Jess lanai

This is day 27 of my 30 day streak.

The main reason I wanted to do the thirty day posting streak was to push through the emotion.

This sort of thing causes quite a bit of anxiety.

It’s similar to acting.

There is a barrier of self consciousness to get through.

I’m not much of an actor. I did theater as a teenager. I did porn (it counts. No matter what anybody says.)

Then I did the Mektoub film. For which I was nominated for an award. (I was very proud to have done porn AND get nominated for an acting award. It was a hilarious achievement.)

I’ve done enough acting now to know that you have train your nerves past the anxiety of feeling self conscious.

One of the hardest things about doing Mektoub initially was the fact that I had a big crush on Salim Kechiouche.

I don’t function very well around men I have a crush on. I knew how to turn off my self consciousness with regular people but I had no practice turning it off around a guy I liked.

Which is ten times harder.

No.

It’s a hundred times harder.

I used to look at Salim and imagine him being erased. Like a big white eraser was just blotting him out of existence. Then I could pretend he wasn’t there. Otherwise I would have been too self conscious to even talk, let alone embarrass myself trying to act.

I had a similar dilemma with this blog. I got super infatuated with a man.

There’s definitely a dial on infatuation. Most men I get a crush on the dial starts at a two or a three, maybe a four, and over time it goes to ten.

This particular guy started at seven and went to ten way quicker than I’ve experienced before.

I could have taken a hard drug and gotten a lesser effect.

Then I found out he read my blog.

All the self consciousness that I’ve worked very hard to get past can come right back like a boomerang and smack me right in the face when it comes to men.

And the dangerous thing about men is the temptation to fully orient towards them. To do everything for them. To direct all energy, ambition and focus to them.

It’s very easy for women like me to get taken over by a guy and give him full dedication and devotion and end up wasting it all.

I’m sure the same thing can happen to men when they get infatuated.

Infatuation is something to try to fight through because this man didn’t work out and if I had let him take too much of my focus, it would have been wasted.

I think everyone should be careful of infatuation, no matter how much fun it is.

Eventually I want to share my fiction writing. Which will be ten times harder than sharing this.

Fiction does require real writing skill and everyone has a different interpretation of what they like or don’t like.

There’s no way to get it fully right.

I’m going to get a lot wrong. I’m going to try things that fall totally flat.

I can’t let myself get too self conscious, I have to be able to work past it and this blog is helping me learn how to do that.

Having to finish this everyday has also put on a bit of pressure. And pressure can be good for me because it forces me simplify.

To stop worrying about how to say something and just say it as clearly as I am currently capable of.

The most useful thing about this blog is it can leave everything in development. Nothing has to be complete.

It’s only important that I practice structuring my writing in a way that is easily understood and gets to the point as simply as possible.

The last way in which this has helped me is that sometimes I really don’t feel like writing it but because I have to do it everyday I have to find a way to get something out.

Sometimes I completely doubt myself and wonder if I should give up entirely. Taking the time to work through the doubt is very helpful.

It does end up making me more tolerant with my more depressive moods. I don’t react to them as quickly.