The Life Back: ...for More, from Loss, to Less Is More

By Lisa Ann

This is the story of life after The Life.

In December of 2014, Lisa Ann announced her retirement from the adult entertainment industry. She released her first book, The Life, in December of 2015.

On New Year's Eve, she received a phone call threatening her life—a call that came from inside her own home.

For Lisa Ann, this was only the beginning of a terrifying year that would spiral completely out of control. In public, she was still entertaining her fans and maintaining her persona on her wildly popular Fantasy Sports Radio shows. In private, she descended through layer after layer of depression, isolation, fear, and darkness.

But the more her life contracted physically—as she retreated into the small, quiet places where she could feel safe—the more her mind began to open. The force to be still created a silence that gave her room to listen. Room to learn. Room to change.

And the chance to break free.

The Life Back chronicles her three-year odyssey through terror, chaos, forgiveness—and becoming unstoppable.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781544522982

Lisa Ann

Lisa is a prolific writer and the author of her debut book Spiritually Waking Up: You (SERIOUSLY) Can't Make This Sh*t Up! and book two in her WOO WOO Series; Hiding in Plain Sight; Confessions of an Angel Messenger. Journaling for more than four decades, she combined her love of writing with her sense of humor and unique spin on life events. Through this palpable spark, she transformed her journey into her personal memoir to help others also going through a spiritual awakening by writing blog entries to document these hilarious events. Her relatable life and disposition shine through as she explores the importance of really getting to know yourself on a deeper level. Through her personal unfolding she has studied with numerous mediums in the US and UK. She also attended Arthur Findlay College in England for mediumship/psychic studies. She is also a member of Rhine Research Center, at Duke University in North Carolina. Aside from her career in the real estate industry, she is also a professional psychic medium, speaker, teacher of spiritual arts, and is the former host of the podcast: MESSAGE DELIVERY! You Can't Make This Stuff Up! Lisa spends her downtime with her family, grandchildren, and friends. She enjoys traveling, camping, scuba diving and other various adventures when she is not learning about more spiritual endeavors.She hopes her raw and often humorous stories help you to better understand what you might also be going through so you can navigate and embrace it for your future.

Book preview

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Copyright © 2021 Lisa Ann

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5445-2298-2

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This book is dedicated to all of my teachers who wrote Lisa talks too much in red ink on my report cards.

Look at me now!

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Contents

Prologue

1. #TheAftermath

2. #Reconnecting

3. #CourtChaos

4. #Surrender

5. #TheTruth

6. #RussianRoulette

7. #MovingOn

8. #Minimalism

9. #ThePlan

10. #TheGamble

11. #Back4More

12. #Momentum

13. #NYE2019

Epilogue: #Gratitude

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Prologue

My first seven days of 2015 were like an intensely scary thriller film with a touch of the movie Mean Girls. Doesn’t sound like a movie you’d want to watch, does it?

Yeah, me either.

But I didn’t just watch that horrible flick—I was in it, starring in the lead role, and not by my choosing. The worst part? I was stuck on this chaotic production until it wrapped, with no script and no idea how it would end.

It was New Year’s Eve. While most of the world was out celebrating, ringing in 2015, I was home in Los Angeles with a friend. I had just announced my retirement from the adult entertainment industry in December. I was laid up on my couch, heavily medicated, recovering from breast reconstruction surgery. I had planned to have breast reduction surgery after retiring.

Breasts that size no longer served a purpose in the outside world. I wanted to do my best to blend in and potentially run on the treadmill without being uncomfortable. Due to the extent of the work done, the recovery was painful, so I arranged for friends to be around to keep me company and make sure I stayed still enough to heal properly.

My friend and I were excited to hang out and watch the Jennifer Lopez HBO special. Our big plan was to enjoy the show on the East Coast feed at six, as we were two of the biggest J-Lo fans and there was no way we wanted to wait till the West Coast feed at nine. We watched it. We loved it. We were living in J-Lo New Year’s Eve heaven.

But those good vibes ended at nine when my cell rang. The second I looked at my phone, the hairs on my arms stood up, and I panicked.

The caller ID was my home phone number—the landline for the very house in which my friend and I were sitting. The living room of my four-floor townhouse was in the middle, one flight above the main door and two flights below the room where the caller said he was.

Frightened, I let the call go to voicemail and didn’t make a sound. I gestured to my friend to follow me to the door, where I hit the panic button on the home alarm and placed her directly in front of the cameras. Then I went to the kitchen to grab a butcher knife. As soon as I grabbed the knife, the alarm company called. I told them to dispatch the police immediately and asked them to please stay on the line with me. While they stood by, I mustered up the courage to check the message the caller had left. A male voice said, I am upstairs in your bedroom, and I am coming downstairs to kill you on your couch!

I went from borderline to full-blown panic. I wanted to run, but I was too afraid for us to leave my building because I couldn’t trust that it wasn’t just a setup to get me out where I was even more vulnerable. So I made the executive decision to stay in view of the security cameras while we waited for the police to arrive. I never disconnected the call with my alarm company, as I wanted someone to know if something happened. My friend and I didn’t speak the entire time. If someone was actually in my house, we didn’t want them to know where we were. The alarm blared, but as loud as it was, it couldn’t drown out the sound of my pounding heart.

The police arrived in less than five minutes, but the intensity and the unknowns of the situation made those five minutes the longest of my life. Six officers appeared, guns drawn as they entered my house. Two stayed in the doorway with us, asking for details regarding what had happened. The cops divided themselves into two teams, one upstairs, the other downstairs. I heard them yelling and storming through the rooms and closets and talking on their radios. They instantly gave me my first feeling of safety and calm since the whole thing began.

The cops entered my basement, and I heard yelling.

Is anyone supposed to be down here?

I responded with a loud No!

Just then, I realized my life-sized cardboard cutout of Shaquille O’Neal was down there. I yelled that down to them, just in time to avoid a potential shoot-out with cardboard Shaq. It was the icebreaker we all needed, and it was the first natural breath I think my friend and I took. The Shaq cutout was later laid to rest in the dumpster.

The cops cleared my house and assured us we were safe. I played the message for the officers and showed them my caller ID. When I explained the call came from my home landline number, they explained that harassers and hackers often use spoofing apps to make the caller ID appear the way they want it to. The officers said this had to be someone who knew my home phone number, knew the layout of my home, and quite possibly knew that I was home recovering from surgery. They further explained that these types of situations are often just harassment—the term they used was mental warfare.

Believe it or not, hearing that phrase somehow gave me a false feeling of I’ve got this. What was one more war for me to fight?

The officers proceeded to give me a detailed list of things I needed to do immediately. Death threats automatically get assigned to a deputy, and that deputy is there to continue to collect information about the case. The officers also suggested I change my home phone number immediately.

If you read my first book, The Life, you know this is not my first go-round with being harassed or threatened. When I owned my day spa, I was harassed for more than six brutal months, and it changed my life dramatically. I couldn’t help but think about how hard that situation was to get through. I also reminded myself I’d persevered, found the truth, and managed to go on with my life. I just had to face doing it all over again.

The aftermath and chaos after my retirement sent me on a spiral into deep depression. I fell into isolation. I felt all that surrounded me was fear and darkness. At the same time, the silence created space that allowed an openness to listen and learn.

What I discovered was myself.

As I started to once again expand and explore, I had a new, mindful approach to everything. I dedicated thought and time to slowly rebuilding my life. I took my newfound knowledge of the life of minimalism and put it into action. Step by step over three years, I slowly changed everything that remained in my life and cut down my physical existence by 75 percent. That journey led to a feeling of unimaginable freedom.

That leg of the journey reminded me to hold on to the good and let go of the rest—including relationships. As I surrounded myself with only the good, I found it in myself, too, and began to appreciate true happiness in the simple things.

Step by step, I went through every emotion as I rebuilt my life. I found forgiveness as a way to move forward, and with that, I became an unstoppable force. That time to be still, in silence, was the master reset I didn’t know I needed. The chaos that ensued was, as I like to say, the best worst thing that ever happened to me! I was forced to be still, love myself, and carefully curate the life I wanted to live.

This story is a reminder that life may not always be as it seems because even as all these events were taking place, I kept up my public persona and radio shows. The shows were my life support during the darkest times, and they became the gifts that I eventually prioritized in the next major chapter of my life.

Like they say, everything happens for a reason.

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Chapter 1

1. #TheAftermath

As we walked through my home with the officers, we started talking about me—my life, people who knew me, and people who might be after me. One of the officers was aware of a Twitter war that I was somewhat one-sidedly involved in.

It was a week after I announced my retirement, while bored at the airport on my way home from my last dance booking. I’d made a bad joke on social media back in December. The joke was based on my theory of women in the industry visiting Dubai. The theory was an industry secret (though not a well-kept one) regarding many women in the industry traveling there to have sex with the sheik and his friends. These were among the highest-paying prostitution jobs for porn stars. As I was scrolling through Instagram, I saw a post from a porn star about betting on camels in Dubai.

On Twitter, I said I bet on other things happening when porn stars visited Dubai.

While I hadn’t made the post specific to anyone and had made the comment on a completely separate social media platform, none of that mattered. I had ignited a war. No one wanted to talk about prostitution in the industry being a real thing. Once the person who posted about betting on camels on Instagram found out about my tweet, everyone got involved, and the social media bandwagon fueled the fire. When I realized the extent of the potential damage from this land mine, I reached out and apologized to the person in question. I didn’t need to have a beef with anyone. My apology was from a place of taking the path of least resistance as opposed to standing my ground over a joke, even though I didn’t tag anyone on the tweet. I deleted my tweet and did what I could to mitigate the situation.

But it didn’t matter.

This one-sided war was real, cruel, and very, very personal. The officer who was aware of the situation suggested I file for a restraining order. It was all too evident to him that this event was connected to the Twitter war, his reasoning being that I had lived there for ten years and never had an issue. For the first time, I accepted this situation might not end well––that my lack of better judgment to keep my jokes to myself had turned into something far more serious. Hate is so real and escalates so fast.

None of this happened to you till the wrong person hated you, the officer said.

He suggested I document everything that took place from that night onward. The other officers went on to tell me that these online attacks often rallied other fans to do awful things for their favorite stars. Upward of a few million people on the internet had viewed and discussed the beef, and overnight, there was a target on my head. The officers suggested I collect the threatening tweets and build a case for my restraining order. They were helpful and calming—but at the same time, they filled my head with the potential worst-case scenarios, a startling reality check as to the seriousness of my situation.

Once the officers left, my friend and I sat back down on the couch in disbelief. I was still in incredible pain from my surgery, but I decided I was no longer comfortable taking pain pills. I wanted to be alert and ready to handle the next situation that might come our way. My paranoia was at an all-time high, and in my gut, I felt this call was just the beginning. I replayed the conversations with the officers in my head, all the stories and examples of similar situations they had dealt with in the past. I had to face facts: this was not going away. It was only getting worse.

Talk about a wild start to a new year.

During the time this harassment took place, I had to wait at least three weeks to have my post-surgery check-up with my doctor and get medical approval to fly. Normally, I would have been locked in my apartment in New York City, where I have twenty-four-hour-a-day security and feel safe. Unfortunately, New York wasn’t an option. I had to stay at my house in Los Angeles—the same place where someone already knew the setup and location, along with my phone number.

I had just retired from the industry with the hope of leaving the fear of health risks from shooting scenes, late-night fights at clubs, and stalkers behind me, only to realize I had to accept a new level of anxiety—the fear of the unknown, along with the fear for my life. My fear was complicated by the concern that someone wanted to hurt me and get in my head. The mental warfare term the officer used stuck with me. He’d said that harassers rarely physically torture someone but instead look to terrorize their targets with mind games, creating high levels of paranoia, fear, and anxiety.

I tried to convince myself no

Reviews for The Life Back

[hjjhjh ljgljg · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I'm grateful to read this amazing book. Thank you, lisa!

[Austin Pierce · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really respect Lisa Ann. Her first memoir was a game changer.