I used to be an S worker, and I live with that regret every…

I used to be an S worker, and I live with that regret every single day. I don’t really have anyone to talk to about it. I’m 26, and sometimes I feel like I’m carrying this secret that’s slowly eating me alive. My friends don’t know. My family doesn’t know. And honestly, I’m terrified they ever find out.

From the outside, I look fine. I smile, I work hard, I run my business, I travel sometimes, I post the occasional happy photo. But deep down, I still feel like I’m paying for the choices I made in my early twenties.

I didn’t have a bad childhood .I was adopted and raised by a single mom who loved me deeply. She gave me everything she could. I just took a wrong turn somewhere. After community college and COVID hit, I got lost. I didn’t have direction, didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere, and one day I made a choice that would change everything. I started doing sex work.

It started small just hanging out with older men, pretending to be someone I wasn’t, making them feel special for money. It wasn’t even real intimacy, just a lot of pretending and loneliness. I wasn’t sleeping with anyone, but I was still selling pieces of myself that I can never get back.

I told everyone I was a yoga teacher, an entrepreneur technically not a lie, but the truth was hidden under so much shame. The money wasn’t great, and it came with this deep emptiness that I didn’t understand until much later.

When I started working at an Asian spa in 2022, that was my breaking point. I thought it would just be another job, but it became the worst decision of my life. I saw sides of people that I can’t unsee. And I saw sides of myself that scared me.

Around that same time, I met a group of amazing girls beautiful, smart, educated, ambitious. They had real jobs, real dreams, real plans. I wanted to be like them so badly, but I was living a lie. I kept flaking, making excuses, hiding behind stories.

They never knew the truth, and I assumed they’d never accept me if they did. Eventually, they stopped talking to me after a trip that just didn’t go well. I don’t blame them. But losing them broke something in me.

It’s been three years, and I still think about them. I still check their social media sometimes, seeing how well they’re doing, and it makes me ache with regret. I wish I could tell them who I really was back then. Maybe they wouldn’t have accepted it, but at least it would’ve been honest.

After that, I tried to start over. I went back to school, became an aesthetician, and built a small business. I gained weight, lost confidence, turned to alcohol for a while to cope but I got sober. I lost the weight. I rebuilt myself from the ground up.

Now I’m back in my hometown, working at a luxury spa, doing okay on paper. But inside, I’m still learning how to forgive myself. People from my past have tried to reconnect, but I always pull away. I’m scared of being asked too many questions. I’m scared they’ll see right through me.

Sometimes I tell myself that nobody needs to know that I can just keep moving forward, build a new life, and leave the past behind. But then there are nights when the guilt hits so hard I can’t sleep. I want to tell someone. I want to be seen and accepted for everything I was and everything I am now.

I’ve turned my life around, but the shame still lingers. It makes me quiet when I should speak, distant when I should open up. I feel like I’m in this weird space too old to start over, too young to give up. Everyone around me seems to be getting promotions, getting engaged, starting families, and I’m just here trying to forgive the girl I used to be.

If you’ve ever made mistakes that haunt you, I get it. It’s hard to move forward when your past still whispers your name. But I’m learning that healing isn’t about erasing what happened, it’s about slowly accepting that you’re still worthy of love, forgiveness, and peace, even after everything.

I’m not there yet, but I’m trying.

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