Where the Flies Swarm

TW: financial abuse, trafficking, rape, abusive situations This post is mainly directed towards people who are living in abusive situations and relationships, people who are looking for ways to get a little safer and hopefully break free from the grasp an abuser may have trapped you with. We live in a digital world. Human sex trafficking is more complicated than the physical violence, invasion, and physical abuse. There are elements of digital stalking, financial abuse, threats, abuse of information, blackmailing, dark web, and other digital elements that make the trafficking world much more difficult to navigate when trying to escape. I can only speak to my experience , and my escape took years because of the digital aspect of abuse and trafficking. The concept of ownership was more than just physical. While being trafficked, my John owned my body, as well as my money, my phone, my wallet/identifications, my time, and my information. After I was able to escape the physical deman...

I wanted to dedicate a post about my struggle with  depersonalization . For those of you who don't know, and according to  Wikipedia , depersonalization is a dissociative  p henomenon characterized by a subjective feeling of detachment from oneself, manifesting as a sense of disconnection from one's thoughts, emotions, sensations, or actions, and often accompanied by a feeling of observing oneself from an external perspective.  It can involve someone feeling as if they are observing moments from a distance.  Depersonalization can happen as a dissociative state happening in present time, but it can also exist long-term, separating the belief that trauma existed from the self. In other words, one can believe that their trauma never actually happened to them,  but rather happened to someone else, or not at all.  This is something that I went through, and still go through from time to time. Every once in a while, I get intrusive thoughts that my ...

  TW: rape, dog being injured This is my dog. His name is Dog. His full name is Dog Puppy Arylide . He's a Jack Russel and Toy Fox Terrier mix, and he's also the love of my life. He is a huge part of my trafficking story, because he's been my companion since 2019, when I first got him as a puppy. We've been through so much together. Mostly good times, but he's also seen the ugly parts of my life too, including some trafficking events that he was present for. He also aided me with companionship every time I'd return home from servicing and being trafficked.     Dog is also an ESA (Emotional Support Animal) which means that he's not medical equipment or professionally trained to aid in my disability like a Service Dog, but he has certain privileges that help me with my disabilities. For example, he can travel with me on trains or airplanes, he can stay with me in hotels at no extra cost, and he can live with me despite "no pets" rules or "pet f...

TW: trafficking, transphobia I've been asked before if my transgender/gay identity is a result of being trafficked. I've also been asked this invasive question by healthcare professionals. To ask this question is to make the mistake of assuming a cisgender/heterosexual identity is a default setting that people acquire at birth, and to assume that to be LGBTQIA+ is a result of something "gone wrong." Lots of people make these assumptions without even realizing it, and they should be called in and corrected when making these assumptions. Being LGBTQIA+ is natural , just as natural as being cisgender/heterosexual. Sexual or gender identity is not a choice, but something that should be explored and identified with curiosity, freedom, and joy.  My journey with my gender identity is my own, and so I only speak for myself. I believe there are as many genders as there are people who walk the earth, because it's such a personal and detailed thing to identify with. I ident...

  The Scream , from the poem Fire TW: SA, grooming, religious trauma If you're a survivor of sexual assault, harassment, stalking, trafficking, or anything of the sort, I'm sure you'd be asked one of these ridiculous questions after sharing your truth: why didn't you run away? why didn't you scream? why didn't you tell someone? why didn't you report it? why didn't you go to the police? why didn't you fight back? These questions come from an ignorant place of someone who has no clue how abuse works. It's not your fault if you didn't do any of the previously mentioned responses. The definition of "grooming" is  the "practice of preparing or training someone for a particular purpose or activity." Grooming is an essential step an abuser takes to ensure that their victim will participate, be quiet, and not question the abuser. After a long period of grooming, I faced abuse with no surprise. There was never a voice in my head th...

TW: rape, trafficking, suicide Apart from visual arts and poetry, I've always had a heart for creating music. I started making music in high school, when I played the piano and wrote several classical pieces. I still have the book I wrote them in! I'd love to relearn them some day. I can't play as well as I used to but I'd love to hear the pieces I wrote and see them come to life again.  I took a break from writing music while in college, because I simply didn't have the time between assignments and not sleeping. Music became something more distant to me, something I "used to do" instead of being constantly engulfed in it. However, during quarantine (2020), I bought myself a keyboard. I hooked it up to my laptop and began creating again. I simply was inspired by other artists and wanted to see what my sound would be like after so many years of not making music. Unexpectedly, the sounds I was creating were much different than the ones I had made in the past...

  Each poem throughout  Where the Flies Swarm comes with a work of art that reflects the emotions the writing conjures within me. All of the following works of art were created by myself throughout different points of time during my sex trafficking experiences. For example, the works named Reaching, Changing for Worse, and Too Many were created in high school (2010-2013), closer to the beginning of my sex trafficking story. Mask and Many Faces were created during my time in college (2013-2017), and the rest of the works were created after 2017.         Most of these works are self-portraits. This is because through my years of trauma, as well as after exiting the trafficking world, I have used my artwork to reflect and identify elements of my mind, soul, feelings, and my internal relationship with my well-being.  It took me a long time to be able to shift focus onto myself, and until that happened, I hadn't considered escape, safety, or a bette...

  Changing for Worse Trigger Warning: sexual abuse/human trafficking/religious trauma      It’s really hard to recall most of my traumatic my experiences in a concrete way. Everything was so frequent and normal that I didn’t consider it wrong, let alone label it with a word like “abuse” or “trafficking.” I actually didn’t make the connection that I was being trafficked until my senior year of college. To pinpoint where it started is difficult too. I have more language now, more education, more space for safety to look back and say “that was wrong” or “that shouldn’t have happened,” but as a child growing up with no knowledge of consent or autonomy, I never considered the things happening to me were wrong. Therefore, to figure out when the trafficking started is difficult. To point out the difference between trafficking and domestic abuse is also hard to say. Who’s to say they didn’t happen at the same time, or somehow played a part in each other? It took years of the...

 The editing process for Where the Flies Swarm took months, and with lots of help from editor Sarah Henry , the book began to take form. Sarah is an artist of many mediums, and a dear friend that I've known for a long time. I knew that they were the person I wanted working on this project with me. I spent time helping write for their blog , and really enjoyed the team I was able to work with. Everyone was so welcoming, inviting, encouraging, and accepting of my self and who I was. Because of this connection, I reached out to Sarah Henry and invited her to be a part of the Where the Flies Swarm project.     Before handing the manuscript off to Sarah, I had cut some poems that I loved dearly, but didn't think they fit quite well in Where the Flies Swarm . They were mostly poems that were important to the process of developing a narrative for the book, but the writing style didn't qu ite match the rest of the book; I wanted Where the Flies Swarm to be unified, and unf...

  Still Amidst the Pain TW - loss of pregnancy/violence      While reflecting on my collection of poems before publishing, I realized I needed to come up with a title to tie it all together. At first, I had the idea of naming the book after one of my favorite original paintings, "Still Amidst the Pain." This painting (pictured above) is about living with the after-effects of an unwanted abortion, which was one of the most difficult elements of trafficking that I've yet to completely recover from (and probably never will). I am still amidst the pain off loss that I went through years ago, when a John took care of it himself in the back of his van.     I actually have two poems in Where the Flies Swarm about this terrifying memory. The poems that describe my experiences through this abortion are called "I Wanted to Keep It -  Forgotten" and "I Wanted to Keep It - Tantrum." These poems were originally one, but I had decided to divide ...