Ann - The Life: Playin Palin, My Love of Sports and Living to the Fullest On My Own Terms

I took a long , deep breath. I lifted my head back up and began to arch my back into a deep stretch. A couple of yoga poses later, I realized my hand was totally numb.

I gave it a shake and flexed my fingers to straighten them out of the curled shape they felt locked into. Its funny, I laughed to myself, stamina has always been one of my strengths. But this I shook my hand again. This is pushing me to my limits.

I straightened my legs out from under me, kicking away crumpled-up balls of paper to make space, and slowly rolled down onto my back. I stared at my living room ceiling and declared out loud, This is the most tedious, nonsensical thing Ive ever done.

My entire floor was scattered with paper that was filled with my handwriting. Most of it was Xd out, folded or rolled up into paper snowballs. The trashcan against the wall was overflowing with my free throws: all the rejects that werent good enough. Then on my coffee table was a small stack of acceptable work. I had spent the last 11 hours writing a letter by hand, and I still wasnt finished.

I sat back up and picked up the page I had been working on. 2014 will be my last year performing in front of the camera doing sex scenes for you, I read aloud, pausing for a second before I continued to the next line. Yes, I am retiring. My handwriting at this point looked like chicken scratch and I debated starting the page over entirely. Why in the world did I decide to write this by hand? Making the announcement is hard enough!

It felt so personal to me; the idea of sharing my handwriting with the world was a new level of intimacy. No one had ever seen more than my signature. But now that I was doing it, I felt weirdly obsessed with the idea that my handwriting had to look niceit certainly couldnt look like the indecipherable handwriting of a doctor that only a pharmacist could decode. So I kept starting and restarting, burning through paper at lightning speed. I glanced down to the five remaining pieces of clean paper I had left. I had started with an entire ream of it and now I was nearly out! As tempting as it was to crumple this page up into another ball and start over, I knew I had to keep going.

The plan was to post my handwritten letter onto my Facebook page to announce to my fans and to the rest of the world that I was officially retiring from my career in porn. I felt really great about my decision to leave. It was something I had been working toward for over a year. But now that the time had come to actually tell everyone about it, I was feeling really nervous. The last thing I wanted was for my fans to feel like I was walking away from them. I didnt want it to seem like I was saying, Im cutting this part of my life away and Im ashamed of it now. What I really wanted to say was, Come with me into this new direction. I have loved what I have done, but I am ready to love something new. Thats why I decided to write them a letter. Its also why I was going to tell my fans before I told the industry.

I had been keeping my retirement a secret for almost a year, and now I was ready to let it out. I picked up my pen again and started writing.

As I wrote, I thought about what was going to be different in my life the next day. I couldnt help but wonder, How are people going to treat me? Are people going to act differently toward me? Whats going to change for my family? Whats going to change for my own self? I thought about the things that had been weighing on me heavily throughout my time in the industry: the health scares, the fact that I never really felt safe feature dancing in clubs, all of the darker ways the business had changed since I first got into it. I imagined what it would feel like to let all of that go and felt so much excitement about what could be different.

There were many factors that led up to my decision to retire.

The first one was a biggie: my health and safety. I had been living in almost daily anxiety after surviving 2013, a year with multiple HIV-positive performers along with many other severe health and testing issues in the industry. It was a risk that was always there in the business and it scared me to death. The industry is also in an incredible battle with the changing laws, and my company was forced to shoot in gated locations to avoid the police or an appearance from OSHA. I couldnt see the purpose of jeopardizing my safety or getting in trouble with the law or the state just to shoot porn.

My environment was starting to get the best of me, too. I started to no longer feel safe feature dancing at clubs, as fights were regularly breaking out, customers were caught with weapons, and crowds outnumbered the amount of security staff present. It got very intimidating, even though I traveled with my own security. I lived in a place of fear and paranoia that transitioned from a quiet whisper to a very loud voice in my head. After I heard reports of a shooting at another club near where I was dancing, I started to think to myself, Is this really a risk I want to be taking? Im in my 40s! Am I really going to go down in a shooting in a strip club? I knew this was not how I wanted my story to end. As time went by, it all started to seem more and more ludicrous.

And lets be real: I was starting to get tired. There was a point in time where I could live on four hours of sleep at night, but now my body was just starting to get worn down. I was actually starting to fantasize about having a good nights sleep, somewhere quiet and not in a hotel. My secret struggle with psoriasis became a battle the more I pushed my schedule. I wasnt ever in pain. I trained like an athlete and always kept myself at a healthy level of fitness, but the concern was always there: Any time now, something bad could start to happen and you could really regret taking these chances. Plus, I was just craving the basics in life! I wanted to cook my own food, sleep in my own bed, and have a simpler routine in my life. The more I started to picture what my post-retirement life would look like, the more I wanted to live it.

Still, the decision to retire came with a lot of tough choices, too. It meant Id be giving up 99.9% of my income once I was no longer producing, directing, and shooting scenes or dancing. I was also worried that, by leaving porn, I would be giving up a part of my sexual self. I loved being able to live out all of my fantasies in scenes I created and produced. If I left that behind, would that part of me feel unfulfilled? The idea would make my chest tighten a little with anxiety. But then again, so did the idea of staying where I was.

I had also come to realize that I had romanticized my relationship with the adult industry. It was hard not toI give it credit for my freedom, my independence, and my future. My relationship with the industry changed as I changed. As I gained more financial security, self-confidence, and self-respect, it became a harder world to exist in. When the Internet appeared, the industry transitioned from what it was to what it is now. I was constantly fighting for my rights in a business that wanted the girls to believe they had none. I felt like I was being burned again and again by the deviant, constant game-playing in the business. It has changed so much from when I started my career and, in a way, my old-school outlook no longer fit in. Its very hard to be in an unprofessional business when youre a professional, and that battle just started to burn me out. The more I had to fight to keep what was mine, the more I felt like playing the game was no longer worth it.