As many of you know by now, I tend to work long hours, very frequently to the point that even I understand it’s unhealthy. Ranging anywhere between 20 and 40 hours before going to sleep, I sometimes do my best to attenuate any long-term neurological damage by using nootropics. Many entrepreneurs have a stack of their own. My friends have their stacks. My mentor has a stack. I too, have a stack. What’s mine? Long hours of research and input from several friends has narrowed me down to Noopept and Phenylpiracetam. I cycle through these two along with brain health supplements like L-Carnitine, Sulbutiamine, and Alpha GPC. Overall, I find my brain health, at least anecdotally based on what I can “feel”, to be far better than before I started using them. But there’s only so much supplements and nootropics can do when you run a schedule like mine for so long. The one simple fact of the human limit starts to catch up: Sleep

And perhaps just as important as sleep, is psychological health. Don’t get me wrong, I am extremely euphorically happy at this stage in my life. I wouldn’t find it easy to work long hours on so many different projects if I wasn’t immensely happy overall about where I am. What I’m about to explain isn’t a complaint, but rather something I’ve been wanting to share with my audience and friends for quite some time now.

I am not a talented person. I have no gifts. Not even the slightest. I do not learn things quickly. Despite being a cam girl and online entertainer, I am fundamentally a shy and introverted person. I am also socially awkward. What you all see today is me trying really damn hard not to show any of those characteristics. Camming has definitely helped me immensely, but I’m still for the most part the same person I was three years ago. It was only three years ago after all.

Perhaps what has allowed me to go outside of my comfort zone and bulldoze through my talentless self to get to where I am today is hate and fear. Yes, that’s right, I am driven by an engine of intertwining negative emotions. I hated how powerless I was throughout my life as a little girl and as a teenager. I hated looking back at how powerless I was against certain unspeakably horrible events that occurred when I was little. And I am afraid of being powerless and oblivious. I knew I needed to change.

I loved very few things at the time. I loved anime, manga, and always wanted to cosplay. I looked up to powerful people, both in the business world and among entertainers. I saw the value that they brought to the world and the audience they reach. I wanted to be just like them. I wanted to some day make people feel like how those amazing people made ME feel. Inspired. It sounds so corny but I wanted to let people like myself at the time know that you shouldn’t give up. I knew there were kids just like me because I was talking to them almost every day. I wanted to do something, for US.

And now here I am, lucky as hell. ManyVids Queen 2017 and Vid of the Year. I’ve won 10 of the last 10 months on ManyVids as well. 145,000 followers on Twitter, 75,000 on Instagram, and a freshly made Youtube channel that shows promise. I actually have a title given to me by my fans? “The Living Hentai” they say (thank you guys!). Sometimes I laugh to myself in bed as I remind myself that I’m still a nobody. Still weak and lacking in information and wisdom. It’s true.

But here I am. I wake up, look at my phone and see 7 PMs on ManyVids, 14 in MFC, 45 in one of my GMAIL accounts not counting spam, 13 in another GMAIL account, and 10 in a third GMAIL account. 5 DMs from Twitter, 6 text message threads, and 1 voice mail.

I open up my laptop and get to work on my daily routine of fighting piracy by sending out DMCAs. I work through the emails and messages depending on their level of importance and then make myself breakfast. I jump on my Bowflex M5 Trainer and stay there for about 45 minutes. I eat breakfast and then respond to some more while I work on writing a script for one of my projects. A few hours of this and I begin getting ready for streaming. It takes 4-5 hours to get ready and I make sure to do something else simultaneously as much as I can. I eat lunch somewhere in the middle of that. I then prepare dinner for later. I begin broadcasting. The next 3-4 hours is a flip of a coin whether it’s a successful stream or not. I haven’t exactly gathered up an active enough fanbase on MFC since I cannot be as consistent on there anymore and I just recently returned. It’s not so bad though, thanks to my loving friends and supporters.

I get off and immediately eat the dinner I made myself earlier. I’m usually really hungry by this point because every meal has been proportioned carefully due to the fact I am still on a journey towards a target body figure. By this point in the day I either continue on a script, another script, or I begin filming for a Youtube video or a ManyVids video. I do whichever one I have the creative energy to do at that particular time.

When I’m “done” (I’m never done) it would be around the 19th or 23rd hour of being awake. By this point I have a choice. I can either continue on any unfinished work or work on something else that’s immediately necessary in the near future, or go to bed. Some days, if I choose the bed I risk wasting an hour or two trying to sleep only to fail and get up anyway because I’m too worried about either an unfinished project or a project that needs to happen soon. I may or may not end up working for another 15-20 hours before it becomes easier to sleep from pure exhaustion.

I don’t want anyone to think this is a rant or a complaint. I do this because I love my career. I do this because when you get to this point, certain things are expected of you from many different places. I do this because it is FUN. It’s absolutely immature, naive, and absurdly weak and stupid for anyone to try to get into this sort of thing and then complain about needing to talk to so many people or to keep up with so many things like social media and marketing. It comes with the territory. You have to be able to take in all the hardships if you’re going to reap the benefits of the positives. Nothing is ever ALL positive. As a camgirl for example, you have the freedom of potentially flexible hours. This should not give you the audacity to complain about being pulled from different places. or that too many people are trying to talk to you. You can dislike it, you can hate it, but you’re in no position to call it unfair. Not when you reap the benefits of being able to write so many things off as a business expense, or the fact that you answer to no one but yourself. You are your own boss. It is absolutely your choice whether or not you work on things off cam for a certain amount of hours, or not at all and just stay satisfied with what you may or may not get from working purely during broadcast hours.

I choose to work as Lana Rain 100% of the time. I eat, breathe, and sleep as Lana Rain. Almost every single minute I breathe off cam, is put towards something I’m working on. Why? Because I am talentless. I have no gifts. I am not like my mentor who has all the IQ and capabilities in the world to make it anywhere and at anything, so I better work my ass off if I want to reach my goals anytime soon. It doesn’t matter if a video flunks. It doesn’t matter if people throw horrible insults at me on Youtube, Facebook, or even when my fellow camgirls throw shade at me behind my back without proper provocation. It doesn’t matter if some are copying my format down to the smallest details you would think it was copy/pasted without giving me an ounce of credit at all as they pretend I don’t notice. And it can suck when I spend 4-5 hours on meticulously getting ready for camming with a cosplay only to never reach the final goal on stream that night. But the sun still rises the next morning and I still have to feed myself and secure a future for myself, so I keep on moving.

Again, this is not a complaint. I love my career and everything that comes with it 🙂 I love the frustration. I love the massive stress and anxiety that comes with it. I mean, I hate feeling all those negative things, but I can’t help but attack it all head on because I know it’s part of everything else. My friend is a lawyer, and he doesn’t have to love the paperwork, but he loves the career as a whole. My friend is a boxer, and he doesn’t have to love the speedbag or jumprope, but he loves being in the ring. I don’t have to be happy all the time, but I AM happy being Lana Rain :).

Thank you everyone, for helping me grow.