Jess lanai

I’m not sure yet what I’m intending when I post my thoughts on porn. I only know that as I get older I become more aware of certain thought patterns and I can even sometimes understand how to change them and that it’s worth publicly recording.

My thoughts on porn have shifted since I started writing this blog.

If one had asked me even just a year ago how I felt about porn I’d have found a way to apologize for having done it before I even answered the question.

I didn’t think about how I felt. I only thought about the consequences and then braced myself to endure them.

Because any consequences I felt I’d acquired I thought were a result of having done porn and I therefore deserved those consequences and simply had to endure them with as much grace as I could find in myself.

That was my general attitude. That has now changed.

What I’ve really enjoyed about getting older is the shift in the intensity of my emotions.

My twenties were hell.

My mood was constantly spiraling out of control. It spiraled out of control so many times that I stopped even taking it seriously.

By the time I did the Mektoub film I considered myself emotionally volatile and simply did my best to maintain control.

My method of attempting to control my emotions was sheer force of will. As well as avoidance and isolation.

In combination those three things could be surprising effective. But the success rate was erratic. About half the time I lost control anyhow and my chances of not imploding were left to the chaos of 50/50.

I was almost thirty when my ideas on how to control myself got flipped.

I started doing yoga. I’d done yoga before but I’d always hated it. With a passion I hated yoga.

But the best way to get over hating something is to love someone. And I made a new girl friend that I totally adored and she invited me to yoga.

The thing about yoga, especially hot yoga, is that it is very uncomfortable. I’d done a lot of sports that had me exerting a lot of effort. But yoga was a much different kind of effort than I was used to.

I was used to sports like martial arts or swimming that had me always in a mind of trying to be faster or stronger or strategizing.

A kind of effort that is very active.

Yoga was opposite all that. Holding one uncomfortable pose for a long period of time in a hot room required a much different kind of exertion.

It accessed a part of my effort that I wasn’t accustomed to using and exercised some emotions that were severely under developed.

Like boredom. Awkwardness. Discomfort that’s right on the edge of pain. Vulnerability.

And once those emotions got a bit stronger, my mood started to even out.

Just a touch.

I didn’t get super far on just yoga. But it opened up the box I’d been living in where I thought everything was internal.

That everything had to do with my internal drive, strength, patience and will.

Yoga opened me up to the idea that the external had a lot to do with my internal and that the external was more easily manipulated.

Instead of trying to control my mood to do things I started doing things to control my mood.

Such as eating certain foods and avoiding other foods. Getting enough sleep. Cold plunges. So on and so forth.

With every passing year I got less and less insane. Getting less insane simply means that I developed methods to track my emotions.

They stopped feeling so volatile and they started feeling predictable. I knew what would make me really angry and what might make me really sad.

I knew the things that made me really happy and I could actually simply do those things and feel fulfilled.

That’s when a really terrible thing happened.

I started to realize I wasn’t all that emotionally volatile. I had no mood disorder.

It was worse than that.

I was smart.

My emotions were accurate predictions of what was wrong and what needed to be changed.

Which can be a devastating realization. Because so many things had to be given up. I was trying to do so many things that weren’t actually possible for me to do.

I can’t improve my way past a certain threshold. I am what I am to a degree. What is possible for me is more limited than I ever believed when I was younger. Which is why I pushed myself so much harder than it was possible for me to endure.

What does all of this have to do with having done porn?

Let’s do some math,

What about me is inherent and puts me in the path of doing porn?

Very high sex drive and high impulsivity.

Those are actually good qualities in a lot of circumstances. If I do manage to get married someday my husband will certainly be grateful for my high sex drive.

What about my high impulsivity?

That’s a toss of the dice. People like me either go down in a fiery ball of flame and totally incinerate our lives or we just bounce around from failure to success erratically with no traceable patterns.

The best I can do to manage my high degree of impulsivity and obsessive tendencies is manage my environment so that energy gets directed towards less harmful things.

Like writing and cooking and family and friends.

But without those things to ground me I’m a damn piece of paper in the wind. And porn was just the breeze that caught me.

I’m extraordinarily lucky it wasn’t something else that caught me. Like drugs. Or an abusive husband. Or even, too early of success.

I’ve always had a fear of success and people always chalk it up to ‘self esteem’ or ‘believing you deserve it’ and all that crap.

Maybe it was just an actually valid fear. Not every human being can handle high levels of success.

I don’t just mean that in the sense of ‘career success’ I’m talking also about the ultimate success that I’ve always wanted. Relationship success.

I had a fear of commitment when I met my first boyfriend and thank god for that. I was right to be afraid.

Because I was so far ahead of myself and not operating in reality.

The reality actually is that I needed porn at the time I did porn.