Taking Care of Myself - To Remain Desirable and Whole
This article is part of a series. To read the first part, click on the following link: Who am I really?
There’s a common misconception about people who work in this field - the idea that taking care of one’s appearance and body is a form of submission to an external gaze, a way of bending to other people’s expectations. I don’t experience it that way. What I do for my body, I do first for myself - for how I feel in my skin, for the energy I have, for that presence to myself that makes everything else possible.
Desirability isn’t something you manufacture for others. It’s something that comes from within - from someone who feels good in her body, good in her mind, and doesn’t need to simulate it. Everything I describe in this article serves that.
The Body - The Physical Foundation
I’ve practiced yoga three times a week for four years. Not magazine yoga - serious practice, with a teacher I see in group classes twice a week and privately once a month. I started because someone recommended it for flexibility and body awareness. I continue because it’s become indispensable - not just for the body, but for the mental state it produces. One hour of yoga in the morning changes the texture of my entire day. The way I inhabit my body, the way I walk, sit, touch things - all of it is different on the days I’ve practiced.
In addition to yoga, I walk a lot. Geneva is a city that invites walking - the lake, the quays, neighborhoods that shift character within a few streets. Sometimes I walk without a destination, with podcasts or music or nothing at all depending on my mood. That activity - the simplest one there is - probably contributes more to my daily balance than anything else. There’s something about moving at a steady rhythm, crossing space, that regulates something in me nothing else regulates as effectively.
Swimming in winter - an indoor pool in the neighborhood, twice a week when I manage it. Not for performance, not to burn calories. For the silence underwater. There’s a quality of silence in an indoor pool I find nowhere else - a complete break from the outside world, a way of being entirely in the body for forty minutes as if nothing else exists. After those sessions, I’m in a state of physical calm that resembles what I imagine meditation is for those who know how to meditate.
Food - Without Obsession
I’ll say first what it is not: a diet. I’ve never followed one, I won’t, and I deeply distrust people who turn food into a space of anxiety and control. Food is a pleasure - one of the most direct, accessible, uncomplicated pleasures. I refuse to turn it into a problem.
What I do is eat with attention. Not in the magazine version of “mindful eating” - in a practical sense. I cook most of the time because I enjoy it and because it allows me to know what I’m eating. Vegetables, protein, reasonable carbohydrates - no rigid rules, just a way of listening to what my body asks for rather than forcing it into a prescribed direction.
What I avoid, without formally forbidding myself: excessive sugar, alcohol outside of work evenings - because my professional consumption is already sufficient - and industrial food that I find unsatisfying as much as nutritionally poor. What I love: cooking slow dishes on weekends, morning markets in the Pâquis, Swiss cheeses that are objectively among the best in the world and that I long ago stopped feeling guilty about enjoying.
My body has a shape that suits me. I’m not trying to change it - I’m trying to keep it healthy, flexible, energetic. That’s all. That’s enough.
Medical Care - What Isn’t Said Enough
I’ll state this clearly because it matters and because I find it’s discussed too little in testimonies about this profession.
I get tested regularly. Every six weeks - full STI screening, blood work, everything recommended by healthcare professionals for someone with my practices. I have a doctor in Geneva who knows my situation without judgment and with whom I’ve had a relationship of trust for three years. Finding him wasn’t immediate - before him, I had someone who couldn’t hide a discomfort that made appointments uncomfortable for me. I changed. It was the right decision.
This rigor is non-negotiable. Not only to protect myself - to protect the people I’m with. Part of the trust my clients can have in me rests there, even if they don’t always know it explicitly. I’ve never had a positive result in four years. I intend to keep it that way.
As for contraception - I’ve used multiple methods simultaneously from the beginning. Over-precaution, perhaps. I prefer over-precaution in this area to any other approach.
Dental health too - because it’s obvious in this profession, and I mention it without further detail.
The Mind - The Most Complex Part
The body is the easy part. Or at least the most straightforward - specific actions produce visible results. Mental and emotional health is harder to manage, more variable, less responsive to fixed routines.
I saw a therapist for two years - from twenty-four to twenty-six, a period when certain things were settling that required space to be processed. Not a crisis, not a collapse. Just the awareness that I was living something intense and not easily shareable, and that this intensity needed a professional space to be digested properly. Those two years were useful in ways I still measure today - in how I handle difficult states, in how I set boundaries, in the ability I have to look at myself with a distance I didn’t have before.
I don’t go regularly anymore - a few sessions per year when something arises that deserves an outside perspective. That door remains open, and I walk through it without resistance when needed. Therapy isn’t an admission of weakness. It’s a maintenance tool sensible people use.
Friends. I have a few - not many, but solid. Two of them know what I really do and have never made me feel it changed how they see me. Those two are precious in ways I can’t quantify. Being able to speak about my life without translation, without omissions, without managing someone else’s gaze - it took time to have that, and I protect it.
The others think I work “in finance” in Geneva. That version of Sofia I maintain with an ease that perhaps says something about my ability to inhabit multiple registers at once. I don’t feel divided by it. I feel practical.
Days of Intense Desire - What I Do Alone
I’ll address something I announced in the outline of this article and could have avoided - but this blog exists precisely not to avoid.
There are days when desire is present without occasion. Not tied to an appointment, not scheduled, not in response to anything specific. Days when my body is in a state of calling that nothing in my calendar answers. It happens to everyone - but in a life like mine, where sexuality occupies significant professional space, that gap between desire and occasion sometimes takes on a particular shape.
I don’t automatically resolve it. That would be too simple and not entirely honest. Sometimes I let that state exist - I carry it through the day like a pleasant tension, I let it color what I read or listen to or think about. There’s something interesting about inhabiting desire without immediately resolving it - a way of being in one’s body without managing it efficiently.
But there are also days when that tension asks for an answer. In those cases, I take care of it myself, without drama and with an attention I’ve brought to my own geography for a long time. What I know about my body - what works, what doesn’t, what produces something interesting - is knowledge acquired over time and that belongs entirely to me. There’s something important in that ownership. In the fact that the pleasure I give myself belongs to no one else.
Those solitary moments aren’t substitutes. They are their own thing - a quality of presence to oneself, without the dynamics of an evening with two people, without the necessity of being attentive to someone else. Something simpler and more direct, responding to something simple and direct.
What I think about during them: variable. Sometimes a specific client, a night that marked me, something someone did that imprinted itself in my body and resurfaces then. Sometimes nothing specific - just images, sensations, an inner territory that doesn’t require a narrative. I don’t censor what comes. I receive it for what it is.
Limits - Knowing How to Say No to Myself
Taking care of myself also means knowing when to stop. Not stop permanently - stop for the evening, for the week, for a period.
I sometimes refuse appointments because I’m not in the state to hold them properly. Deep fatigue, an emotionally charged period, a diffuse sense that I wouldn’t be capable of being truly present - those signals I’ve learned to listen to. Canceling an appointment because I don’t feel well isn’t unprofessional. It’s exactly the opposite. A client deserves someone who is there. If I’m not there, I shouldn’t be there.
I also have inviolable spaces in my week - days without appointments, without professional contact, when I’m entirely in my ordinary life. On those days, I don’t respond to work messages, I don’t plan, I don’t anticipate. I’m simply Sofia doing her shopping, reading, meeting a friend for lunch, practicing yoga, lingering in pajamas in the apartment if that’s what she feels like.
Those days are the guarantors of everything else. Without them, everything intense in my professional life would eventually wear down - not dramatically, but gradually, like material that is used without ever being allowed to regenerate. I don’t want anything to wear out. I want to last.
Lasting - and Remaining Whole
The word “whole” in the title of this article is the one that matters most to me.
Desirable, I am - or at least I do what’s necessary to be, physically and otherwise. That’s the most visible part, the easiest to describe. But whole - that’s something else. It’s the part that isn’t visible from the outside and yet is the condition for everything.
Whole, for me, means not losing myself in what I do. Keeping an inner life that belongs to me, opinions that aren’t calibrated to please, anger and enthusiasm and bad moods that don’t need to be managed for someone else. Having spaces - physical, temporal, relational - where I’m not Sofia the luxury escort but simply a twenty-seven-year-old woman living in Geneva with her own peculiarities.
This profession, poorly managed, can erase that boundary. I’ve seen people in this field who lost track of who they were outside the role - who no longer quite knew how to be with others without performing, who had colonized their entire lives with their professional lives. I understand how it happens. And I work actively to make sure it doesn’t happen to me.
So far, it holds. The mirror in the Pâquis each morning shows me someone who recognizes herself. Someone tired sometimes, luminous at others, ordinary often - but someone recognizable, coherent, present to herself.
That’s all I ask. It’s a lot.
Sofia
Sofia, 27 — Based in Geneva, she fully embraces her life as a luxury escort and speaks about it openly.
Through her stories, she shares her beginnings, her experiences with an international clientele, the advantages of the job (luxury, freedom), but also the more complex realities. She writes in a simple, honest way about what truly happens behind the doors of Swiss hotels.
This text was originally written in French. It was then translated to be readable in your language.
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