in hindsight it's quite funny that the first break i took in my career i was like actually i need to quit my job

My medical hiatus last month was triggered by a scary new diagnosis. I was so pessimistic and nihilistic, I couldn't hold a conversation. I decided that for the first time in 5 years of content creation, I would take a break. If I moved things around, I had enough spare content to take 3 weeks off.

So I fully took that time off, focused on My hobbies, reflected on the year, thought about the future. I connected almost all the dots, but it wasn't until I got the notification (fake or real, it didn't matter) that My OnlyFans "accounts had been deleted" that I realized what I was feeling. Dread. Resentment. Fear.

I knew that it was showing, but I figured the whole job is fantasy. People see what they want to see. They see pain as pleasure, they project their own fantasies. Once upon a time, though, it was based in reality. I did enjoy those fantasies, I did enjoy that flavor of performance. Unfortunately, the relief I felt when I thought that I might not have to film content for the following week--or might not have to even think of an idea that I could possibly pull off--was such a huge weight off my shoulders, I knew I had hit My limit.

Back at the beginning of the year, I started trying to address the resentment itself (a symptom of the real problem--grief due to chronic illness, resentment of others who experience more pleasure from My body than I do, whenever they wanted to--but alas) by exploring femdom, and found a lot more of My own pleasure in that. It may not have always been traditional pleasure, but there was gratification in denying others where I had been denied Myself. There was satisfaction in being encouraged to be harsh. There was a freedom in being as bold as I wanted to be, instead of trying to mimic a version of Myself that didn't exist for the sake of being parasocial.

Everyone's favorite sentence--"I prefer when you're being yourself!"--when you've lost yourself to chronic pain, lost your sense of time to the never-ending doctor appointments, lost your bank account to all the desperate 3am overnight purchases of braces and compression sleeves and lidocaine patches... it was always so frustrating to hear. "There is no 'myself' right now," I always wanted to respond, "can you just tell me who you want Lanie to be?" As if no one truly understood the second word in the title 'adult actress.' So I thought about what normal girls would be like... but trying to mimic that only made My grief stronger. I avoided social media, which is supposed to inspire Me. I declined to promote Myself to any degree. I wished every night that things could be different, and woke up every day to the same.

I love putting on war paint. There's something in human history about it--of course, you can see it on soldiers going back centuries, if not millennia, but you can see it today. An athlete in their uniform, that one seems obvious too. What about that cute little matching set before going to the gym? What about that badass fit you put together for going out with your friends? What about the 8-piece ensemble I picked out to make content in tonight? I love the ritual of it, the mindfulness and the intentionality. I loved that it seemed to be so intertwined with femdom. I loved that I could become someone else long enough to figure out who I was again.

When I got My accounts back, one of the first things I had to do was deliver a video to someone who had sent in a tip earlier that day. It was for a video from 2023, which was now about 3.5 years old, where I was talking about an extremely 'submissive' fantasy. At this point, I had already made the decision to quit. I knew in the very first day of losing My accounts that I was going to quit. But delivering that video... I was so satisfied with the idea that soon, I would never have to see those videos again if I didn't want to.