I have read maybe a hundred blog posts and comment pieces about ‘entitled millennials’ and wept with frustration over the idea that I take anything for granted or believe that the world owes me a living. I know, better than anyone, that a career like this isn’t a right. It’s a prize to be won, through late nights, and extreme tiredness, and fear and vulnerability and humiliation. Being a good writer isn’t good enough.

The office is warm, and quiet. At least Harri didn’t make me go back to a different orgy. At least I’m getting paid to sit and think, and I’m not staggering between work experience and a ten hour factory night shift. This really isn’t so bad, it could be so much worse.

The piece needs to be sexier. How could last night have been different, in my imagination? What would I write if I were blogging about my ideal orgy?

Louise’s voice floats through me. I’ve been reading about this thing called imposter syndrome. Yeah, well, talk to me when you’re a professional orgy-goer whose wildest bedroom urges involve seventy-two hours of uninterrupted sleep.

Sex used to be my constant craving, my release. When the world was really weighing down on me, orgasms were all I had. That was why I started my own blog—I felt compelled to write, and to make myself come. Work and worry burned me out, but sex brought me back to my body. Touch has always been my love language, and instinctively, I’ve touched myself when I have not felt loved enough. It has nourished me, and as well as bringing me peace, rest and freedom, it opened up a creative space.

Now, I’ve sold something sacred, and private, and made it public. I don’t feel ashamed of who I am, and what I want. But I realise that the magic has been compromised. Now that sex is work, my mind has nowhere else to go. And it needs a special space.

I revisit a favourite old fantasy. I used to dream of having an anonymous lover. After hearing too many of Sam Strong’s inanities, I decided that my fantasy lover is French, and that his English is very limited. There are specific, recurring broad brush strokes. For my fantasy to work, first I must mentally move house, to a thirties, art deco wedding cake apartment on the edge of Hampstead Heath, with wooden shutters and white sheets. The hasty reinvention of myself and my life, liberating myself from the constant, nagging cramping sense of self-doubt. The main difference is in work and money. Fantasy Me is solvent and secure, a woman in a position to pursue all of her passions. Sex aside, it’s my favourite daydream. I live alone, I write, and I can make choices about clothes, meals and journeys, not compromises born out of necessity.