Natasha Guynes, 35, is president and founder of HER Resiliency Center, a nonprofit for vulnerable young women. She lives in Washington.
I’m going to thumbnail-sketch you for a second, and I’m sorry about that. You went from being a commercial sex worker to working on Capitol Hill.
I moved to D.C. when I was 20. Things deteriorated very quickly. For me, drugs and alcohol came after the escort work. It was me trying to cover those traumas. Until I hit a bottom where I didn’t want to be touched, didn’t want to be looked at, I was not fit for work. End of that year, I got sober in a 12-step recovery program. The women in that program didn’t just say, “Go do this and come back and tell me how it works,” but they literally would show me step by step how to be an adult.