The strip club did indeed make me bonkers!
Peace. I’m here to talk about money.
This essay originally appeared in Former Stripper, Part-Time Visionary, a fundraiser text circulated in order to build a library in the author’s homeplace. The essay has been narrated in full below, edited for an internet-based audience. The topic of money can be disarming, alarming, and triggering for folks experiencing trauma because of capitalism, so the author invites a deep breath or two before beginning this essay.
Every time I do something ostensibly… odd in terms of personal finances, there appears, with the persistence of a greek chorus, sing-songy feedback inquiring about the strength of my sanity. Participants of the social internet (who I never know personally) kindly ask me if I am experiencing a bout of mania, if I have slept properly, if I am sureeeee about whatever financially wayward decision I am making. Many cite Western-style therapists (or tell me they themselves are therapists)— which, I suppose, grants them the authority to deem me absolutely off my rocker. For the record: I do not necessarily disagree with their conclusions (that I am off my rocker). It seems to me that we gaze at the same nutcase (hi!) with two distinct realities.
To begin, we have concepts of “sane” and “insane.” In this iteration of the world (that we all keep choosing to live in), sanity keep us coloring within the prescribed lines of thought by design (Bruce 2021).
Hello to you reading, by the way! Oooh, Oh my goodness. I feel like I'm being so rude.
I'm here with some milk coconut oolong tea and a touch of honey. It is my second steep; second steep is always better than the first one for me. I hope you're having a lovely morning or evening or whatever time of day you're listening to this. I hope you are having a lovely morning, or whatever time of day it is.
The majority of us engaging this essay adhere, generally, to the rules of the capitalist socioeconomic system, wherein: we exercise our imaginations for the sole purpose of creating better, more efficient, and more comfortable coping mechanisms to deal with the production demands of capital, and our actions reinforce that set of beliefs. Not only are we all complying with outsourcing or concentrating our labor and turning our labor into dollars (thus shackling us to time in a very particular manner), we're also only really exercising our information, our ability to create new things, the vastness of our minds… for the purpose of surviving under this system. But we're not really trained or even (for a lot of us) desiring to think beyond it.
The borders of the mind are the knowable and the safe (thus, the sane) and the unknowable, unsafe, uncharted deviance from compliance (insane).
I know this to be true because I, too, trained as a clinical therapist from an elite colonial school in the (so-called) United States. I remember how many small steps towards radicalization I took while filling out my client notes after session. My clients were low-income, often using Medicaid to cover the insurance bill on their sessions with me. Almost all of them had enough basis for me to diagnose them with generalized anxiety and depressive episodes so that I could bill their insurance. And all of them told me of moderate to extreme amounts of overwork that was actively ruining their life, their mental health, their bodies, their relationship with their families, (the list goes on). In this world making, maladies really only become problems when they interfere with one's ability to perform their daily job. So, I'm not supposed to write to insurance and say, “Hey, this person is working too much. And that's really the cause of all of the things that they come to see me for." I'm supposed to give you tools on how to cope with the amount of work that you have to do. Should your woes, or desperation, or depressions, or bursts of creative energy, or the counsels that you hold with the voices in your head– if any of those make it so that you wanna stop working, or such that you stop the habits that allow for such intense overwork, that is a deviation from sanity. That is when I am clinically trained to go under the table and hit the small red button marked “Insanity!! Intervention necessary!” In the best case scenario, we plan for you some sort of realignment so that you may orient yourself to the mission of capital production. In the worst case scenario, you are disappeared into the realm of unHuman (also known as institutionalization, a thriving part of the prison industrial complex).
A question arises: what do we become when we are no longer interested in coloring in the lines? From a revolutionary standpoint, I wrote an essay on this at the end of 2023 called “There Is No Revolution without Madness.” But for today, I would like to talk about money.
PART ONE: NOTES ON SANITY, FROM A FORMER STRIPPER
Reality is whatever we collectively witness. If you are in a reality where everything comes second to avoiding capitalist disaster— becoming jailed/imprisoned, homeless, hospitalized incarceration due to lack of sanity, unable to get enough money to keep yourself from starving— there are (1) a great many ways to die and (2) even more ways to become so subhuman that your blood becomes like fuel to the economic engines rather than a crucial part of your life (and subhuman enough such that no one really cares if your blood gets everywhere). If keeping yourself “safe" acts as your primary motivation, then someone risking imprisonment, homelessness, hunger, or being deemed mentally unstable would feel unthinkable. You might automatically move to correct them— it would make them crazy (with crazy defined here as: without a grip on reality).
(I did also write a bit about this in an essay called Therapists Are Also the Police, where I spoke about how working in the strip club at the same time that I had a full client caseload at a private practice revealed to me how much I cannot actually guarantee any of my clients confidentiality. But today, I’m talking about money.)
I am writing this essay about money to say: yes! Your assessments of me prove correct: I do not have a strong grip on the reality of capitalism! Thank you for noticinggg ♥ I actually just got in the habit of waking up each day and doing a little jig, such that I might shimmy and shake capitalism’s grip up off of me. This reality of capitalism is but one reality out of an infinite and ever-expanding range of what is possible, and this reality reaffirms itself as real only because we all choose to believe in it, and we choose to comply in it and we choose to reinforce these beliefs with our actions. The belief in the endless strength and the innate nature of capitalism crumbles when you cease to comply with it. And it will make you crazy.
“But ismatu,” you might be saying, “the social order exists whether I want it to or not. I didn’t ask for this! If you don’t pay your bills, you will die. Why would you want to be unsafe?”
Sure, more or less. I do subject myself to increased risk of premature death by noncompliance… Ooh, I really should introduce myself a little bit more.
My name is ismatu and I work for free.
I started working for free in 2023 and haven't looked back. All of the work that I do: client work, political education, farming rice, building libraries, et cetera– the work has grown over time and I don't charge for any of it. I don't fuck with paywalls. I don't keep anything that is ever behind a paywall there forever. I think education should be free. I think medical care should be free. I think food should be abundant. And so I move like it, which means that I do not lock my work behind the transactions that capitalism demands of us. And I'm still alive! It's been a few years, you know. We're still kicking. Still cute. Love this for me. What Muhammad Ali say?
I have just a few thoughts to add to this very Reasonable sense of panic. For one: I do not think reality is a monolithic situation. Multiple realities can exist at once, stacked on top of one another. I would argue that that's the case for this world as well. The reality of being someone born into generations and generations of institutional wealth is very different than the reality of being born into homelessness (like I was). So this manic, delusional, precarious world I skip and jump in is only manic, delusional or precarious if your primary lens roots itself in the capitalist (or aspiring capitalist) reality. From my point of view, I am having an amazing time! My life is beatific. I inspire millions across the globe to consider, flirt with, dip a toe in deviation for the sake of liberation.
Then: I don’t think this iteration of reality, this capitalism game we keep playing, is very safe at all! I get lectured a lot about safety and risk and all that stuff, right? But this capitalist game we're all playing, it literally runs on blood. I wasn't kidding about being made so subhuman that your blood gets converted into fuel. Okay? There’s lots of manufactured suffering and engineered scarcity and way too much child sacrifice for my tastes! Also, the numbers don’t make sense for the stakes! The game of capitalism lives and dies by the figures we made up on the screens we invented and not the numbers that rule the natural world. In essence: we are literally dying for figurative ideas, instead of the literal and non-negotiable rules outside of our control as humans. Like, for example, the number of trees. We made up currencies attached to nation-states. We made up the idea of a nation state as a whole. We didn't make up trees. Or the lifespan of a human animal. Or the rates at which our babies die. Or our global crop yield over the next three hundred years. Top soil! If we made up a different game where wealth was measured by how many people over 80 years old and under 10 years old lived in harmoniously without disease, I think we would all have a better time. But that’s just one idea. There are endless ideas. This game already isn’t very safe!
Finally: we who want desperately to be safe, in any world, oftentimes imagine being made unhuman under capitalism as this… instantaneous death. That’s where the objections come from— the idea that sanity (adherence at any cost) begets safety and insanity (deviance) means instant death. Let me go ahead and affirm for you— you do not always just die. The belief in the endless strength and innate nature of capitalism crumbles when you cease compliance and you live to see that oftentimes, you do not just die! There is, sure, often pain, often suffering. But— the process of realizing you are expendable bloodfuel slated for slavery or slaughter brings about pain and suffering in and of itself. Reorientation towards sovereignty (what if my blood belonged to me? What if my time belonged to me? What if my kids belonged to me?)— these mental reorientations naturally inspire the desire to deviate from the systems we have in place. In departing from Sanity, many of us do not survive, and indeed, many of us do not die. Sometimes, in your liminal space between Human and mortal, you do not perish instantly. You live to see all these different kinds of ways of life, all these in-between worlds you never would have known existed unless you fell far, far out from the gilded, VIP-only section of Eden and down into the lowcountry swamps.
Now, the idea that we made up money (in terms of US Dollars) is not in itself a revolutionary concept. We all know this intellectually at some point in time. I had known this for a long while, but that didn’t stop me from being physically compelled by the lack of it, or the need for it, or physically salivating at the sight of stacks of crisp, fresh out the bank bills. When I felt in my body, in my literal flesh, that money is entirely made up, that’s when I changed my actions. I stopped feeling motivated by money when my nervous system was no longer engaged by it.
I can tell you the exact moment it happened: I was looking up at Eden from my place as a bottom-feeder, drunk off champagne, upside down. My ankles, coated in a very gorgeous shiny fake leather, had no trouble holding onto a pole spinning my body around. God, I loved those shoes.
Anyways. The ceiling was low at this club I’d ended up in that new year— it was 2022, according to the Gregorian calendar— so you could literally see dollars floating down from the rafters. Blue-banded notes fell from the sky in flurries; everybody’s rent glittered in the air and curled up, languid, like a snow globe. Like cigar smoke. Many different iterations of Adams in suits had left their Eves at home to come patron their local Liliths for a few hours. Before this particular moment, I didn’t mind this prolonged in-between place of Human and mortal. I mean, I had my gripes. But I also had grips, if you feel me.
Copious amounts of cash made self-medication easy to maintain, which meant I could stave off the growling, unnameable disillusion indefinitely. Any time I almost saw my aching desires in their nakedness (I am enraged. I am so angry all the time. Fuck grad school fuck the debt it’s shackled me to fuck this job that keeps me up all night. I haven’t slept in 27 hours, literally. I am counting. I feel like I would be good at leading riots)— I take a deep breath. I would mentally make a note to check in with my therapist about internalized violence and proportionally increase my comforts in the meantime. Am I angry or do I just need a chai latte? With a double shot? And a blunt? Haha!
…Ha.
ismatu gwendolyn
I felt no need (or want) to look my questionings in the eye until they invaded me while the guard dogs of my mind were too sloshed to turn musings of dissent away at the gate. Picture: me, tits out, downright glittering, flowing through a stage set with my Prettiest Girl in the World ™ costume fused to my skin on some random Tuesday night (or was it Thursday? whatever. Time is amorphous), looking at a hollow place within myself where pleasure usually resides. The club is up because I am on stage and I am drunk off champagne, which means I pulled a room already. It’s a good money night. Where is my pleasure? Where is the rush?
Conclusions burned a tiny hearth in the center of my chest cavity: oh. I… don’t know that I care. I don’t care about this anymore. This is fake. Money is fake. All of this is made up and the rules can change at any time. Idk if I’m just drunk? Maybe I’m just crossed. This is why you don’t smoke at work, ismatu, now your brain can’t stop moving. But that shit looks like monopoly money. It literally looks fake. It might as well be actually— none of this actually matters.
I had a realization like this before, years ago. The first time I had ever forgotten I was reading, I remember hearing my name called for dinner and coming back into my body. I don't know if anyone's ever experienced this, maybe sometime in childhood or adolescence— maybe the first book that literally plucked you out of your current reality and placed you in a new one was recently— whatever it is, it's a lovely feeling. I remember hearing my mother call my name for dinner and like whooshing back into my body. And I remember thinking I had, for a moment, been so suspended in a different world I forgot my own name.
The book was Inkheart by Cornelia Funke and the accompanying thought train gave me shivers. It was similiar… parallell… flip sides of the same coin to the one I was having in the club. I forgot, having dissolved so thoroughly into the story, that Inkheart wasn’t real. Some lady named Cornelia just made it up! And I, for at least a few hours, lived inside of it. You can make up worlds. Again and again and again, you can make up a world.
ismatu gwendolyn
Back to the strip club: I’m spinning and spinning, trying to keep track of my mind. I remember tabling this moment, putting my money away in my locker, wrangling my meandering mind and stuffing it back in my locker (to be reinstalled at the end of my shift). I recall my thoughts feeling like molasses in a whiskey cocktail on the drive home, the tendrils congealing together, far more visible to my sober self. The money is fake. This world is made up. I just saw it. Like I saw the seams on this world. Money's fake. It's literally made up. If the money is fake, maybe I do not need to be ruled by it. This world does not need to be real. Maybe I am fake. Some weirdo genocidaires just made all this nonsense up and I am choosing to keep living in it. Maybe I am a separate entity from this world. Or, if I am not right now, maybe I could be. The rules can change at any time. This world is not the whole world after all, it’s just one layer of paint. Meaning: there is a world, a canvas under this painting that still exists. The world is malleable. The world will bend to our asking, if we only know how to ask. How do I ask? What would I ask for?
How do you ask, that world... the world… to make a new thing?
PART TWO: EVERY WEIRD THING I BELIEVE ABOUT MONEY CAME FROM THE STRIP CLUB
The Mechanics of Thought
Thought comes first. I repeat that small phrase to myself all the time: thought comes first. The primary place of production exists within the mind and what we see in our material world happens in response to our ideations. Is this counter to dialectical materialism? I’m really not sure, because I know that my thoughts are shaped by my material world. I would not have been praying for money coming in large quantities from wealthy men in sensible athleisure suits if my material circumstances as a stripper had not introduced me to the possibility of that particular possibility. I just think, from my entirely circumstantial and anecdotal experience, that human animals are thought-based creatures. What becomes in our minds becomes our material realities—sometimes, rather quickly. The actions that we take reinforce the beliefs we have in our mind, which then creates a positive feedback loop: it is and so you act like it is and so it is and so you act like it is and onward.
If you wish to engage your actions, you must first change your mind. If you wish to change your actions, you must first engage your mind. Humans don’t like to waste time on anything we fundamentally believe is impossible. So then: if you are moving towards something that feels… if not impossible, then deeply improbable— like making $3,000 in cash on a Thursday night. Or like mobilizing your neighbors to unseat and replace a local council member. Or like unionizing your workplace—if you want that which feels insurmountable, you must move towards those boundary points of insanity with a peaceful and persistent curiosity. You must inquire as to why you ever thought it was impossible in the first place. Who told you that? Why? What stake did that person or belief system or institution have in making sure that you never ventured over there, where your mind meets its limit? Are you sure that the limit exists? Are you sure that’s all you got?
Besides, your conscious mind is not all that great at ascertaining what you are good at. Within the internal self, there is the realm of what you know that you know— the conscious mind— and the two-part realm of what you know you do not know and what you cannot even begin to comprehend about yourself.
Because the conscious mind is easily programmable, and because it tends to make a lot of lofty declarations about the whole of yourself without knowing better, we regularly underestimate our capacities as humans— and we certainly underestimate the possibilities for the world around us. Moreover, we do not waste time on what we fundamentally believe is impossible. Which means, if you are working on something lofty, like getting way more money than you think you can, or like sustained community sovereignty within a hostile nation state apparatus, you must first align yourself with the belief that what’s coming is not just possible, but inevitable.
When gazing at the boundaries of your mind, those areas that suspiciously fade into black… what keeps you from venturing outside of the realm of sanity and towards those places of endless expanse?
The Necessity of Dreaming
Success (however you choose to define it) does not and cannot exist without a dream, and dreams can (and should) be intentionally constructed. The strip club may as well be a bootcamp for manifestation. Making large amounts of cash is a pretty improbable outcome on top of this particular job being verifiably a waste of money. Why pay hundreds (sometimes thousands) to look but barely touch? Who does that help?
You must (you literally must) become a tinge unhinged! Well... me, I thought to myself doing my eyeliner. It helps me. And I love help. I help other people with that help. I actually think totally think it’s reasonable to hand over $800… a thousand dollars… for an hour of my time. Why would you not? I am so gorgeous. I am literally the prettiest girl you’ll ever meet, and I want nothing more than to gaze at you. Basically I’m blessing you, and you’re helping me do that so I can be good to others too. This is actually the best money you’ll spend all week.
Of course it sounds silly. You know why I do not care? Because it works. Step one is believing those things about yourself, however self-ingratiating you might sound. You could literally never be a waste of money because you are a walking blessing (duh). Step two is believing that someone really is going to walk through the club doors and agree with you. And then you have to fill in the gap between this idealized reality and this lived reality with actions that bolster your belief. Which means: no matter the day you had, or the way you feel about your personality or your body, or that bullshit boyfriend— whatever is stressing you out, you have gone through the ritual. You have filled your head with simple beliefs to get straight forward outcomes. You have put your brain in a jar and the jar in your locker. You have really amazing lip gloss on. You, even if just for the next few hours, are the prettiest girl in the world, without exaggeration. Who arguing with you? Not me! Then: you walk out on the floor. You are the exact right person to give a thousand dollars in cash to just because.
This logic is transferrable to anything that feels even mildly impossible. You are the exact right person to unseat the current governor of California (shade intended). You are precisely the being needed to upgrade the water pipelines in your municipality so that we can survive the next few hundred years with water that comes into your house. You are exactly the right person to do your dishes before bed so that you wake up really pleased about having a clean kitchen. Of course you can learn Mandarin! Of course you can secure housing for yourself and your family! Of course you can manage to make a full-time living working in the role of public servant that nobody asked for with materials that are free anyways (as is my case). The dream, once undeniable, is addictive, and human people like to participate in the making of a new thing. It’s gorgeous to participate in the making a new thing. This is how you present the world with a reality you want to call down.
I am not saying the way is easy. I am saying: voyage down the road often starts with envisioning the destination and believing that destination is likely should you set out. Should you engage in your rituals. Should you do the work.
Within liberatory spaces, I often see plans designed to mitigate suffering, but no vision of what a world looks like where we have won, top to bottom. People generally act to mitigate their suffering, but very few people act to win. I want to win. I don't wanna have to negotiate with suffering, I want to win. What does it look like to win in whatever realm or time or circumstance most relevant to you? What does it look like, feel like, act like, taste like to win? How would planning, programming, daily work, mass work, education, moving with finances, how would all those things look different if we move from the surety of success rather than the constant fear of failure or the mitigation of suffering? What does it look like to win?
Money is something different than Dollars.
Again: this idea made itself clear intellectually, but took a while to internalize physically and metaphysically. Money is a method of materializing the energy of exchange, so that our means (materials) of exchange can be faster, more efficient, and more honest. Money predates capitalism. In many parts of the world, money will subsist after capitalism finally stops its thrashing and violent death. God, wouldn’t it be thrilling? To see that day? Isn’t it lovely, how close all that feels? I digress. I have no idea whether I want moneyless societies or not, I will be honest. I cannot tell how much of that longing is because I genuinely desire to see what is possible, and how much of that desire stems from trauma relating to US Dollar bills (which are only valuable because of the blood they are soaked in). Money doesn’t need all the blood sacrifice. Money was designed as a medium of exchange; David Graeber, in his book Debt, argues that many societies invented money as an easier means of having, collecting, mitigating, paying debt (which again leads us back to the energy of exchange).
Ever since I heard that the Mayans utilized seeds as money (Phi 2021), I have always thought of it as something with a shelf life. Money expires. Money is a perishable item. How will you plant it before it rots? And, ever since the strip club, I have thought about money in this world-making as something addictive. No drug I have ever tried compares to the feeling of watching it rain thousands because of you. Money is drug, I am telling you. It feels so good that you’re tempted to excuse all the blood on it. How do I use this drug responsibly while I make a new world?
It can be helpful to define for yourself what money and wealth mean to you. So:
Wealth, for me, is measured in time.
Money and wealth are not the same thing. Money is the amount of energy you have to exchange at any given point in time for whatever outcome you desire numerated into a standardized exchange. Wealth is the conduction of that energy into systems that create for you sovereignty over your time. These are my personal definitions— not telling you that you need to feel this way, I am telling you how I feel. Which means that I personally (me, ismatu), do not care how much paper or digital money I garner in this life. I know that I can do without material human comforts (even the ones that make a dignified Human existence in this particular word). What feels imperative to me is that I never, ever return to the state of time poverty I was in. Once I entered into the working world (at a ripe and grown sixteen years old), I began the slow and brutal process of working myself to death. It’s so funny— I’m re-flourishing with a old friend (we’re at almost ten years of friendship now) and in telling her about my adult life, she’s nearly leaping for joy at how I have a regular sleep schedule. She really got to witness so many iterations of time poverty: I got up, worked at school, worked at church, worked at my myriad of paying after-school gigs, worked on homework until I fell asleep on my books from exhaustion, and did it again. From high school to college to graduate school. I did not own myself in waking or in sleeping, as sleeping was only to refuel for work. My mind was relegated to fantasies of survival; if you had asked me my wildest dreams at any of these points, I would have said, “A week off to sleep.” I dreamt of college, to escape from minimum wage jobs, so that I could… work for a living. I dreamt of graduate school so that I could… have a licensed professional class job, so I could work for living, but from a plush office chair. I was in graduate school dreaming of death. Dreaming of death and taking drugs to stay awake.
To create is to channel the divine; when your material circumstances box your mind into only thinking of how to survive them, you create nothing. You accept the world as given. That, in and of itself, is a death.
Time poverty degraded me. I ain’t sleep. By the time I was grinding my way through graduate school, I had no time to sleep. There would be stretches— one or two days— where I literally did not have time to go to bed. I would watch two sunrises in a row without an hour of unconscious rest in between. Sometimes, three. I will never, ever, return to that state of time poverty ever again. I do not care how much precarity defaulting on the payments to the world of capitalism brings; I want time. I like to be with my family. I want time to spend in my homeplaces. I want time to eat ripe fruit with such slow reverence it looks downright sexual. Time. I want time.
Time does not intrinsically “cost” money, by the way. Those are the rules of this iteration of world-making, but that is not some innate reality. Time’s mediums of exchange require effort, connections, focus, planning, foresight, and diligence. In this world of capitalism, many of these concentrations can be purchased with money, so that someone else creates for you more space to exercise your ability to bend time to your liking. That’s a better way to describe wealth, actually: the ability to bend time to your liking. However, there are many ways we can seize back our time. I believe this bit was the most radicalizing thing about working in the strip club: learning that nothing was more important to me than sovereignty over the way I spent my time.
This was the most radicalizing thing about working in the strip club: ;earning that there was nothing more important to me than sovereignty over the way I spent my time. By the way, I became a stripper because I still had to work for a living to pay my rent while I was also doing clinical work that paid $0.00 but was a necessity for my degree. And I needed like 2000 hours of clinical work per academic year or something crazy like that. Like I'm working for free for a degree that I'm paying for… really I'm paying to work. Nonsense, right? So I had a very small amount of time to make enough money to feed myself and to make sure that I had money to send home and whatnot. So I pursued sex work because I was like, “This is the only job that I can work 10 hours a week and make like one, two, three, four thousand dollars. Because there's no way."
When we have time to think, new realities occur to us. There was a point in time in which I took a prolonged unplanned break from graduate school, so the only thing that I was doing was being a stripper. And I was like, so this is what it feels like to work 15 hours a week and then just be able to get to do what I want? Whatever I was doing before? I'm never going back. When we have time to think, new realities occur to us. When we have time to think persistent recurring thoughts about potential new realities, we can begin to actually act upon them.
A relevant side note: there are many ways we can act with effort, foresight, diligence (etc.) to realize our greatest goods without exchanging dollar bills. It just requires prolonged thought.
Time freedom, time sovereignty, goes beyond spending it on loved ones or pleasures. In terms of first priority, I am in need of time to pray. Do you see the feedback loop? I get time; I gift it to my imagination. Me and my mind and my Benevolent Divine, we sit in contemplative prayer and focused acquisition of our greater desires. The focus yields a concretized vision, which in return brings us to actions which create more time. The feedback loop goes around like this. I act and so then it is and so I act like it is and so that it is— except for the return on this investment is not necessarily money (although it could be). It's time. It's that I get more time. That I get more time to spread. I believe that this works and because I believe it works I move like it does, and time falls into my hands, and then I gift it to my imaginings and my imagination leads me to new actions which produce more time. Repeat. Repeat. I love this song.
So much better than working for money is working for time.
Ordering my thoughts allows for me to pull my desires out from their germination space in the ether and make them material. The life I live now comes from ordained, ordered thought and consistent prayer, and then the shaping of my actions to concretize those beliefs, bolstered and fueled by the love and kindness of quasi-strangers, who love participating in a different dream. That’s why people do this with me! And send me $5 so I can keep going! Because everyone loves what it feels like to concretize a new dream!!
This is why love the strip club; it feels like a liminal space, like purgatory, where you can see Eden and damnation with a side of truffle fries. That’s why people like these parts of my life I share online; I fundamentally feel like this method of living is contagious. I believe if you ask the earth to show you her wildest beauties, she will bless you with fruit. She will direct you to her children.
* * *
Anyways, the odd thing that I did that spurred on this essay and this book at the time of writing was that I dumped out my entire savings to procure a library in Sierra Leone— a children's library. At the time of circulating, I have also stressed people out about money yet again. I think because I said like, I would rather prioritize the rice harvest over my own individual safety. And people were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're deviating from sanity. LOL Welcome!
I do these things because… I felt like I should. When I became a stripper, my methodology was the exact same. I had this eerily inexplicable, haunting belief that I was just…supposed to shake my ass for rent money and that everything would work out. I spent every penny I had except for what I needed to live for the next forty days or so. I bought a 2007 Toyota in cash and drove it across the country in a sure faithfulness of a job I literally did not have yet. I said, aloud, many times, “I fundamentally believe this will work.” If it didn’t work, I have no clue what I would have done. But it did work, so... :)
Same loop of thought in a different iteration of time is right here: I watched myself become too attached to a life smaller than what I am capable of. I felt a need to write about money and its uses in my life because (1) I work for free and (2) I oftentimes use the money I do have on systems outside of me (even though I depend on the systems that I am implementing). Apparently these habits are stressful to many of you watching me grow and radicalize in public. While working on an essay about the internal structures of the @ismatu.gwendolyn experiment, I realized that none of my current praxis on money was going to make sense if I didn’t take the time to tell you how to the strip club truly did detached my nervous system from US Dollar bills and forced me to consider what money could do if I did not believe in the innate nature of the world of capital.
The biggest lesson I got from the strip club was this: money is everywhere. Especially in this world making, where dollars (or other currencies of the nation-state) are backed up by nothing but belief, money is truly limitless. If that is the case: why would I hoard it? What would happen if I focused on learning how to conduct its movement as a perishable item rather than make a mad grab for something that falls from the sky? Being a stripper taught me that money can fall out of the sky.
Radical change requires radical action. If I wish to significantly depart from the systems of capital currently in place, how does that not include how you move with money? Then: I don’t know that this is true of everyone, but my feedback loop requires expansion. After about a year of deciding to work for free, I finally yielded enough to be sufficient for my everyday circumstance and to take care of my family. I finally made it to a place of comfort. This was the summer 2024, and I was making about $8,000 per month despite not charging for any of my work. Great news! Especially since my mom got a cancer diagnosis a few months prior, the money from the gofundme was gone, and I had to figure out how to pay all her bills and my own. It was doable. Then I had to fuck around and want bigger, wider things slated to live a lot longer than me. You might say to yourself, using your food money on a pipe dream is crazy. Why do you need to build a library? Why do you need to farm rice? I would respond: is it not so marvelous? To want the world you see in your head more than you want the food here on the ground? I didn’t know it was possible to want a dream more than I could want food. What an incredible, stupendous turn of events.
Conclusions
To close out this essay: I spent a little less than three years as a stripper before I tumbled out of the club and into a life of being a full-time nutcase. I did not realize how much of my thought processes, methodologies, social skillset, and risk calculation came directly from the time I spent as *insert stripper name here.* Brandy? Wish I would have been Brandy.
This essay opened out a text I circulated to fund the construction of a library. I entitled it Former Stripper, Part-Time Visionary and sold it just for a few months (simply to test the ecology). I’ll attach the PDF below in case you want to read; it’s a conglomeration of previously published essays in chronological order, really showcasing the expansion of my thought over time.
The “part-time visionary” bit comes from the fact that the radicalizing I was doing (most of which were written in 2023)— getting into political education, spearheading farming initiatives for my tribe in Sierra Leone, writing more political essays, working on a donation-based model— all those breaks from our common systems in between what we expect of people with money and what I actually considered my life. I did not wake up one day and go, “I want to be known as a revolutionary force.” I took teeny, daily steps towards what I felt in my bones was the right answer for the time. I would not be half as grounded in the systematic improvement material circumstances if I had not become a materialistic at my local strippery. So then: former stripper is an honorific to me, as sex work was foundational to some of my most poignant thought and action.
Being full-blown stripper in real and physical life set me on a path that forced me to deviate from sanity. The more I felt out a new method of living, the more I did stuff that reinforced the reality that I witnessed as possible (rather than the one that’s constantly being sold to me). My chapters in sex work fundamentally shaped my person for the better; I am a more self-aware, more compassionate, a more strategic, kinder and disciplined individual. The (allegedly) revolutionary stuff I do really occurs as a byproduct of my reorientations— in other terms, it’s the work I do part-time. I write so that I can fund programs that make survival easier and that give us time and space to dream about thriving. Right now, that looks like building a library (or two. Hopefully, two). That’s where your dollars go: keeping me alive and paying for the works of my head to be born out of my hands. But that’s another day’s essay!
Today: thank you for reading. I hope the work of your day passes through your hands with ease.
(or, simpler said: peace)
ig
Works Cited
Bruce, La Marr Jurelle. “Chapter One: Mad Is a Place.” How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness at Black Radical Creativity, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2021.
Phi, Nila. “2-Minute History of Money & Seeds.” SEEDS Library, Seeds Collaboratoy DAO, 13 July 2021, seedslibrary.earth/2-minute-history-of-money-and-seeds/.
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