During my trip to Boston earlier this year, I got started on a project that has honestly been a long time coming: culling my twitter account. It incited a strangely emotional process; Twitter is my longest standing platform, the first social media platform I started under the Empress Wu moniker. I have been using this account for about a decade as both a professional platform, at times a bit recklessly, as an archive of my perverted exploits.

When I think of Empress Wu, I think of her not as a person but as a space; she is the site in which things unfold. She does not create the container, she is the container for both my submissives and myself. To act as if I’m unaffected is untruthful. In reality, she and I (management) grew up together. We are not the same but we are inextricable from one another. Her body is my body. Her mind is my mind. Her words are my words. We are mutually entangled.

And so in the process of culling her account, I am confronted with images of my self as a 19-year-old. The pageant mom in me is simultaneously proud and also fussing with her hair across spacetime; “she should have cleaned her room before taking those selfies.” “She was so strangely worried about gaining weight even if she pretended not to be, which is stupid because she should have been more worried about her eyebrows, and gotten a layered haircut.” “She had so much spunk.” “She had such clear creative vision.” “She was afraid but did it anyway.” I wish to be like her—continuously jumping across a chasm of uncertainty. Does anyone have an ancient Greek allegory for that?

And it goes like this, for the past ten years of my life, with the exception of the gaps that are lost to the dysfunctional search feature. My body at 21, at 24, at 27. The months of travel (exhilarating and glamorous). The months of travel (unsettled and exhausting). Shifting business strategy to adapt to a global pandemic. Pivoting tactics whenever I lost a payment platform (5 and counting). How I turned to work for comfort and stability in the midst of an excruciating break up. How I discovered myself as a leatherdyke. The different phases of my hyper obsessions and how they played out in kink. Various haircuts and glasses.

A butterfly flaps its wings: some rich billionaire somewhere wants to be able to stalk his younger and chronically online baby mama, and now I must migrate this archive. It’s funny, I made an art show with Veil Machine about the phenomenon of sex workers being first to bite for new platforms, and often getting edged out via stricter and stricter community guidelines later on down the line. We called it E-viction, and here I am, over five years later, and working conditions have not changed. They are actually even more emotionally arresting than before.

As always, in the ever-shifting landscape of this world, the only archive that can’t be erased is the one that lives in our bodies, our flesh, our memories, oral histories recounted when I’m old and wrinkly. In-person sessions will always be my true love in this work; you can book one with me by clicking here.

In the future, I will mostly be posting my racier content on Sextpanther—stay in touch by following me there.

Scroll through some of my deleted tweets over the years below.