Jess lanai

People might wonder what I mean when I say porn did some ‘damage’ to me.

Life is weird because people are individual. Your solutions are not always my solutions and my problems are not always your problems.

I am an impulsive personality. The second I felt thirsty I just jumped right into the well. Not everyone does that. Some people take the time to find a bucket and get the water out the well without risking death.

Those types of people have different problems than I will.

They might look back and wish they took more risks and been bolder and crazier.

But they will also have the rewards that my impulsivity could not achieve.

Our natural tendencies are very hard to fight and we don’t know in which circumstances they will benefit us and in which circumstances they will put us in danger.

Maybe I actually did the very best I was capable of doing. Maybe porn even helped me develop parts of myself that otherwise would have been doomed.

I’m not really sure but the one thing I do know for sure, is porn let me avoid things.

It let me avoid getting a boyfriend, something I deeply wanted. It let me avoid thinking too deeply about how to make money. Or the fact that I actually hated living in La.

It let me avoid things for years.

Which did stunt me. I did most of my maturing in the last few years.

I have a blank space in the year I quit Porn. I don’t think I announced it. I think I just sort snuck off and faded out.

Maybe I announced it. If I did I don’t remember what I said.

What I do remember vividly is the night I decided to quit porn.

If you’ve read my the other parts to this I’ll have hopefully communicated that quitting porn wasn’t an impulsive decision.

It was something I’d been working and developing in the back of my mind. I kept shortening my years.

When I first got into porn I thought as long as I quit before 35. By my second year I planned to be gone before 30.

And then I think I started to plan to quit before 25.

I was worried about my future

Hm.

Writing about this makes me have to really think.

About what was actually true at the time.

And thinking about it now I might be wrong.

Maybe I was still in the haze.

The haze of having fun and wasn’t worrying too much about anything at all.

Maybe I don’t remember the year I quit porn because I was drunk for most of it.

What I do remember very well is that after I quit porn I went through a very depressing period of celibacy.

It wasn’t so much a choice as it was an aversion. I was physically very horny but emotionally wrecked. I did not want to have casual sex.

And when it came to trying to date for real I was basically a virgin.

I hadn’t gone on any dates.

I guess one, one date.

My self esteem was pretty wrecked. But, the more I talk to young woman the more I realize self esteem is pretty wrecked for most mid twenty year old women.

Probably the same for men.

The twenties are very difficult.

The memories from those years do sort of blur together. I have no sense of time line. I don’t know in which sequence the events happened.

All I know is that wild bunch came back into town. I went to some big party with lots of film people. Real film people. Not porn film people.

Real film people are often about ten times more desperate than porn film people. I’m not sure why.

Maybe because us porn people can’t really fully delude ourselves. We know we just do porn. We can’t take ourselves too seriously. We’re a joke and we play to the humor.

But film people. They do take their work seriously. They do imagine themselves as something special. Especially when they aren’t yet special.

I felt extraordinary lonely at that party. And I think I thought, well great. This is even worse than porn. I can’t do this.

Now I’m screwed.

Then I saw the guy.

Didn’t like him at first. He was a stuffy film actor person after all.

Everyone was congratulating him on his new film.

But then I got a bit drunk and started acting a bit too much like myself and he laughed at me.

For real. He genuinely thought I was funny.

I started to develop an attraction.

I was hanging out with wild bunch, tagging along to all the events and parties they went to.

The actor dude was at most of them.

My attraction started to increase very slowly.

And I hadn’t experienced that since the MLM guy.

Just the real life. Where you meet someone and develop a crush and don’t know what will happen. Where there is anticipation and uncertainty.

For years all I’d had was prescheduled and pre-approved sex on camera. Maybe some private meetings here and there with porn star guys.

But nothing like that real life.

Real life is better. It’s hard. It’s uncertain. It’s complex and unfair. But it’s better.

So much better in every conceivable way.

The real sex I had with actor guy was pretty awkward. He felt awkward. I felt awkward. It felt like we both lacked experience (neither of us did obviously) it was very shaky but that was part of the fun. The fact that I didn’t know how to do it or to act it.

It was just real.

For me it was so intense that I snuck out while he was sleeping. I think I may have hurt his ego.

I didn’t mean to.

It was just too much. I’d avoided that kind of intensity of emotion for years by doing porn.

It was an emotional overload that definitely short circuited everything I’d become accustomed to.

The part of my brain that had stopped growing from the repetition of porn sex had been flipped back on and started to grow again.

It broke me out of the loop I’d been trapped in and made it impossible to continue living the way I was.

I still feel a tremendous amount of regret because I couldn’t handle my feelings and snuck out on that guy.

I don’t know if he cared or not but I cared because it helped me so much, and I never got to tell him because I found out later that he died.