The Writing Womb: January 2018

Saturday, January 06, 2018

I Quit My Porn Job

I haven't posted on The Writing Womb in a loooong assed time. Mostly because this was supposed to be a cartoon blog and it's a lot of fucking work to make cartoons...I don't want to invest that kind of time. Lots has happened since my last post, one of which, I have started a new blog that doesn't require me to cartoon things...I will share the fun posts from there onto here too. Why not? Maybe I will become inspired to cartoon again, I certainly have a lot of cool ideas but not a lot of time...so we shall see.

Life has changed a lot since I was posting back in 2010...after two years, I moved back to Canada and left Thailand behind. I let go of teaching yoga and started doing stand up comedy which I did really well at. Comedy wasn't fulfilling me so I reinvented myself again and became a performance artist & storyteller...I won some awards and also won a grant from the government to produce my own one woman show...pretty great! I was selected to be on a reality dating show called First Dates Canada and it actually worked (for a while)...I moved in with my blind date and it was a good year. I left him a few months ago and am really happy just doing my own thing, on my own time and I realized that performing and telling stories was still missing something....I wasn't fully engaging all of myself and I wasn't able to have a really connected feeling with the audience.

I decided to take my 10+ years of extensive shamanic medicine woman work that I had been doing and become a Spiritual & Psychedelic Integration Therapist which I find deeply rewarding and fulfilling. Basically, I help people integrate their experiences with hallucinogenic plant medicines like Iboga, Ayahuasca, Huachuma, Mushrooms and Peyote to name a few. I love it and yet...I really miss being on stage and having a laugh. What's in my view finder now is combining integration therapy and stand up comedy and offering workshops to people or becoming a speaker. I don't know how it will happen yet but I can feel that is what will happen and it is deeply exciting. Instead of reinventing myself, I am refining and sharing what is already there to include ALL parts of me. I love this. While I was getting my therapy business together, I decided to take a job as a Porn Stars assistant which I just quit yesterday (see below for that story).

So the new blog I have is called I must Get Fit. My goal is to lose 100 lbs in 365 days by eating a Raw Vegan diet. I have lost 7.2 lbs so far in under two weeks so it's going well. Here's today's post:

Check In:

Whooohoooo! It's the last day of the detox cleanse, thank f*&#! I lost a total of 7.2 lbs in the 12 days of this detox, I am down to 232.8 lbs. I think doing this cleanse as a vegan would have been fine but as a raw vegan, it was super challenging...especially the last 3 days. My tongue got all dry and thick and the food got so boring & tasteless I had no desire to eat. My head was all woozy from the no eating so I had to force feed myself. I was very much like a child at the dinner table who 'didn't wanna' and I had the 'yuck' face on for every single meal. I can't wait to go grocery shopping for yummy foods again like Bananas, Cantaloupe, Pineapple, Mango, Mushrooms, oh sweet heaven.

Got a new scale to track my weight & all the other stuff....the other scale wasn't working right

Yesterday I woke up to having a couple of really painful zits on the right side of my tongue or at least that's what I thought they were. After consulting Dr. Google, it turns out it was infected taste buds which are caused by stress, eating too much citrus and lack of vitamin B's. Ok that's fair. I had eaten a couple of tangerines the night before and even they were tasteless as was everything (which is a side effect of having infected taste buds...the circle of life huh?) and I was uber stressed because I had been procrastinating quitting my job and barely slept the night before as I was filled with doubt and a bad case of the 'what if's'. What if I can't pay my tuition for school, what if I become homeless, what if there's a monster under the bed...you know, the usual.

Tongue zits? NOPE! Stress induced infected taste buds :(

Inspired Action, I Quit My Porn Job:

After a stressful night of tossing and turning, I woke up at 4 am yesterday and I gave notice to quit my job. The job I was doing was really brutal on my psyche and I felt like I was getting PTSD from it...no joke...every time I opened my laptop in the morning it literally felt like someone was punching me in the stomach and just before I opened it, I had to steady myself with this mantra "don't vomit, shut it down, disengage". See, just like most of the other jobs I have had in my life, this job wasn't exactly a conventional job either. Yes, it was just administrative work however, I was a personal assistant for a very famous porn star...specifically, a very famous Dominatrix (for all you Office fans out there, I was Assistant to the Porn Star). The money was great and I didn't have to work very many hours per week but this job required me to work 7 days a week and check her emails & Twitter first thing in the morning and last thing at night, every single day and night.

Now I don't know how you like to wake up in the morning or fall asleep at night, but I was starting my day off every morning with a big ol' eyeful of dick pics and these weren't your average, vanilla dick pics, no sir-ee these were some raunchy, dick locked in a chastity cage with a pipe up their penis hole type of dick pics. I stopped counting sheep to put me to sleep and started counting penises while singing 99 dicks in a cage on the wall (to the tune of 99 bottles of beer on the wall). At least I still have a sense of humour about it.

Don't get me wrong, I love me a weird job as it fulfills my life's purpose of doing strange & unusual shit that most other people wouldn't think of doing and then coming back to tell everyone about it and having a good laugh (like joining a cult accidentally, becoming a yoni masseuse and model, being a stripper, a professional poker player, being on a reality TV show, to name just a few...I have lived a 1000 lives in this lifetime) which also adds fodder to my ever growing comedy & storytelling act but no joke, this job was just so out of alignment for me that I had to start numbing my brain and my body so I didn't feel my soul screaming at me and shaking me to 'GET OUT NOW'. I totally thought I could handle this work but boy, was I wrong.

Sure, there are some great, raunchy anecdotes that I have collected to awkwardly break the ice at a snobby party or to be shared at intimate dinner parties & holiday celebrations but ~shudders~ I started falling into another depressive episode and I knew I had to let this go, my mental health could not stand to do this for very much longer and I didn't want to have to deal with the consequences of what I might need to do to keep numbing myself. I know when I was a stripper a decade ago and wanted to leave the job because I hated it so much, I turned to some hard drugs to numb me enough to keep working...I didn't want to fall into that soulless, zombified way of life again.

Still, it was a tough decision to give it up...I had so much freedom; I only had to work 20 hours a week or less, I got to work from home in my pj's, the pay was fantastic and I was basically my own boss but jeez...is assaulting my senses with the most graphic & depraved sexual acts, videos and pictures really freedom??? NOPE! I had no choice but to quit. I couldn't contain the lurching in my belly when I opened my laptop anymore.

I thought I would feel bad when I let it go, but I didn't...I felt free. Free of the gross dick pics, free of the depravity I would have to read from all the fans, of the videos I had to watch & edit, the pics I had to photoshop and I felt free to really focus on my therapy business and comedy career; to nurture that side of myself again or maybe I won't pursue that, who knows?! I am taking some time to feel into what the next step is. Maybe it's not being a psychedelic therapist, maybe it's not being a storyteller, maybe it's not writing my book...maybe IT IS doing all of those things? I am cool with not knowing right now and I am not attached to the outcome anymore. For me, this is freedom.

The first thing I did this morning was sit and meditate instead of opening my computer to face the twisted emails from the night before and my brain was like "THANK YOU" and my heart was like "THANK YOU" and my whole body was cheering for me as all the cells cried in unison, "thank God for no more dick pics!". It was a celebration inside my soul for sure. What a relief. I am stoked to see what doors open for me now that I have closed the porn door and I am looking forward to being in the discovery of what I will create now and what will happen next. Every part of me is vibrating with wonder. I have no clue what I am going to do next and I love that!

Today's lesson for myself and maybe for you too:

Take time to listen to your intuition and to trust & honour what your heart whispers to you. Then love being in the mystery of what's next.

With love,

Patricia