the thesis is pleasure

you gotta dance with the one who brung ya

Aug 26, 2024

The thesis right now is pleasure.

I’ve been in a funk. Just the feeling of being slightly off. I haven’t been eating enough because I get tired of cooking for myself, and also there’s this persistent ant problem in the kitchen, and also because when I eat alone, I eat healthily in a way that is not aspirational but more monk-like. No oils, no sauces, it’s all protein and cottage cheese and vegetables, and everything is borderline disgusting but it’s food that gets the job done. It is not about pleasure, it’s about not being hungry. I finally gave up yesterday, and ate a massive breakfast at a diner with breakfast sausage and toast and eggs sunny side up and a small cup of black coffee. Even the coffee was better than what I make myself.

After eating, I got a massage from one of those day spa places in a strip mall. A two-hour massage for a $120, including a body scrub. I always forget how physically private American culture is compared to everywhere else. The woman even massaged my armpits. When it came time for the scrub she had me strip down, completely naked except for a tiny washcloth over my vagina, and scrubbed me head to toe. I lay there, naked and giggling because there’s something inherently so funny about nudity, and she giggled right along with me, briskly washing my hair before sending me on my way. Another person hasn’t washed my hair since I was a child.

I think one thing about the thirties is you start to see the cumulative effects of the paths everyone has walked. Who crushed it financially, who drank too much, who’s gonna have a baby. One benefit that being homeschooled for the majority of my youth gave me, was an awareness that everyone is truly on a different path. As a teenager, surrounded by both ultraconservative Christians who were not in school for religious reasons, and also “unschoolers,” (typically ultraliberal hippies) who believe that “life teaches, so children don’t need formal education”— that feeling of “checking” on my peers, at least at an early age— wasn’t really on my radar. We were all on different paths, to become different people, with different interests. In that regard, the “checking” that I did in college to see where other people were at— the comparative nature of being in a group where everyone is the same age, ostensibly from a similar background… felt new to me. It still feels new. When I was a child, my mom loved reading me a book called Clive Eats Alligators, about a group of children with a wide array of preferences that extend from what they want to eat for breakfast, to what they want to be when they grow up. Clive eats alligator cereal. Tessa wears a tail. Celeste has a pet rooster. Lately, I’m noticing what everyone is eating for breakfast and who is wearing a tail. Weirdly, because of the way my life has shaken out over the past few years, many of these things feel somewhat irrelevant to me, because I’m starting over on a fundamental level. The freedom is intoxicating and overwhelming. I saw a video online recently from an elderly woman who said something along the lines of, “the fact that life just continues, no matter what, is the most shocking thing.”

But pleasure. Pleasure is the guiding light right now. I can meditate on what success does or does not look like to me, ask god what the path has in store, wonder if I’m gonna have a baby… but my only strength lately is simply in continuing. Continuing and consistency. And doing exactly what I want, which is… a pleasure.

I feel that there is a puritanical streak emerging culturally, for better or worse: Celibacy is trending, dating TikTok is filled with rules, people party less, life is genuinely so hard for most people. I want for everyone what they want for themselves, but I notice that sometimes a lot of contemporary rhetoric about what adulthood looks like doesn’t resonate with me as much, simply because it’s not very fun. And I like having fun. I feel as if I’m defending the pursuit of pleasure even to myself… the pursuit of ice cream, going to the beach, physical touch… sometimes it makes me feel crazy. I’ve been reading Glynnis MacNichol’s book I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself— watching a woman in her mid-40s unravel her own processing around the tenet that she’s simply “allowed to enjoy herself”— is eerily similar to the thoughts I find myself thinking on a daily basis, around food, desire, my body, and relationships in every area of my life.

In the book Glynnis describes how after WWII, infants who had lost parents, died the most quickly, not from lack of food or water, but from the lack of touch. Touch, she wrote, (I am paraphrasing) is the only sense that we truly cannot live without. When Glynnis pedantically explains the sexts she receives and sends, we are somehow made to feel that this is radical because she is a woman of middle age who is after sex, not love. And yet, despite the inherently asinine nature of writing about sexting, there’s some kernel of deeper truth here about the courage required to pursue pleasure and have fun, not just as a woman, but as a person. She quotes Audre Lorde, “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.” I am now familiar with the feeling of “satisfaction” Lorde describes, and yet, operating from this positioning feels deeply unfamiliar to me. It feels like a secret.

Pleasure is radical. It’s not sensible. It can’t be scaled, it’s individuated, it is not algorithmic. It is only felt: the sun on skin, the luxury of presence, an internal space— free of structure, binary, or even time. How quick I am to assume that it’s been like this forever, that pursuing doing what I want is something that’s always been accessible— when I back up I remember that widespread use of birth control is not even 100 years old. I wonder if I’m ambitious enough. I wonder if it’s embarrassing how delighted I am to eat eggs alone at a diner in Altadena at 2pm. I wonder if I’m working hard enough to merit enjoying myself this much. Simultaneously, I notice my own disappointment in myself that the desire for love and touch and people being attracted to me does take up space, maybe too much space in my head. Aren’t I, a modern women, supposed to have, on some level, evolved beyond this? But in the words of Gen Z: “I’m just a girl.” And then I wonder why I’m so self-absorbed… And yet. I prayed for this. This feeling of fullness I have now. Glynnis describes it: “I am fully inside myself and only looking out.” Maybe it was the fire, but I have such a different appreciation for my body, for physical well-being, for mental strength and clarity, for the romance of daily living, for cold water and hot sun.

When I was twenty, I went to a New Year’s party at a little house on the edge of town. I was with Harrison and Montsho, I think. I remember the party was big, and the music was really loud and I climbed up and sat on top of the piano and watched all the kids dance. The house was literally shaking and I desperately wanted to be the kind of person who dances, unaware of how special and fleeting the moment was. I wanted to be someone who didn’t take stock, didn’t try to remember everything, I just wanted to live it and yet I could not. I wanted to be a dancer, not an audience member in my own life. In a therapy appointment I had months ago, the therapist asked me what was one thing I could do that would make my life incrementally better, and I told her that I wanted to eat fruit and I wanted to dance. I still need to eat the fruit, but I did start dancing. It has taken my whole adult life to be a dancer, to unlearn the self-consciousness of actively being in my body all the time— loving it when it’s being scrubbed by a stranger, loving it when I honor the need for ice cream in the McDonald’s drive through at 11pm after drinking two glasses of rose, loving it when it is alone in bed and finding even that pleasurable in a particular and specific way— because it all belongs to me. Regarding a similar feeling of ownership, Glynnis writes of a sexual encounter: “The pleasure I have taken from the memory, a pleasure that increases instead of fading away, is what comes from the knowledge that I summoned what I wanted, and it came. It is the pleasure of power. Of being powerful, mind and body. And to have that power emerge, while in a position, literally, of almost complete vulnerability.” In theory, this is easy. In practice, feeling this level of ownership over what I want, again and again, proves a challenge: I think I shouldn't spend that much, I think I shouldn’t eat that, I think I shouldn’t say that, I think I shouldn’t take the afternoon off. And then to do it because I want to…. Insane… It makes me feel so gauche all the time, brand new.

Two years ago I read the book I Am Not Ashamed by Barbara Payton, a movie star with an impossibly short career who steadily unwound her life with alcohol and pills until she ended up, dying at age 37, presumably of alcoholism, in Mexico where she worked as a prostitute and wrote poems until her death. The book is brilliant, mostly because, as per her own title, she wasn’t ashamed— she just wrote about what she did, what happened to her, her loves and desires, where she went, who she talked to, honestly, clearly and frankly. Daily, I remind myself, I am not ashamed.

This morning while walking, the phrase “You gotta dance with the one who you brung ya” came to mind. I asked my dad what this meant and he replied: