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Archive for January 2nd, 2022

Rooted in the Past

Posted in Biography, Philosophy, tagged , on January 2, 2022| 1 Comment »

It’s hard to believe it has already been a year since I semi-retired, which means it’s been 22 years since I started escorting full time, 27 years since my first husband left me, and just a few days shy of 37 years since the first time I accepted money for sex.  But despite my life being different in a number of ways from what it looked like in 2015, and quite different from what it looked like in 2005, and extremely different from what it looked like in 1995 and 1985, I’m still the same person in many ways.  Obviously I’m much older and much wiser and far more satisfied with my life, even if it doesn’t look anything like 1985 Maggie would have imagined it would look.  And yet, there’s a clear line of continuity across all those decades, and even the changes which might seem major to outsiders (such as moving from librarian to whore, from Louisiana to Washington, and from nigh-total abstinence to daily drug use) are in reality rooted in what went before, in the same way plot developments late in a novel might be foreshadowed in the early chapters.  This was driven home for me just two weeks ago, when one of my cousins suddenly decided to re-establish communication after almost 30 years of none.  We were very close friends for several years in our mid-teens, but when I went to UNO and she went to LSU we lost touch as so often happens, and though we would chat amiably every time she came into the library, we both had poorly-chosen husbands to deal with and she lived on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain.  Apparently, her mother brought me up in conversation at Thanksgiving and it made her realize how much she missed me, so she contacted my sister on Facebook and we were soon playing catch-up.  Once I told her about my activism, she decided to watch the many videos available on YouTube and was struck by how little my vocal inflections, mannerisms, and the like had changed since those long-ago and far-off days when I’d ride my bicycle over to her house and we’d hang out all afternoon doing the sorts of things that seem very important when you’re 15.  Her timing was very good, because next week I’m headed to Miami for a conference, and after that I plan to stop by the New Orleans area for a visit; it’ll be good to see her again after so long, and I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t the first of a series of such returns, unexpected and yet foreshadowed, old loose threads being gathered together to serve a new function in the story of my life.

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