I had to get outside. I was starting to feel trapped- by the oversized fleece blanket on my lap, by the codependent dogs who are insistent upon occupying my personal space at all times, by my roommate’s annoying quirks, by my designated spot on the couch where I live most of my life. We had smoked a small bowl of sour diesel and the cool late-November air felt fresh on my arms. I sat on the stoop, closed my eyes, and looked up at the partly cloudy sky. I could see blue through my eyelids. I took a few deep, restorative breaths, hinged my hips, tucked my belly between my legs and folded forward over my knees. Stretching like in cat-cow back and forth, while seated on the stoop in the cool air and the dusty blue sky. Side stretches, spine twists, and a raspberry lime sparkling water on the stoop. A series of tiny pleasures, satisfactions, and feel-goods while sitting on the stoop outside my front door so I could come back down to earth instead of floating away on the tide of dissociation. It’s the kind of high that allows you to tap into the clear creative river coursing inside yourself. It’s the kind of high that heightens your internal somatic sensations, so that your body can guide you to relief.
It’s hard for me to talk about pleasure and satisfaction. It’s hard for me to talk about smoking weed- medicinally or otherwise. It’s hard for me to talk about existing in a body that isn’t really… on your team or, at least, isn’t really useful or beautiful to racial capitalism. And yet, it’s these moments- 5 minutes, high on sour diesel, fresh air, restorative stretches, supported by the stoop- that ground me, keep me going, and contribute to my healing. Being able to pendulate from pain, physical discomfort, exertion intolerance, and grief to somatic satisfaction, joy, and pleasure for small doses is medicine.
This is, for me, a vulnerable post about how much I still carry with me after reading adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism: the Politics of Feeling Good almost a year ago even though I haven’t figured out how to express it yet. The permission to seek pleasure from amb and the generative somatic tools I’ve learned in therapy since reading the book have fundamentally changed my experience of illness and disability. Dissociation, derealization, and other forms of disconnection are common in Long Covid even though they are not talked about much; pleasure activism is a balm to disconnection. Someday, I hope to be able to say more about that. For now, a quote or two from the book for those who haven’t read it yet:
- “Pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy.”
- “I believe that we are in an imagination battle, and almost everything about how we orient toward our bodies is shaped by fearful imaginations. Imaginations that fear Blackness, brownness, fatness, queerness, disability, difference. Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality.”
- “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”
- “My intentions for readers of this book are that you recognize that pleasure is a measure of freedom; notice what makes you feel good and what you are curious about; learn ways you can increase the amount of feeling-good time in your life, to have abundant pleasure; decrease any internal or projected shame or scarcity thinking around the pursuit of pleasure, quieting any voices of trauma that keep you from your full sacred sensual life; create more room for joy, wholeness, and aliveness (and less room for oppression, repression, self-denial and unnecessary suffering) in your life; identify strategies beyond denial or repression for navigating pleasure in relationship to others; and begin to understand the liberation possible when we collectively orient around pleasure and longing. Bonus: realize you are a pleasure activist!”
Ok fine, it was four quotes. The book is FULL of wisdom and offerings. If you’ve read Pleasure Activism, I’d love to hear from you here in the comments or over on Twitter.