self care - Rem Sequence Official

In the first blog post I wrote on boundaries, I talked about WHY it is so important to have them in these five areas. But what use is a why if you don’t have a HOW? In this follow up blog post, I will talk about how I maintain boundaries in order to stay happy and healthy.

With your TIME

The first thing you need to do when maintaining boundaries is to set them. Time is probably one of the easiest areas to do this in, as it is an objective measurement. For example:

When will you work?
When won’t you work?
When are you available for your customers (how much time)?
When are you not available?
How much interaction are you willing to give to potential customers (how much time)?

Once you have decided on these, don’t be shy about it; make it known. You can do this through your 1:1 interactions with people, embed it into your social media postings or posting on your sites. I am not available after 10pm every night or before 8am in the morning my time and I am pretty vocal about this. At this stage, this works for me. If it changes, I will make it known again. Consider it the opening hours of your business. The thing is, if people know when you are open for business and what to expect from you, then there is no pushback. Why? Because your clients/customers then accept that that is how you operate. You don’t have to be snarky about it, just matter of fact “I don’t respond after 10pm, I will get back to this in the morning.” Treat it like any other business would.

With who YOU are

We all have lives that are separate from our content creator personas, and although there may be some crossover, it is important to keep some distance between the two (for the sake of your mental health). This is difficult though, as we develop relationships with our fans, customers and clients, it is normal that we may start to share more about our lives than we may have at the beginning. Also, the way this industry is now, people expect a certain amount of personal sharing and connection with their favourite content creators. I maintain this boundary by treating Rem Sequence as a job, both in practice but also in my headspace. My fans and clients do not know my real name; I ask that my friends and people who know me in real life call me by my real name. I am not a big sharer anyway, so I find it easy not to share personal details in public. I think this is useful to think about in multiple ways; the content of your photos (keeping personal things out of them), when you talk about places you visit, things you enjoy. Although these can build relationships with your fanbase, they can also erode the boundary between YOU and your work. How much are you willing to share? What things are you going to keep just for you? When I am pressed about certain details, I have a few strategies that I use. Sometimes, I will make something up; other times I will just distract the person. Remember, you are in charge of what and how much you share of YOU. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

With your CASH

As with time, how we maintain boundaries when it comes to our money is a bit easier as it is something objective. Your payment methods, your rates and your pricing are all things you can decide upon and rattle off very easily when asked. How to maintain that boundary? My best piece of advice is to stick to your guns, even if someone gets pushy. Lots of content creators get worried about losing business or what others will think about them if they budge around their cash. If someone really wants to have a piece of you, they will work with you and not waste your time by arguing with you over a payment method or a matter of dollars. Let these people walk. Don’t even bother arguing, just politely excuse yourself from the conversation. You are costing yourself MORE money by justifying why you run your business in a certain way to people that are not invested in what you are doing.

With your PERSONA

When it comes to boundaries around my persona, I have found that the number one reason that I may budge on them is because of a lack of confidence in myself. If I feel like maybe I should explore area xyz because someone has asked me repeatedly about it YET it is something I am not comfortable with, then the reason probably is because of a loss of faith in what I am creating. The way I manage this is by surrounding myself with supportive and encouraging people who are knowledgeable in the business and can pull me up by the bootstraps when I need it. Instead of questioning and exploring my boundaries with customers, clients and random peers, I will go back to this group of supporters and check in with them. Nine times out of ten they tell me that my initial reasoning was sound and not to worry about what anybody else says. I think when it comes to our personas, having confidence in ourselves and commitment to the path we are taking is absolutely key. And the way to maintain this is through the people we surround ourselves with.

With your ENERGY

In my first post on boundaries, I talked a bit about how to maintain these around your energy. It is definitely easy to get sucked into working 24/7 as a content creator and it is just not healthy. In my opinion, the best thing you can do in this regard is to treat it as if it were a vanilla job where you are accountable to someone for the level of energy you put in. Develop a work schedule and stick to it. Incorporate break times/days into this schedule and make sure you future proof yourself for if you are in the unfortunate position to have to take time off. The number one thing is to work out how much you can do in the time you have, and know that some other creators may work more than you and some less, but that doesn’t make you any better or worse than anyone else. And if people make you feel bad about that… well, that says a lot more about them than it does you. Working with people can be incredibly draining, and you must develop boundaries around this and maintain them in order to remain consistent and survive in this industry. Once again, having a strong support network who can encourage and support you in your decisions around this is vital.

I hope this piece helped to address questions you may have had about how to maintain boundaries. However, in writing this, I realised one of the key things to success is developing supportive and encouraging relationships with other content creators and people in our industry. In my next piece, I will talk about finding your tribe and some guidelines I have found useful when building and maintaining my support network.

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I asked my fans to hit me with their questions and here is what I got. Enjoy the safe version of “Fan Questions” (the naughty version will be coming soon).

1. top 5 songs to take selfies to

I generally don’t play music when taking selfies, but, hang on… all my clips are self shot so TECHNICALLY they are selfies! I have the most eclectic music taste, so brace yourself for the songs I love to play in the background while I am making content:

Triumph – The Wu-Tang Clan featuring Cappadonna
Room A Thousand Years Wide – Soundgarden
Curmudgeon – Nirvana
No Pity For A Coward – Suicide Silence
Turn It Up – Busta Rhymes

Don’t judge me… I was a musician in a past life so I have a very very broad and unusual combination of musical loves, but these 5 tracks pretty much cover the kind of stuff I enjoy listening to and that get me inspired to make stuff.

2. what do you consider to be your best real life learning experience over the past year?

Good question. I have had alot of great experiences this year that have helped me grow, but the one that had the most impact involved my vanilla work life. I have been striving to progress in the organisation I currently work in and won a coveted position in a very high profile project. I was extremely excited by the potential gains from this employment, but it turned into a literal nightmare. I was reporting to a person who was a narcissist of the highest order, who absolutely slammed my experience, skills, knowledge and confidence on a daily basis. When the three month contract came to an end, I was incredibly relieved (I actually had a countdown calendar for the last month in the 7th layer of hell). Not only was I relieved, but it actually played havoc with my mental health for months afterwards, and the team and boss I went back to were incredibly gentle and caring as I recovered. What was the lesson I learnt? There is nothing that compares to having control in what you do and being surrounded by people who are supporting and encouraging. This experience made me realise that I actually don’t want to progress in the corporate world. I am much happier riding along in my position and building my business to a point where I can quit my job and make adult content full time. In my vanilla job, I will always be under someones thumb, and you can never guarantee that that person will use their power for good instead of malice.

3. do you have a dream job?

Fitting that this question should follow the one above. My “dream job” has changed so much over my life and I expect it will continue to change as I get older and more cynical. There are specific things which give me great joy and that I have done in one form or another as work (making art, playing music, helping people, academia, animals and nature). I think the main thing is that I want a job where I don’t have to worry about making enough money to cover the things I want to do and that gives me the control in when/where/how I work. That is the real dream. I am currently enjoying my vanilla work as well as developing my adult content creation business. If I could solely do adult industry work and drop the other, I would have no hesitation in doing so. But, I must admit I like the comfort of a paycheck that I can rely upon. So until I am at a stage where I don’t have to worry about making enough to make ends meet, I will juggle the two.

4. what are you most afraid of?

This is going to sound very strange but you asked so I shall tell you. I am extremely afraid of small dead animals, particularly mice. I think this particular phobia came about as I grew up on a horse stud and we had a year when we had a mouse plague. If you have never had the honour of being present during such an event, honestly, count yourself lucky. We would open bags of horsefeed and have 10 – 20 mice jump out. Our sheds were full of them, and there were times when the ground was covered like a living, moving carpet. It was useless setting traditional traps so we rigged up some things to capture and kill as many mice as possible overnight. One of these things was a 44 gallon drum of water, which enticed the mice to climb on a tightrope type thing and then fall into the water and drown. We would kill 70 – 100 mice like this per night. Finding dead mice where you least expected them also happened regularly. I am pretty sure that this is the source of this phobia.

5. tell the story about the bedframe…

Once upon a time, I was dating a dude when I came upon the info that he was dating multiple women in town and across the globe, unbeknowst to any of them. I sorted out my commitments for the day, then went down to his sharehouse and knocked on the door till I was let in by his housemate. I removed all the items that I wanted to keep from the room that I had fully furnished before removing the mattress that I had purchased for him and smashing his bed. When he came to ask me what I was doing, I told him that if if he ever tried to speak to me again, I would slit his throat. When he began panhandling on the internet for a new bed, citing his crazy “friend” as the reason for his sleeping on the floor with no bedding, the Rem Sequence shitshow swung into action and shut his ass down, to the point where he deleted all his social media accounts. I will not be lied to, have my time wasted or made to look like a fool. He did all three, and got off relatively lightly. I bruised the bone in my ankle quite badly, where it took several weeks before I could walk properly again. I say that is a small price to pay to put a loser in his place. It is an example of how restrained I can be, in that his face did not end up in pieces on the floor.

6. what are some things you do to take care of yourself, when you have “you” time?

Quite honestly, this is not something I do enough of! I always put it off because I am “too busy”, but I am finding more and more that if I don’t stop and do something nice for myself, I end up feeling very dark about the world. I practice taekwondo regularly which is a good self care activity. I makes me stop and be very very present. Because if I am not, I end up getting kicked in the face. The other thing I am getting back into right now is colouring in. I used to love it, and I would have a tonne of different books, sheets and pencils/textas/crayons to colour in with. I still have alot of supplies, and the other day when I needed some mental space, I decided to drag my stuff out and I loved it!

7. what is your favourite comfort book? what do you read when you need to de-stress?

Reading is one thing I do every single day to relax before bed. I read for at least an hour a day and I guarantee that is where my skill of speed reading and my infinite store of irrelevant facts comes from. I have written another blog posts on my favourite authors which you should check out for a bit more detail on what I enjoy reading. But the books I love and that I read over and over and over again because they are so enjoyable and relaxing are mostly horror novels; “The Shining” by Stephen King, “Dracula” by Bram Stoker, “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley are a few I read every year. But there are also some obscure books that I love and are in annual rotation; “Perfume” by Patrick Suskind, “Crash” by JG Ballard and “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote are amazing pieces of literature that I come back to all the time.

8. which one of your tattoos is your favourite?

I would have to say my favourite tattoo is my owl on my inner right forearm. He is just so beautifully drawn with amazing detail. He is an otherwordly owl, sitting on the skull of another bird. I was inspired to get him in that spot after having a dream about my tattooist tattooing him in that position. When you do some research on owls, you will find they are an extremely powerful symbol of intuition, and are also considered to be the gatekeepers of the other realm. It was a pretty memorable dream for me, and obviously something my subconscious was forcing me to acknowledge. So that back story coupled with how beautiful the design turned out makes it my favourite tattoos. But I do have a soft spot for birds of prey, so the eagle on my chest may just become my new favourite. We will see once that piece is done…

9. who would you like to work with and why?

There are so many creative people I would love to work with in the adult industry. Not just models, but photographers, videographers and other production companies. In the US, there is my number 1 crush @thelwoolf, Michael Ramos of Broken Dreams studios and the guys of Developredeye Photography. My arty weirdness is drawn moreso to creatives in Europe including Sascha Billig, Dollhouse Photography, Peacemaker Art, Gunther Florennes and Dassy DX. I am on a mission to get to Europe in 2020 so that I can work with a bunch of these people and more. Visit my gofund me as part of my ManyVids services page to contribute and help me get there!

10. Why do men?

There is too much in the answer for this question to do it justice in a single paragraph of a blog post. It deserves an entire post dedicated to explaining why I continue to enjoy the company of men when they are so problematic in so many ways. Stay tuned for that one.