I was 33 years old at this time. I lost my virginity when I was 17. My sex life was 16 years old and I estimated (I had to estimate, I was disgusted with myself!) I had had sex with between 50 and 60 different people! That's three and a half people per year! Let's round that up to four people per year since I've never actually had sex with a circus freak. Dr. Davis explained that a real slut would have no idea how many sex partners they'd had. They'd have sex with strangers at the drop of a hat. They rarely masturbate; instead they'd go out and pick up a partner for real sex. They'd do this several times a week, some would have periods where they do this every single day of the week and would carry on for weeks on end with this sort of behavior. The most sluttish day of my life I did three different people in
one day
. Two men and one woman.
I rarely used condoms. And this fact alone always weighed heavily on me. I've been ever so lucky in my life. I felt as though I was taunting God, playing Russian roulette with my life. In all my time of sexual exploration (we call it that instead of "Slutting Around") I only suffered one STD, and antibiotics cleared that up.