Pleasure Principle
I started this post at least 3 different times because I’m fighting with what I think I should share versus what I want to share. Often, these are the same but when I’m in new territory, I fight with myself a lot. Part of that is protective — I am not here to continuously give away pieces of myself for your entertainment. I do not want to be consumed and regurgitated for fun. I also know I can’t control that. Once my work is out there, people will fit it into their narrative however it’s most comfortable for them. The biggest part, though, is that my pleasure is deeply personal, and I don’t believe it should be for public consumption yet the denial of its existence is the parsing of my humanity, and I think I’ve done that more than enough for one lifetime.
This may get a little uncomfortable because our society is much more fixated on pain and trauma than pleasure and joy, something I have come to realize is a significant part of my wiring. It’s not something I was completely unaware of — how could I not be. I look at my writing and think about my past experiences and it’s a lot of pain. Not all of it, but that’s a lot of what I’ve written about publicly. I don’t know why pain is easier to share — maybe because I have to process my instinct to avoid it. Maybe it’s because once I process that pain and start sorting through the nuances of it, I get to a place where everything isn’t one massive jumble of emotions I don’t understand. My process may be to work through the pain, express it, and then see all the things the pain was masking, and if that’s the case, then so be it. But I now know and understand my pain. I also know that the hits will not stop coming and the resulting loss of joy because the pain is too consistent. I’ve had to actively look away from the pain because I’ve forgotten the joy of just being.
It’s taken a toll. I’ve felt myself disassociate from my physical self. I’ve distanced myself from many of the pleasures of being alive. For a while, I only noticed the most extreme — physical pain, and usually when it’s debilitating. Twelve years ago, when I was in the clutches of diet culture, I was a Weight Watchers disciple and avid self-torturer. I would push myself past pain regularly because it was what my fat body deserved. I wouldn’t allow myself to enjoy food and every day I didn’t work out meant I was a lazy piece of shit who clearly hated herself because I allowed myself to look like this. And I kicked ass. I was walking, running, working out — my body tightened up and my clothes fit differently. I was so proud of myself. Fast forward 12 years and you are now speaking with someone who has had to learn how to enjoy food and not hate herself when her back goes out or her knees are sore. I’ve ignored my physical needs in many ways and it’s all still tied to this idea that my fat body is not worthy of care, rest, affection, pleasure, or love. It’s complicated. It continues to be complicated but I’m figuring it out, piece by piece.
I’m having to re-learn that it’s okay to just be and to love who I am in all my forms. It’s more than okay: it’s required and during this pandemic, I have moved my focus to doing exactly that.
That means allowing myself to feel good just for the sake of feeling good. It seems like such a simple concept but when you think about how often we feel bad for enjoying something delicious, for sleeping when we’re tired during the “productive” part of the day. The times we look at pleasing ourselves as self-indulgent, like watching something we enjoy or creating art with no purpose attached. I felt so self-indulgent and guilty for buying pretty clothing that I couldn’t wear to work or work out in, as though items whose only function was to make me look and feel good made them useless.
It is disturbing to realize how often I de-prioritize my needs…something that is consistently reinforced by my invisibility or mockery by the media around me.
This year has been eye-opening in that regard. The pandemic has slowed my outside interactions to only what is 100% necessary, which has given me the time and space to care for my physical needs with fewer conflicts. I cook more and pay attention to what my body wants versus just eating something for energy. My sciatica flare-up made me have to pay a lot more attention to how I sit, stand, lie down…I had to give myself more time to move through my home because I couldn’t rush around anymore. I’ve had to nurture and care for myself much more consciously than before and it was during that care that I realized I only respected my pain and not my pleasure. Realizing that made me sad in so many ways, and since that realization, I’ve made it a goal to acknowledge and celebrate the ways my body pleases me and to stop telling myself that pleasure equals guilt.
I never thought I was a prudish person. I’ve always thought I was fairly open and liberal with my attitudes and beliefs. I’m having to realize that I mostly applied those to other people, that I held myself to a different standard. Since then, I have been refuting any shame I feel about myself. I have started rejecting all the ways I’ve been told to hide myself away. In 2015, I did this with my voice. In 2020, I’m doing this with my body. Maybe in another 5 years, I’ll be a fully realized person who doesn’t worry about whether I’m a narcissist because I like being seen and heard — a person who doesn’t worry about her desire to be acknowledged as a character flaw or fear the misogynoir and fatphobia that tends to accompany it.
Maybe.
But right now, I’m figuring out how this pushes my sexuality into my personal spotlight and what that means publicly. It definitely doesn’t feel safe, but it also doesn’t feel wrong. It feels like that space where I realize this can have unpleasant consequences that will reinforce the space that society has allocated for me and my refusal to stay there. That’s the part that bothers me the most — I’m not personally ashamed, but I am afraid of the response. Despite that, I’ve decided that if fear is what’s urging me to erase myself, then maybe that’s the space I need to be in, pushing MY fear aside until I find MY limits rather than the ones I’ve just drifted into setting. This is what it means for me to break the box made for and enforced upon me…and it scares me because the punishment for doing this is often steep and cruel.
So, that’s where I am. It’s not a comfortable space, but what change is? That’s not to say there aren’t some really cool moments. For example, I commissioned new art from Maya Joi Art and BlueNoelle based on some of my images and I fucking love them. One of the best things that have come out of doing this type of introspection and creation is realizing how few images there are of womxn like me there are, and then supporting artists to change that shit. Art depicting all different body types so necessary — not just the sexy, pretty, strong, or funny. Not just the societally approved. We need to see the various ways we experience the world depicted in the art we create. I want it to be easier to love bodies that look like mine. I want it to be easier to love my body for more than just what it allows me to do for other people. And seeing my body type in various mediums and roles does that.
I want fat, Black womxn to stop feeling like they are less because they take up more…I want us to feel like we are a part of this society instead of being consumed by it while we suffer in silence. I want us to stop suffering and live as bold and loud and free as we want. I want us to celebrate ourselves and our beauty without fear of recrimination or reprisal. Is that an unrealistic goal? Maybe. But much of our reality started as someone’s dream and I don’t know why this dream should be any less important than those.
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Originally published at https://talynnkel.com on August 29, 2020.
