My recent post about social anxiety and isolation and how a sex worker might be able to help you is, at the end of the day, a bit “theoretical”.  Yes I say things about how I can help, but can I really?  So I asked a client I’ve known for several years now what her (entirely virtual) experience with me has been like as someone with social anxiety. This is her response.

“I’ve lived with severe social anxiety disorder since age twelve, so I don’t often talk to people socially, especially men. I had no idea how to flirt let alone go on dates, and sex seemed impossible when my only reaction to a (very rare) man’s interest was ‘oh god, please stop talking. I’m so uncomfortable. Please go away.’

Enter John Oh. I contacted John during the start of the pandemic when pretty much every country was locked down. But I live in the U.S., so why was I emailing an escort from Australia when travel was absolutely out of the question? I started reading John’s blog after I learned about him in Hallie Lieberman’s BuzzFeed article about straight male sex workers for women, and I felt like he could handle my ‘situation.’

Reading his blog, I discovered that older virgins like myself are not the freakish anomaly society makes us out to be, and we have a variety of reasons for our circumstances. This made me feel less alone and even a little hopeful, so I decided to see if I could handle just talking to John.

And that’s what it really came down to: could I talk to a man–about myself, my life, my wants and desires–like a regular human being without being crushed and ultimately silenced by anxiety? This is what we worked on starting with email and casual topics like my love of cats or the novels of Terry Prattchet, things you might talk about on a first date or chatting with a new friend. We started with email and moved on to exchanging texts and pictures a few times a week, the regularity of which gave me something to look forward to and made my feel more relaxed and open with the things I was willing and able to discuss.

But video chat was a whole other level. The element of virtual face-to-face meeting and the fact that I actually had to speak filled me with dread. How would I avoid looking ridiculous or saying something wrong when communicating in real time?! I forced myself to do it. There’s something about John’s smile that’s disarming. As soon as I saw his smiling face looking at me across time zones and the camera, my heart rate slowed. I remembered ‘this is someone you’ve talked to before, someone you talk to often. He knows you’re awkward; it will be okay’ And it, of course, was okay.

It was the unfamiliar that felt familiar. Yes there were silences in the conversation. They felt uncomfortable, and I survived. We had more video chats, and I learned that silences do not have to be filled with my panic. I learned through listening to John and observing his patience how one can have slower, more thoughtful conversations with a person–that a topic does not desperately have to be grasped from thin air lest we ‘have nothing to talk about.’ With practice, I learned how to have an authentic conversation, discuss, listen, and not get distracted by the voices in my head shrieking that I’ll say or do something stupid.

Now, it wasn’t lost on me during this time that I was paying John to talk to me and, in a sense, make me feel good. But that line of argument didn’t ruin or invalidate anything for me. I was getting comfortable and confident talking to a man about myself and therein getting confident in myself. It didn’t matter whether or not John was blowing smoke up my ass because it was changing the way I felt about being myself when talking with another human being.”

So if you have social anxiety and/or feel isolated in your life – physically or mentally – then you are welcome to reach out to me.

John