I’ve had an entire bottle of peach soju when I finally muster the courage to grab a microphone and belt out Oasis’ “Wonderwall” while rocking side to side. The mic is clutched in my right hand and I’ve stuffed the left into the pocket of my jeans to stop some of my nervous shaking. I tell myself to stare straight ahead and look at the flat screen television mounted to a wall across the room because if I do I don’t have to see the others at the tables around me and think they’re judging me. No one is. In fact, the others in the room sing along on the chorus in short and soft bursts and it gives me confidence. They join in between sips of their own drinks and bites of food stacked in small dishes on a table near the door.

Outside that door there is a restaurant and outside of that is Baltimore and the AWP conference all of us are in the city to attend. Some of the writers in the room I know and others I’ve been introduced to for the first time. The energy in the room is easy. People have already performed solo and in duos and trios. Those not on the mic aren’t afraid to add their voices to the lyrics and there’s plenty of laughter to go around. By the end of the night, we will have belted out Usher and Boyz II Men as a collective. But right now it’s me and an instrumental Oasis track trying to keep time.

I don’t really need the words of the song fading in and out on the screen. I know them by heart. I’ve sung them over and over at the top of my lungs at home alone. In my car while driving the back roads. In the dead of night with headphones stuffed into my ears and tears in my eyes. I don’t know how long I’ve known the song. I just know it. It’s in my body like a switch—one note and something in me changes or shuts down. It’s one of those songs that make me contemplative and hopeful. It’s always made me feel like I could move forward toward something better than my current place in the world or has given me permission to dwell a little in memory.

In October 1995, when “Wonderwall” was released, I was still in high school. I was just as you would imagine a Gen X teenager would be at the time. Angsty and quiet. Very serious and terrified, too. Back then I was still living into who I thought I should be. I was on the fast track to college, candy striping at the local hospital, a member of Junior Achievement, a cellist, and a very good girl. Maybe I’d heard the song floating out somewhere on the radio or at the skating rink. I could have seen the video in passing on MTV. I don’t know. All that I do know is that 30 years later I’m a little tipsy in a karaoke room in Baltimore living out some part of my teenage dream. I’m a writer. I may not be writing for Vibe Magazine like I’d planned, but I’m a writer nonetheless. 30 years later and I’m not the cool girl I’d hoped to be by moving to New York and covering the music industry. I’m not driving the Jeep Grand Cherokee I coveted or living in an exposed brick loft. I am cool, though. Cool enough that I am in this exact space with people I think are talented and creative and by extension that means I am, too.

When the first chorus comes around, I’m more comfortable. I let my hand slide out of my pocket and my arm swing next to my hip. I’m still rocking back and forth, but my grip on the mic is looser. It’s not the soju in my body. It’s the understanding that I’m safe here. That it’s okay to open up a little more because even if this moment was never one I daydreamed about, I’m right where I’m supposed to be. This isn’t that path I’d chosen when I was idealistic and still believed everything I ever wanted could come true. This is the adult version of my life earned through looping life lessons and veering off the beaten path.

Back in 1995, all the state testing and extracurricular activities set me on the college prep path. This path was supposed to lead to the American Dream. And it did in a roundabout way. I just got lost along the journey. I changed majors from what I loved (magazine journalism) to what I thought made sense (sociology) after hard criticism from a professor. I went back for another degree to right that wrong. Ended up in graduate school in my late twenties. Married. Divorced. Broke and rebuilt. Started a career in the polar opposite industry of where I really wanted to be. But all of it led me to the center of a dim room, gripping a mic, and singing about being saved.

I saved myself. When the second verse begins, the room and the people in it have faded a bit. I’m still staring straight ahead at the monitor, but I’m using it more like a metronome to make sure I’m not singing too quickly and getting off beat. The words flow out of me. I don’t sing any louder, but there is more conviction now. The person doing the saving is me. I’m not the person lead singer Liam Gallagher is crooning to. There is no mystery lover or friend who’s going to be the one to show up and right the world for me. It took me a long time to figure this out.

I can’t count how many times I wished and hoped and prayed for someone to step in and step up for me so that I’d be free from making big decisions, and small ones, too. I spent years telling myself that I just needed to hold on a little while longer and eventually the good work I was doing for myself would put the right person in my path. And it has, but not in the selfish way I was thinking of. The people, like those in this karaoke room and beyond, appeared to show me what advocating for myself looks like just as much as they showed me what respite is and not rescue.

That is what I was seeking. Respite. Some breathing room along the path of my life to give me time to figure out if the next step was straight ahead or if it was time for a whole new route. I’d spent my life waiting to be told what to do or waiting on the proper guideposts to appear to make sure I was on the straight and narrow. Had I stayed putting one foot in front of the other I would have missed so much. I certainly wouldn’t be in this room at this moment. I would have had a good life, I think. Far different than what I have now, though. I saved myself from a life much more dimmed. I took a scenic route that turned out to be richer than anything I’d ever imagined.

The song starts to fade out with a repetition of the same questioning salvation. The soju has warmed my belly and my limbs and I’m singing to bring it on home. A friend circles me with her phone videoing and photographing me for memory’s sake. It makes me laugh and I pitch forward to let it out and take my seat back against the wall, take another sip, and join in with the next chorus of voices.

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Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.

On a Saturday night in January, I’m sitting in my bedroom waiting for over a foot of snow to fall. I’ve made all of the necessary preparations without crossing over the line of panic buying and resource hoarding. My car’s gas tank is full and the wipers are pointed toward the sky. I can see my SUV from the window and I’m already mulling over a de-icing schedule in my brain. All of my devices are charged and ready for any power outages and there are plenty of candles, batteries, and a flashlight in a basket on one of my nightstands. I’ve even made a bugout bag for my trunk just in case I have to leave. And I’ve checked in on my parents and sister, making sure at their respective homes in Ohio and Illinois they are ready to ride out whatever the next few hours are waiting to pour over our heads. I think I’m ready if the world suddenly blinks offline.

The block outside my apartment windows is quiet, all the cars lined up and the streets salted. Everyone, and everything, seems tucked in and anxious. I’m comfortable, warm, and calm. That is a feat in itself. It doesn't matter how long my city has been awaiting the snow, the entire world has been on edge. The social contract has ripped at the seams and all that we’ve tried to gather and fix and hide is now spilling out as each day passes. Comfort seems a rare luxury even fewer of us can afford than ever before. Safety, too.

While waiting for the storm, for the first time in years, I’m listening to the radio. The soft voice of the disc jockey is singing the praises of the Smokey Robinson song “Quiet Storm” that has just ended. I don’t know what radio station I’ve stumbled upon—it’s one of only four I’ve managed to pick up so far—but it’s a soothing mix of soul and uptempo jazz, like a 60s cocktail party. It’s the kind of music that lets you zone out and before you know it your shoulders are moving and time is slipping by.

As the disc jockey chats about the upcoming set of artists, I realize that I’ve missed the vignettes of music history and lore that come between the songs on stations like these. The immediacy I’ve gotten used to via streaming services is absent. On the radio, there’s a gentle fade out between songs, maybe three or four of them played in a row, before the voice over the frequency comes back to connect with listeners again. It’s a much slower pace and I’m not sure how I’ve gone so long without experiencing music this way.

A few weeks ago, while meticulously scanning the books in my apartment to create a digital library of what I own, I decided I wanted to invest in a vintage home audio system. I scoured eBay for one that hit my desired budget, need for actual speakers, and the aesthetic I was seeking. Of course, the dream system I’d grown up seeing in videos was now vastly overpriced due to the resurgence of all things 90s and 2000s being cool. So I settled on a sleek mini system with two speakers and that slightly futuristic vibe that permeated my middle and high school years. When it arrived in perfect condition, I set it up in my bedroom right near my bed with visions of lazy mornings and evenings listening to CDs dancing in my head. Until I realized I had exactly zero CDs to test out this new desire. So I listened to the radio while I sent me and my sister on a quest to rebuild the collection of physical media I’d once been so proud of.

The analog world I’m creating isn’t perfect, though. The system I selected could pick up more radio stations if I was willing to unfurl the antenna wire and trail it along the wall, but that ruins the aesthetic. So I think maybe I stumbled across the perfect station and that’s all I need. As the night rolls on, and the snow has yet to start, the station has switched to soft Latin tunes full of percussion and brass. I can only pick up a percentage of the words, but I’m still soothed by what I hear. Even the new jockey slips in and out of Spanish during the transitions. The songs are long, looping into and over each other, until I look up and an hour has passed. I get up to check outside and run my fingers over the books on the built-in shelves in my bedroom. I’ve been on a mission here, too. I’m not just cataloging the books I own; I’ve also been collecting the physical catalogs of all the independent Black authors I love, directly buying from them when possible and on Amazon as I have to, because I’m afraid that in this current world one day I’m going to log into my Kindle account and poof!, the books I love will be gone even if I’ve paid to own them.

It’s become important to me to keep physical copies of Black history texts and critical theory as moments, mentions, and monuments of my people are being erased in real time. Just two days ago, I watched videos of placards outlining the history of slavery in the area being removed from the President’s House exhibit in Philadelphia. The administration says we cannot disparage those in the past. We must show our nation’s glory, our achievements. But collectively owning generations of people and milling them down to bone and spirit is achievement, right? Pretending that the ripple effect of that grinding down doesn’t still wear their ancestors smooth so they can’t quite get a grip like yours do is an achievement, right?

I wonder about the Spanish on the radio, even the words I don’t know, and how quickly they can be erased. How quickly the bodies that make the voices can be swept away and buried. I wonder what the world sounds like without these voices. It’s becoming reality now. I don’t have to wonder what the world sounds like when the voices are knocked out of harmony and instead they are screaming for safety, compassion, justice, fairness, and basic human decency. It’s reality now. Two days ago, there was a little boy in a blue hat being led away, pulled from everything he’s ever known in the dead of winter. This city, and many across the nation, have been freezing for months now. And then a little girl. They show her in pink on the news, her little face smoothed over like there was Vaseline on the lens. Captured in an innocence that can never be again.

It’s not snowing yet but it’s cold. Or maybe it is snowing, but unless you’re looking you don’t notice it. The city prepares for nights like this; the meteorologists warn us what to do in advance. They tell us to clear the streets, to only travel when necessary. The roads are dangerous, they say, covered in ice. You have to be careful where you walk because any little slip-up and you’re falling and no one can help you.

But that’s not necessarily true. It snows for hours once it begins. The snow and ice pile up so quickly that it seems an impossible task to dig out from their weight. But then my neighbors start to appear one by one from lighted doorways and down the steps of apartment buildings. The percussion and horns keep playing in the distance, the soft Spanish of the disc jockey explaining the significance of the songs, as I gaze out the window and hear the shovels start to break through and hit ground. At first the people work solo, digging around the tires of their cars and one man taking his snow blower to the sidewalk to create a path to his home. But then he clears a little further, expanding the path so he’s not the only one safe from falling. He makes a plan for the rest of us, too.

I let the radio play until my eyes feel heavy and the music switches again to classical. In the morning the snow has stopped and the block is quiet. But then it starts again. People come out and start digging and digging until soon a few cars are able to leave. People mark their spots with chairs and tiny tables and a singular, bright orange traffic cone. The neighbors respect the hard work it took to make progress against the snow and so even when the cars leave the block we hold space for them. In the morning snow, I see people I never knew lived in the houses and apartments around me. We work side by side, our breath white in the air, fingers freezing, until soon enough of us have fought back against the snow and the ice that we’re moving forward again. We refuse to be trapped on this block, in this moment in time. The city isn’t coming to rescue us. There’ve been no plows, no more salt to melt anything away. It will take us to set things right.

When the sun goes down, I listen to the radio again. The jazz starts first and then the lilt of the Spanish tunes fades in and after a few hours the concertos and symphonies pick up. All the while, the sound of shovels and digging persist. A few voices rise as people greet each other or offer help. When the sun comes up the next day, the block looks clearer than it was before, the snow and ice beaten back and still receding.

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Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.

“What are your resolutions?” my co-worker asks me as we’re settling in for the workday. It’s that blur of a week between Christmas and the new year. Half of the office is still out and the skeleton crew of us are tired and dragging. We’re federal employees and this year has been our own special hell, but we’ve made it by hook or by crook. The office is quiet, not in just the way that says the year is almost over, but also in the way that tells you people are deep into their thoughts about what the coming year will bring. I’m not much for talking. I just want to keep my headphones in and tap away at my keyboard until I glance at the time and the day has wrapped up. I can’t eat another cookie or candy cane and I’m tired of the red glitter that pops up on my desk from the decorations lining my cubicle.

“I don’t really make them,” I tell her while waiting for my computer to boot up. “I set my intentions. I made my jar this weekend.”

And I had. Sitting cross-legged on my bed, I’d read the note I wrote myself as last year closed and reflected on how much of it had come true. I’d taken a few moments to look at each trinket in the jar before I started to sift through them to determine which were important to include for 2026 and which had served their purpose. After those decisions were made, I said a few words over the old items and the new and sealed them into the jar before placing it back on the shelf in my office. When next December rolls around, I’ll repeat the ritual and keep my life pushing forward. I don’t journal much anymore, but this is the way I mark the passage of time and what it entails—my hopes, dreams, accomplishments, and my fears.

I’ve learned that giving myself grace means setting intentions instead of resolutions. For me, resolutions are promises that I rarely keep. And those failures tend to set a bitter tone over what I actually do as the year runs its course. Intentions are guidelines. They are what I want to do instead of what I am forcing myself to do for fear of failure.

I do my best to keep myself above the judgments of February when people have stopped going to the gym, had the forbidden soda, or taken a puff of nicotine, and progress gets put off until next year because it’s not perfect. Setting intentions means I’ve built in the possibility I may stumble. I may fall flat on my face. But I may also wildly succeed.

Eschewing resolutions means that all progress is good progress because I’m moving toward something new with purpose. On those occasions that something fails, I’m still travelling forward because now I know what works and what doesn’t. I can make a game plan to avoid the same mistakes and pitfalls the next time I start working on that goal. Intentions are kinder, softer. They don’t seem to include the pressure of having to make the world new again. They only ask me to shift a few things around and see how I like the arrangement. The intentions I set more gently prod me into resting or striving or standing still instead of wiping the slate clean and having to race toward December to prove that I’m accomplished and worthy.

To help guide myself to the best start to the new year, I’ve spent a good amount of time coming up with questions to ask myself when gathering my thoughts about where I see myself going and what I wish to experience. Not all of my thoughts are groundbreaking. Some of them are rooted in very real life changes and others are simply things that I think would make me happy no matter how fleeting. I don’t categorize my intentions, either. Just like the trinkets packed into the jar, everything goes into the same place because life is full of overlaps and new connections. What is important to me is to find at least a mix of the serious and the silly. The creative and the practical. I think about the start of each year like this:

1.) What are my goals, but more importantly, what do I want to feel as I’m working toward them? I don’t just focus on the outcome because I know I’m guilty of only caring about the bigger picture and tend to race through the experience in order to mark something off a list. My intentions are meant to make me appreciate the small steps that make up the larger journey.

I do my best to include items in my jar, and on the physical list I write, that represent these ideas. This year I want to get a new tattoo and a piercing. I want to become more fluent in Spanish. But I also want to pay off my car and increase my savings.

There are 10 intentions on my written list and about triple the amount of trinkets in the jar. Each of these ideas hits a particular part of my life I think needs attention. So if the year ends and my car loan still exists? I’m not going to be disappointed because the root of what I want to feel still remains the same. I want to feel responsible and accomplished. If I don’t pay it off, at least I’ve made extra payments and I’m still ahead. And if I still stumble when speaking Spanish? It’s fine because at least now I’m saying the words aloud instead of only reading them on the page.

2.) I ask myself if the intentions and goals I’m setting are mine or am I working toward change that I feel I’m obligated to reach because of tradition or social expectation? I don’t care about making a resolution to lose weight. I’m a big woman by both genetics and habits. My intention is to cut back on my soda consumption. If I lose weight? Great! That’s a bonus. I don’t want to be among the hordes of people who feel the new year means they have to rush to the gym because there is a finite amount of time to prove they’re serious about their body and that clock runs out on 12/31/2026.

I want to set intentions that make sense for my current life and that just as much as they involve change, they don’t require me to be a completely different person just because time has elapsed. I pay close attention to one key thing when I set these intentions. I like who I am and the only thing I should focus on is being a better version of her and not a completely new woman because the calendar has flipped.

3.) I ask myself what kind of fun I want to have in the months between then and now. There are always ideas popping into my head about what sounds like a good time. I buy tickets to all kinds of concerts and events. I show up at restaurant weeks and dinner parties. And yes, sometimes I get a little too ambitious in those plans and end up giving up the tickets or staying home, but remember I said all progress is good progress. I do attend events and I do have fun. The intention is to get out of the house and live some beautiful memories. I can do that a day at a time with or without a full calendar.

4.) Lastly, I set my intentions with lots of audacious hope. Some of the words I speak over the trinkets in the jar, and those on the list, can seem impossible without intervention from the universe or a miracle. But what’s the saying? Shoot for the moon and even if you fail you’ll end up among the stars? That’s the crux of all of my intentions, progress and forward movement, but why not dare to dream a little big while you’re working on the practical, too?

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Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.

By the time this is published my birthday will have come and gone. I would have spent it on a staycation here in Philadelphia in a hotel room with a whirlpool tub overlooking the city. I would have already opened the birthday gifts I bought for myself, had dinner with friends, and indulged in room service in a pair of new pajamas. I would have popped a bottle of champagne and eaten chocolate while tucked beneath a heavy hotel comforter and smooth cotton sheets. I would have lived my own little slice of heaven while swaying to Olivia Dean and making declarations about how that particular moment in time was a reward for trusting and caring for myself despite any bumps along the road.

This birthday isn’t the first I’ve made a concentrated effort to celebrate myself. In years past, I’ve picked a city and traveled solo or with friends to celebrate another trip around the sun. Memphis. Las Vegas. Baltimore. Columbus. New Orleans times three. Bermuda for next year if all goes to plan. The location may change annually, but the intent is always the same. To remember that I’ve not only survived another year, I’ve thrived. Each birthday is a reminder of this.

Columbus: This is the first year I’m traveling for my birthday. The suite overlooking the city is a gift from the hotel for being a loyal member. I’m at the corner of the building overlooking the city and they’ve laid the table with a bottle of sparkling wine and chocolate-covered strawberries with a card signed by a handful of the staff. This makes me cry. It makes me cry because it’s an act of kindness and care I haven’t afforded myself in the last two years. These employees have shown me softness I haven’t shown myself. This needs to change.

I’ve packed myself into my car and driven two and a half hours to visit my college best friend. Kahlilah has been an anchor for the last year. I’ve driven the miles over too many weekends since I’ve returned to Ohio and she’s held me together. She’s held my hand and danced in sweaty clubs with me. Helped me pick out my first tube of red lipstick and pulled me back to when we were college girls sharing a dorm room and giggling in the window at cute boys walking by. With her I am the me before the heartbreak. The me before life got a little too heavy and my mind turned to survival. I want to be that girl again. I just have to figure out where to start.

Las Vegas: I don’t want to be sad for my birthday. I’m still nursing a broken heart and doing my best to put on a brave face. I can mask most of the time, but it’s getting harder and harder to do. I know that I feel like I’m supposed to be some rom-com version of myself. I’ve done all the moping and crying and now it’s time for me to dance in my kitchen and laugh with my head thrown back. I don’t do that. I curl into myself and try to “fix” what’s wrong with me in order to prove I’m lovable. I can’t quite figure it out and so I just keep curling into myself.

I don’t remember how the conversation arises, but some weeks out from my birthday my friend Neek agrees to take a trip with me. He’s trying to help me bat away the sadness. We fly separately to Las Vegas in mid-December and it’s colder than I expect. I’m not prepared for the weather, but we still take full advantage. We take an elevator to the Eiffel Tower replica at the Paris hotel and beyond the netting meant to keep people from scaling the railing and plummeting down and down, I let icy wind whip the hair around my face and take in the glittering city below. I feel something lift in my chest. It’s a small thing, but it’s a start. I’m not alone. I have a friend and that means someone outside of my blood loves me. And that means that I have worth and until I can feel it myself I can lean into the idea that someone else sees it. This year I’m not thriving. I’ve survived.

Memphis: This year is the start of a tradition. I fly to Tennessee for the first time into Neek’s hometown and he shows me around. He takes me to my first NBA game and high up in the rafters we watch the spectacle on the court below. The lights dim, the bass pounds through the speakers, pyrotechnics flash and heat the air as the home team takes the court. I’ve never seen anything like it. I feel both a part of and lost in the crowd of people cupping their hands around their mouths and creating one uniform voice. It feels like the sounds are all melding together to say “We are alive!” It’s an energy that normally would scare me, too many people and too much chaos, but right now it’s exactly what I need.

I don’t pay attention to who wins the game and I don’t remember filing out of the arena among that same crowd that buoyed me during the four quarters. In fact, years later I will remember nothing other than that singular moment in time because what lingers from it is that same buoyancy I felt at the top of the tower in Las Vegas. Something like freedom and fear reminding me it’s okay to keep on living.

New Orleans #1: The drive between Memphis and New Orleans is about six hours. After the game and a few other highlights of his city like the Stax Museum, Neek and I head even further south. After we arrive, we end up on a riverboat with a live jazz band playing music that puts us right where we are but also back in time. This is the first time I’ve felt decadent in longer than I can remember. I’ve poured my frame into a black body suit and dark jeans and I’ve added wavy bundles of hair into my own so the furious movement of the boat’s paddle wheel ruffles my hair as I lean against the railing and Neek snaps a picture. I don’t look fully happy in the photo, but it’s certainly better than the first year in Las Vegas when the railing, and my life, were surrounded by netting to keep me safe. This year I’m leaning with my back to the open water and the endless night, secure that I’m willing to save myself if anything happens to throw me off course.

New Orleans #2: I’m turning 40, so a group of us are heading to New Orleans for a few days of celebration. There are nine of us, including my baby sister, who travel in the middle of December for a little debauchery. Between a flurry of group chats and coordinated flights there is finally a consensus and everyone is booked. I arrive in New Orleans a day before everyone else, anxious to settle in and prep before the party begins. I’ve spent the weeks leading up to this trip making individual gift bags for each woman attending. I’ve stuffed each full of liquor and hangover cures and personalized shot glasses. It’s kind of like the bachelorette party I never had and I get so into it that we will end up leaving behind unopened bottles of champagne we can’t take back home.

I wander to Bourbon Street, a few blocks from the hotel, and end up at an oyster bar. This is how it begins in each new city I visit. I find a bustle of people and take a solo seat to watch and pat myself on the back for being brave enough to do this. The oyster bar is starting to get a bit too crowded and I’m elbow to elbow at my seat watching men in T-shirts and aprons shuck with skill and slightly bulging arms. I’ve missed the way I feel in New Orleans. Electric like lightning that has been building on a sticky summer night and finally lights up the sky. I sip drinks and pop hush puppies in my mouth, hiding a smile because unlike in Las Vegas and Columbus and all the birthdays before this happiness.

Making my way back to the hotel is a slow stroll. Never mind the throngs of people crowding Bourbon Street and the slip of liquid beneath my feet. I think I want to be a part of this energy—to let it build around me until I carry the hum of it back to the hotel to tuck me in for the night.

Baltimore: It’s corny. There is no other reason I’m standing in the beautifully tiled shower of my favorite hotel with a glass of champagne to my lips and taking selfies. But I feel beautiful in my pink dress and this is the best background in the room. It’s been about ten years since Columbus and I’m kind to myself now. In a few minutes a car will arrive to take me to dinner to celebrate with two friends who’ve braved the cold to come out into the night. There will be more champagne and fried chicken because I love both the high and the low of life. I don’t know it yet, but at the end of dinner the waitress will bring out a slice of cake with a sparkler burning brightly and nearly the entire dining room will erupt into happy birthday. Between the embers I’ll see the faces laughing and singing until the tiny firework extinguishes and the room returns to normal.

I don’t know what my birthdays in the future hold. I may be alone or among friends. I could be rushing through an airport trying to make a flight or riding the rails and looking at the world whip by. What I do know is this. I deserve to be celebrated. Because each day, even on the worst of them, I’ve made the conscious effort to live to the best of my ability. Sometimes it’s glorious. But it’s not always pretty. And sometimes making it through calls for a bit of cake and a little bit of champagne.

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Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.

Way back when my mother had a book. It was spiral bound in thick, red plastic with white covers folded over horizontally. On the cover in the same bright red were the words The Learning Years and a collage of blocks, toys, two children at the start of their education and two more wearing caps and gowns. Inside, there were envelope pages for kindergarten through twelfth grade with a space for a picture and the same prompts each year like favorite teacher and subject along with blank lines for hobbies and vacations.

But the most important part of the book was what was inside the envelope. Over the years my mother stuffed them full of report cards, Iowa testing results, ribbons from field day, and a variety of certificates and newspaper clippings. And each year there was a picture of me—moving from a chubby-cheeked child to an angsty teen with braces to finally a girl on the verge of adulthood.

Now fully grown, I’ve collected similar milestones with ease. They show up in my Good Things Jar or the Google Photos folder I’ve titled Writing Wins where I house screenshots of my accomplishments to keep me buoyed when the rejections pile up. I’ve cataloged the big moments in my life in scrapbooks, framed them in my office, and even at times tattooed them into my skin. I may not always remember the fine details of these milestones, but they shape my life nonetheless.

For the last few weeks, the idea of milestones rattled around in my head. I thought about all the ways I’ve chased them and reached them over the course of both my childhood and adulthood. I’ve checked off box after box. Scholarships and degrees. Luxury cars and trips overseas. Publications and accolades. Pretty much anything I’ve set my mind to I’ve done or obtained. Each time I’ve marked off a “success” I’ve felt vindicated, like I’d done what was expected and I was given my reward. The problem is that once that elusive desire is in my hands my mind is already on to the next item on the agenda. I’m never quite settled. I’m constantly moving, moving, moving.

My father reminds me I often downplay or push to the side the goals I’ve hit and those I’m still working toward. He’s my biggest cheerleader, but he holds me accountable, too. He tells me that I’m going to burn myself out by burning the candle at both ends, that I’m in rarefied air and it’s okay to relax because I have nothing else left to prove. An old friend was once fond of saying I never allow myself to feel the warmth of both the big and small milestones. Always thinking ahead, he liked to say. He thought I tended to get caught up in the bigger picture, the larger scope, of my life and the fine details got lost. I can’t say that he was wrong.

I was already very aware of what he observed in me. The little girl in that spiral-bound book was just the same. She was always hard on herself, thinking she needed to be a fraction better or that if she obtained one more ribbon or certificate she’d be the best. She failed just as much as she achieved, but those failures and missed opportunities always seemed to outweigh the good. She kept blowing by milestones trying to find the one that would mean she’d finally arrived.

I’m still that little girl. I want to achieve something so badly that it’s like I get tunnel vision. I want to mark the passage of time in ways that seem productive or special so badly I can forget the quiet victories that exist right along with them. I pulled out that old book to ground myself while I wrote this. I chuckled at the names of friends I no longer remember. I got a kick out of the first place field day ribbons because I’m far from athletic and couldn’t fathom what physical activity I was the best at. And I beamed with pride about how I was in the 99th percentile in vocabulary on my Iowa test results, but just as quickly forgot that joy when I came across a reminder I’d missed being in gifted classes by a couple of points.

I’m sure there’s a conversation to be had with my therapist about my tendency to be an overachiever, about why racking up accomplishments gives me a feeling of worthiness. I’m sure that there was some seed planted in me many years ago that grew into the idea of being better or smarter as a means to prove I should be seen. I’ve always felt invisible so that tracks. So much of how I’ve identified as a person has been wrapped up in accomplishments. I’ve spent my life thinking that if I wasn’t achieving that was an indication that I wasn’t smart enough, working hard enough, or that I didn’t belong. It’s likely why I struggle with impostor syndrome now. Why I’m always waiting for someone to discover I’m just an illusion.

In my own way, I have been working to dismantle this kind of thinking by continuing to take a hard look at myself. While it’s still a work in progress, I’ve been trying to rewire my brain. The first break in this relentless need to always be in constant motion, constant production, happened over a decade ago. I’d come to a crossroads. I’d earned three degrees, drove a luxury car, had sparkling diamonds, fine leather bags, money, and all the other trappings that I’d “earned” by ticking off the boxes that said I was moving in the right direction. But I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I’d gotten to that point in my life with the same work ethic of the little girl in that book. Good is nice, but better is best. So I kept pushing and pushing. The material things kept piling up and the rarefied air kept getting thinner and thinner until I had to make a decision about what was important to me.

Here’s what I decided. Happiness was important to me in whatever form it took. Sometimes that meant I was chasing down another professional accomplishment and others it meant that I was marking off some silly little task on the list of activities tacked to my fridge. Neither was more important than the other, but \ I found myself cataloging the smaller joys more frequently. That same giddiness I found while looking at those test results I got when I managed to accomplish some tiny act I’d never paid much attention to before. I felt accomplished when I cooked dinner instead of ordering in because it gave me time to prop up my phone and sing and dance in the kitchen. I felt like I’d actually done something when I finally got friendly with my neighbor across the hall after years of being in my own little bubble because it meant I was truly home.

The milestones have started to be in the living for me. Yes, I still catalog, but the drive behind it is gone. I’m no longer doing it to prove I’m worthy or good. I do it to remember I’m actually living in the moment and not in some far distant possibility. I’m doing it for the joy, and now if I forget to slip an item into the jar or screenshot some mention of my name, what happened still exists and it’s still important. It lives in me now as a breathing part of me, not something stuffed into an envelope carried from decade to decade jumbled up with all the other detritus of my life. The fine details, just like the blank spaces in that childhood book, are the focus. I’m filling them up with all the things that matter no matter how big or small so when I look back at the years behind me, I can see the entire picture.

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Real all Radical Pleasure columns

Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.

The first haunted house I visited was in a squat, concrete building next to a set of small railroad tracks in my hometown. Located in a long-abandoned cluster of industrial structures, each autumn the space transformed into a scare house. One day the block of buildings would be normal and then seemingly overnight there were lights beckoning the brave to come on in. I’d seen the way crowds stood outside. Girls huddled next to their boyfriends and ragtag groups laughing and trying to scare each other before they stepped single file inside. A few parents were usually milling about waiting to drive their children home or to the next spooky activity like a haunted trail ride or a trunk or treat.

The year I was finally brave enough to go, in the late October air, a group of four of us stood at the double glass doors draped in black fabric to hide what was inside. There was Lisa, my closest friend, and two boys. Maybe it was a double date and maybe it wasn’t, but one boy has since been lost to my memory. The other was the boy who’d months later in the summer I’d count as my first boyfriend during a sticky sweet and all too brief moment in time. No matter what brought the group of us together, I had two rules that night. Don’t leave me behind and don’t let me be the end of the line. I didn’t want any of the ghouls and ghosts who’d been hired for the season to touch me. I didn’t want to be pulled away from the group and I certainly didn’t want to look over my shoulder and see some shadowy figure lurking down the path behind me.

The haunted house, which seemed just a simple square from the outside, was cavernous once inside. The black draped paths twisted and turned and seemed to go on forever. In the dim light we dodged cobwebs and hands reaching out from the darkness. Screams and moans echoed on loop from speakers somewhere in the distance.

Eventually, in the chaos and fear of it all, the boys shifted and I became the tail clinging to the back of one of their shirts. My greatest fear for the night came true. We turned a corner and when I glanced back there was a figure following us slowly. Logic should have told me it was just a local high school kid in tattered clothes and a mask. Common sense should have told me that there was no real way the person stalking us would hurt me. Fear didn’t care about any of that. So I screamed and scrambled and tried to move the boy behind me with no success. The figure got closer and closer and the spooky soundtrack kept echoing. Then there was another corner and then a faint strip of light signaling the end of the haunted house. I’d survived even if my heart was beating out of my chest and over 30 years would pass before I set foot into another scare zone.

Even though I’ve never been one to purposely seek out fear as entertainment, I’ve known hauntings since that night. Most of it has been the normal adult worries I can shake off with a few drinks, a good night’s sleep, or a venting session with friends. But some of those hauntings have clung to my skin like cobwebs in the dark. They’ve set up shop in the corners of my vision so I never feel fully settled. Those memories and feelings that I’ve tried to run from, or been chased by, have stalked down the path of my life with me even when I’m seeking the light that marks the end.

For years, after the implosion of my marriage and the trauma of the divorce that followed, I felt haunted. The ghosts of the life I’d always wanted, and had a small taste of, took up residence in every part of my newly single life. I barely slept and woke up frequently from nightmares and sleep paralysis. Hunger rumbled in my belly because I barely ate. I was only existing, a hollowed-out version of myself.

Heartbreak became that haunted house from my childhood. I’d thought the building that night looked so small until I was inside and the rooms and halls seemed never-ending. My broken heart was the same. I thought I could just pick myself up and everything would be fine. It wasn’t. In the corners of my days were the shadows of what could be. Wispy memories of what had actually been mingling with what I so desperately wanted to be true. My mind drifted back to cruel words and what I could have said or done to combat them.

I couldn’t escape from the idea there was something wrong with me. Had I been a better person and partner my spouse would have remained faithful and stayed. The haunting was ever-present—sometimes slowly encroaching and other times moving with lightning speed to take me down. I let my fear spiral and soon I was jumping at my own shadow in the light and the dark.

I was haunted by being a failure. I’d always been a good girl, the smart one full of potential. But by the time I’d earned my degrees and settled into a career, the ghost of impostor syndrome slipped from the ether and materialized at will. I was always waiting for a light switch to be flipped and to be exposed as a fraud. I was just as haunted by the possible relief that would provide—what haunted me couldn’t exist in the brightness of reality, right? There I was stuck between the fear of continuing to exist in the darkness of waiting for someone to prove I was coasting by on luck and the fear of seeing who I really was in the full light.

Over 30 years after that first night at the haunted house, I traveled to Universal Studios in Orlando for their annual Halloween Horror Nights season with a friend. She loves all things spooky and I was interested in the scare house built around Jordan Peele’s film Us. We spent the day lounging in the hotel pool and Jacuzzi and shopping. When the sun fell below the horizon, we joined the crowds walking through roaming zombies and foggy pathways and listened to screams in the distance. The closer we got to the line for the house, the more my nerves picked up. My body coiled and shook until before I knew it, we were at the front of the line waiting to be waved in.

In the dark again, I was no longer left behind. This time I was leading the way with my friend and a group of others at my back. I slinked in the haze around me, peeking around the first corner cautiously before an actor dressed as one of the characters stepped quickly out of the corner of my eye. I startled and knocked my own glasses off my face. I froze. I stood there, what little vision I had left made even worse by the blur of being without my glasses, with no idea what to do. But from behind me my friend made the choice for me. She opened her arms wide, just like the ghost on the haunted house sign way back when, and yelled for everyone to stop. The actor, the other patrons, the world seemed to do just that. She yelled again that no one had better move before I found my glasses. The lights didn’t come up, but I knelt down and felt around in the dark until my hands came across them. And then we continued on.

The actors kept popping up, the rooms still stayed dark, but the fear had waned just a bit. Maybe because a couple of things were true this time. Of course, I was older and I could fully lean into the idea I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, be hurt. What was more important, though? All those years later I’d learned that I didn’t have to let the fear linger. I didn’t have to carry it with me so even after I was away from the perceived danger it ghosted through my life. I’d learned to do this with heartbreak and disappointment and shame and all the other heavy things I’d gathered since childhood. All of it was important but none of it was permanent. I could feel what I needed to in the moment, and even a little while after, but at some point I had to give up the ghost. I had to let go and move on.

I’d come to understand, too, that I wasn’t alone. Back at the first house I’d begged not to be left behind and was disappointed that I had been. But we were children and this was now. The present meant that I’d cultivated relationships with people who understood fear and hauntings more than I did and could provide me with the support to move through those feelings. Like that friend shouting into the dark who stopped the world until I was ready to move again. Giving up the ghosts of my fears and failures hasn’t been easy. Just as I’d stumbled through the dark as a child and an adult, it’s been lots of trusting that I’m moving forward and that sooner than later there will be some light or an ending in sight.

That hometown haunted house doesn’t exist anymore. The building that held it is no longer standing. I can’t even remember the house’s name. There’s just a faint memory of the sign incandescent with bulb lights, a white ghost in the top right corner with its arms spread open wide.

But I do remember this. That night, after the four of us had tumbled out of the darkness and out of the doors, the figure that stalked us, that seemed so close to touching me, stood against the glass waving a rubber knife. It menaced us from the other side as a final scare and an invitation to try again. As a kid that didn’t happen. But now? With years of hauntings and survival under my belt? I think I would have gone through a second time knowing that everything on the other side of that door was only as scary as I allowed it to be.

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Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.

On a chilly September Wednesday, during a rare lull at my day job, I jotted down 11 ideas on a piece of bright yellow legal paper. My handwriting looped messily over the lines as I tried to squeeze in a few thoughts before the phone rang or the Teams chat dinged or someone stopped by with a question. I started and stopped through a handful of those interruptions until by the time I shut down my computer at 4:30 and headed out for my commute I’d come up with a rough sketch of my ideas. I knew I’d have to parse out the mess later, but I felt satisfied I was onto something.

The points, some fully fleshed and others just wisps of ideas, marked the beginning of my “quiet season.” The phrase had come up in multiple therapy sessions. I’d mulled over the idea as I tried to fall asleep late into the evening. I tried to put my finger on why I was starting to feel a bit wound down. Why it felt that as the seasons were changing so was I. The pull toward a quiet season wasn’t necessarily sadness. It wasn’t even melancholy. It wasn’t a depressive lull. What was settling over me was the need to be quiet in all ways—physically, creatively, and personally.

As the summer started to come to a close, I’d naturally started retreating to my bedroom as soon as I got home from work. I’d turn on a playlist with the volume so low I could barely hear it. Then I’d switch on my bedside lamps and let the bright overhead lights stay off. I’d burrow under my comforter and read or listen to the street noise outside my window until I finally switched my brain back on just enough to answer a few emails or write a bit. I didn’t necessarily feel like talking and I certainly didn’t feel like socializing. I just wanted to be. In my body. In my brain. In silence.

But there was another layer to this, too. It wasn’t flouncing like I’d mentioned in an earlier column a couple of months ago. I wasn’t necessarily interested in seeing if anyone cared if I was being quiet. There wasn’t some grudge I was holding or some slight perpetrated against me, either. But just as I was retreating to my bed after work, I also felt little desire or need to be social. That meant that if I wasn’t being contacted or checked on then I just didn’t feel like saying anything or doing the reaching out. I figured that the less contact I had the better. It meant whatever energy I had I could conserve for later.

I could have called this a brumation season—a time when my life would be dormant and I could survive the fall and winter by conserving all the joy I’d spent the spring and summer cultivating. But this wasn’t quite right. I was feeling quiet, not like I wanted to slip underground and not see the sun for the next few months. What seemed to make more sense was to harvest the good of the summer season and then tend to the spaces inside me so they’d keep my spirit fertile in the quiet times. Maybe I’d be ready to bloom again in the spring. A fallow season. That’s what I was feeling.

A fallow season just meant a different kind of care and cultivation. The fields remain unsown, letting time and the elements help the soil retain moisture and nutrients until it is time to plant again. This makes sense. In the dusk of my bedroom and my silent drives home I’d already started to ruminate and live in a different kind of way. Summer had been full of boisterous laughter and my skin prickled with heat. It was full of dinners, concerts, trips, and living out loud. Fall was still for living but in a different way. Those ideas I jotted down circled the thought that I should concentrate on the roots, those parts of me dug in deeply that nourished me, and the very actions that would help the blooms of spring be even more beautiful when the seasons changed again.

There were a couple of fundamental truths I needed to set for myself as fall, my long favorite time of year, came on. The first point I wrote was “Quiet does not have to equal depression.” I’ve been honest about my depression. I know when I am feeling the slide into something a little too heavy to carry. So I had to be clear that me being in a quiet season wasn’t cause for me to associate this time with some of the darker ones in my past. I knew that I would have to teach myself that quiet doesn’t have to be the product of bad mental health, exhaustion, or burnout. I’ve shut down and been quiet in the face of these feelings more than my fair share, but this was something new. Just as I’d made a concentrated effort to live into joy, I had to make the conscious decision to live into a joyous quiet, too.

As the list I made at my desk continued, I scribbled that this season wasn’t “obvious luxury, just taking care of myself softly.” Not the social media version of a soft life but a life with built-in comfort that wasn’t dependent on how much money I spent, where I traveled, or what I could purchase. For me that looks like taking the vitamins and supplements I’ve been avoiding in the hopes they will improve my sleep. Cooking more than ordering in because the slowness of preparing a meal is time to settle and be nourished. It means decluttering my space so I can have more clarity physically and emotionally. I want what I no longer need to flutter away like autumn leaves.

The quiet season got me to thinking. What happens to my pleasure as it switches over to the fall? When there is a dying off of activities and life starts to move a little closer to home and the days get shorter? I’ve challenged myself to understand this change isn’t always painful or explosive. Sometimes it's just a natural shedding for new growth. Fall is renewal, I think. It’s that fallow season again. When the crops of warmer months are harvested and the remains start to die off, there has to be a plan to keep the soil fertile. You let things rest and come back to center before you plant again. Dormancy is necessary sometimes. I’m in a fallow season. I’ve expended so much energy living the life I’d always hoped I would be brave enough to attempt that now it is time to renew. It’s time for me to tuck away and slow down just a bit.

Next to my desk phone, my list rambled into more practical things like saving and paying down debt—the very unsexy part of the process, but still actions that would allow me to hide away a little bit more. By the time I finished reviewing the makings of my plan it had all come together. I’d spend the next months nurturing myself in silence. I’d go fallow and let the quieter parts of myself replenish. I decided to prioritize those parts of me I’d placed to the side in favor of living the bolder life I yearned for when I moved to Philadelphia over a decade ago. Fall, and moving into winter, wouldn’t only be about quiet; it would be about me coming back to center via a season built upon solo time and reflection. There was no shame or failure in this change. Summer doesn’t last year-round. What would be the fun if it did? Different seasons call for different methods, new expectations and experiences.

At the end of the list, right before I left work and headed back to the comfort of my bed, I jotted down that no matter what happened I was allowing myself to feel how I was feeling and to allow my actions to reflect what I needed. Just as much as I needed to be out in the world, connecting with everything the hot months had to offer, I also needed this shedding, this slowdown, this renewal to be a fuller version of myself, the version of me accepting joy in whatever form it comes.

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Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.

The first time I can remember learning about magpie birds I was a kid. I’m thinking that it had to have been some fable I’d read in the copious number of books I’d consumed or maybe I picked up the knowledge via an anecdote an adult was using to teach me to be careful about what drew my attention. All that glitters isn’t gold, you know? You can have all the good intentions in the world, but if you pick the wrong person or make the wrong choice your life can change in an instant. What I remember is that I was told the birds were known to latch onto shiny objects and collect them. It didn’t matter if the material was good for protection or suitable for the nesting of eggs, if it was of interest the birds collected it. Somewhere in my head, I held a picture of a magpie nest glittering in the sun constructed of tinfoil and coins and metal. Beautiful, albeit wholly impractical.

What also stuck in my brain was that magpies were kind of dumb. What kind of animal was so distracted by something fancy that it couldn’t even take care of itself? How easy would they be to catch if all you had to do was flash a little bit of something their way and they’d swoop right in? I didn’t know at the time most of what I’d been told wasn’t true. Magpie nests are quite bland to be honest. And science says they actually tend to steer clear of unfamiliar objects and they’re smart, too. They can mimic human speech and can work in pairs.

Still, don’t be a magpie was supposed to be the lesson, I guess. Be mindful of what you build the foundation of your life upon. It should be solid, practical, and safe. I suppose I was to understand that collecting the shiny bits of life was dangerous. It was unpredictable because you never knew what you would get or whether or not it was something you could actually use. Safe is fine. Safe is best. But all these years later I’ve learned that safety mixed with joy is ideal.

Annually, as December wraps up, I pull my Good Things jar off of a shelf in my office. Over the last decade, the actual vessel has changed but what’s inside remains the same. Ticket stubs. Wristbands from concerts. Flower petals. Corks and caps. Tiny slips of paper littered with my handwriting. All the collected joy of the year leading up to that moment.

As the year winds down I usually spread the objects across my bed, a drink and my favorite Chinese food order somewhere within reach, and hold each object remembering the day, the event, or the feeling attached to each of these items I’ve squirreled away. Sometimes the memory is vivid and I time travel back to that very instant. Others, I have no idea why I’ve saved a particular object. Neither is more important than the other. What matters is that a past version of me was so happy, so joyous, that I wanted to remember. Whether or not I do doesn’t change that. The solidness of the paper or cork or plastic bobble in my hand is all that I need to know things have been good, are good, and can be good again.

By the time the clock hits midnight I’ve usually centered myself in those reminders. For a couple of years, I bagged up the items and wrote the date across the plastic in thick black marker. Then I tucked each year into a drawer, knowing if I ever needed to remember I could always just break the seal and time travel again. But as more and more time passed, the ritual did too. What was shiny and needed to be kept changed. My cataloging of my joy went from a bag to a handful to now nearly nothing left behind. I’m still a magpie of myself, of all the living that I do from day to day, but I collect and catalog in a variety of ways now.

Like going home to visit my parents. It’s a kind of time capsule. Of many things, really. My old bedroom and the sprawling backyard and all the familiar places now rapidly becoming ghosts. On my visits I tool down Main Street with my mom and visit my favorite secondhand shops and thrift stores, collecting little bits of shiny history and curiosity. I eat all the food that only tastes right within those square miles and I dig. I dig for pieces of me. Some days while I’m back in my old stomping grounds, I sit on the living room floor and shuffle through bags and boxes of photos. In the pictures I am not just young. In them I am curious in ways life, and my own decisions, have tamped down. College me slips by in a racy red dress. Childhood me stares down at a partially completed art project covered in tin foil. The me in my twenties stands at a mic on a stage with a headwrap balanced at the base of my neck, the shine of the spotlight reflecting off my glasses.

One thing is true about the photos. In each of them there is something glittering—in my hands or on my face or in my eyes. I’m vested in whatever joy that moment brought into my life. But instead of them being sealed into a jar waiting for the New Year to come, these items are scattered where I used to be, not where I am now. It's my job to gather them up and build something solid just as much as it is beautiful.

What started off as a coping mechanism during one of the darkest times of my life has become integral to how I navigate the world. This has spilled over from the physical Good Things jar to folders on my phone’s photo app named Writing Wins! and Photos of Joy where I keep digital reminders of my creative accomplishments and life’s happiest moments. All the shiny bits of my life to remind me of what could be when things seem bleak.

No matter what is actually true about the magpies, I’ve decided to focus on what I think those who made up the myths saw. There had to have been something that made people think that the birds collected the bright bits of their worlds and stored it away. Curiosity and levity, perhaps. That’s the magic. Amid the daily motion that made their lives move, the birds took the time to pay attention to joy and keep a little bit of it for themselves. I want that for myself and so I gather my joy with glee and routine, too.

I build in the shiny bits each day. In the fancy facewash in my bathroom and the comfortable sheets and the quiet moments where I let the sun collect on my skin and listen to the way the world moves outside my window. And I curate the big experiences, too. Those moments that far into the future I can look back at in wonder. All of this is a part of the nest I’ve built for myself—shiny and sturdy in equal measure. I’m sure there are myths about me, just like the magpies. About how I hold the parts of myself up to the light to see all the good I’ve hidden beneath the dull for so long. And about how even those less than bright parts that remain are still so very necessary to becoming the person I want to be and living the life I want to live.

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Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.

A few years ago, when I was much more heavily involved in the machinations of the internet, the idea of flouncing was a hot topic. A person, usually one who thought the spotlight should be on them or who had recently lost it, would make a dramatic exit from whatever website, message board, or platform that had the bad sense to shift the light from them to someone or something new. I always pictured flouncing as a person puffing out their chest, dramatically turning away from the crowd, and exiting while listening for the collective gasp about their departure. A child stomping away with their virtual ball, perhaps.

Other times, flouncing was a single post announcing the need to step away from the internet or a cryptic tweet about needing time away. These kinds of posts were always hard to separate from a true need to disconnect. Social media moves a mile a minute and it’s easy to get tumbled about in the speed of it and be overwhelmed. But because I've been guilty of putting up a post or two about stepping away, I know the other side of that honest desire is a need to see who would even care if I was gone. That kind of flounce, from the inside, is nowhere near disconnected. It’s scrolling and not liking; avoiding watching stories so you remain hidden; pretending not to know what’s going on in the lives of the people around you. It’s terrible, I know. It’s childish. But it’s a sign, too. It’s a symptom of something much larger about myself, at least.

It stems from what I think are equal parts jealousy, fear, and competition. Each of these feelings, when unbalanced, have pulled me into some of the greatest flounces of my life. There was the Great Flounce of 2011. I deleted every single one of my social media accounts because I figured no one really cared if I was around anyway. I was hurt, watching the lives of people I loved and considered friends, moving on without me so I figured I would do them a favor by erasing myself completely. I lasted about three months before I was back online. At least once a year, and sometimes more depending on what is happening in my extended community, I make it a point to announce a break. It’s never really dramatic, but it serves as a marker that there’s something off balance in me and I need to correct it.

So what’s the main reason I do this social flouncing? Fear of not being good enough. Jealousy that someone else is getting a foot up in the literary world while I feel as if I’m standing still. Competition that mostly exists in my own brain and nowhere in the actual real world.

We know that social media is the highlight reel of our lives. Things tend to look glossy and beautiful. We flick our thumbs and we see people in love; people traveling the world; book deals and book tours; prizes awarded; the endlessly cool places, clothes, and habits of those we choose to follow. And sometimes we’ll look down into our laps and see our free hand balancing takeout while zoning out on the sofa. Or we’ll stare at the blinking cursor on the page because the words won’t come. Maybe we’ll silence our morning alarm and rise for yet another day, another year, in a cubicle when all we want to do is create our art. And this is where the fear, jealousy, and competition take hold.

I know how it manifests for me. Some days I have to remind myself to unscrew my face because it’s shifted into sadness or anger. It’s not anger at the person whose life I’m virtually observing. It’s anger at myself because I am convinced I’m not doing enough. If I was it would be me with that good thing. The sadness is rooted in that fear I mentioned. I get sad because I’m terrified that just maybe I will never know what it’s like to live the creative dreams, or the writer’s life, that lives in my heart. That all rolls into competition.

I’ve joked with a friend or two that I have a secret archnemesis who doesn’t know we are in a shadowy battle. I see this other writer doing the things I wish I could, and to be honest have in some cases, and I feel my skin heat. Not because I think they don’t deserve it, but because I feel as if I do, too. So I push myself to do more, to be more, to catch up. I have no idea if this person, or anyone else, is looking at me in the exact same manner. Maybe there’s someone watching my life scroll by on the feed and their face screws up and their vision turns a little green, too. I wouldn’t fault them because I’m the exact same way.

And since I recognize when I am being a little dramatic, or a bit irrational, I’ve learned to redirect myself. It’s not a perfect science. I still have the urge to slink away from the world and lick my imaginary, and sometimes self-inflicted, wounds. I’m not perfect by a long shot, but I’m trying. I redirect in a couple of ways. The biggest one is trying to find the joy and pleasure in someone else’s win. It’s moving myself from the idea of feast or famine when it comes to not only creative opportunities, but also life’s upswings. There’s no shortage of love or happiness or creativity and those in my orbit are not taking any of that away from me if they possess it for themselves. There is only the possibility for more.

What do I mean by that? It means their joy, their wins, and their happiness trickle down to me. I genuinely love and care for the people in my inner circle and those in my extended community. I want them to win, so what am I putting into the universe when I want to flounce instead of standing in that light? It cheapens those victories and more than anything I don’t want that. I want the people in my community to be happy for whatever gift they’ve been given either personally or professionally. The more they win, the more joy they spread, the more it leaks out into the world around them. The more it fills up those they love and on and on and on. So I shift my focus.

What in their joy is making me feel like I need to hide? What in their happiness am I latching onto and then creating a sense of lack within myself? Am I feeling this way because I haven’t put in the work and am afraid to admit that? My feelings could stem from a myriad of places but what’s important is to determine where I should focus.

I choose to focus on the joy, the happiness, the laughter. That is the correct path because it leads me out of the desire to disappear because I’ve convinced myself I don’t measure up. That same path takes me away from the twisted idea that the only way I can be appreciated is via my absence. It stops me from something even more detrimental than these feelings of inadequacy and fear.

Focusing on the joy of others forces me to stop tying up my value, my worth, or my happiness into the idea of production and supplication. I don’t have to drain myself to deserve the same kinds of joy I envy. There is no requirement that I do anything other than continue to live my life on and off the feed. And if that joy spills onto the timeline? I hope that it sparks something giddy and wonderful in whoever may come across it. I hope the same for myself, too.

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Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.

Sundays are quiet. They are slow and solitary and in these late days of spring, right before the world tips over into summer, they are full of sunlight and open windows. Most of these days my home smells of incense and bleach and I strip down my bed and replace the sheets and pillowcases and burrow into the smell of lavender in the new ones. Some of those days I order groceries and eat thick sandwiches on soft bread stacked high with roasted chicken and extra sharp cheddar. I play jazz albums and binge read books about seemingly impossible love. On Sundays I reset for the week ahead.

These now-routine days have been carefully curated to be as stress free as possible. I’ve curated them because I know the way impending Mondays drop the bottom out of my stomach. I start most weeks nervous and wound so tightly my shoulders and neck ache. I know that most weeks will slide by in a blur of casework and voicemails and emails and meetings and a full calendar. Sundays are for me—isolated and out of touch to most of the world at large. I’m lazy as the weekend comes to a close. I’ve finally let myself be okay with that.

For so very long I expected constant production and accomplishment from myself. If I wasn’t always doing something then that meant I was wasting time and wasted time meant I was stuck in the same place. And if I fear anything? I fear being lapped, being unprepared, and being caught off guard. I like to appear competent and in control. I take pride in being able to troubleshoot, provide for, and indulge the people in my life even if they haven’t asked for it or are expecting it. And so I get into these cycles of giving and doing until I’m tapped out.

The Sunday reset didn’t start as a way to ease into better care of myself, though. It started off as a purely practical act. I needed to make sure I wasn’t sleeping in dirty sheets and that I had enough clean clothes to wear. I needed to make sure there were no dishes piled in the sink and that I’d cleaned the bathroom. All pragmatic things that made me feel at least a little bit better about the way household responsibilities would give way to stress as the week wore on. But that practical prep didn’t leave time for me. All it did was shift stress and give energy to it. I wasn’t doing much of anything to be soft with myself. Monday through Friday were for the office. If I was lucky, a random Friday night might have meant dinner or drinks with friends. Saturdays were always for writing, errands, or to-do lists. Sundays were always prep to start the cycle all over again. Where did that leave me? Responsible, organized, and very, very exhausted.

The shift to the Sunday reset, and the personal pampering that it eventually morphed into, doesn’t have a particular starting point in my memory. Before I realized what I was doing, I was integrating small changes into the day. When I opened my eyes, I stopped muscle memory from making me reach for my phone and instead started listening to the environment around me before I moved. Birds, the whoosh of my nightstand fans, my skin across the cotton sheets, the rain sounds from the white noise machine. I trained myself to stretch my body like a cat, all long and loose, before I put my feet to the floor.

I told myself it was okay to spend the entire day in bed if I wanted to and started bringing my laptop and phone and books and laying among them for hours on end as I moved between activities. I started to take long baths and lounging so long I wrinkled. Some Sundays I’d find myself with my knees in the sofa, arms crossed on the windowsill, staring out into my neighborhood in silence. Bit by bit I slowed myself down and sat with my body, mind, and heart so I could pay attention to what each of them required to come back to a solid foundation.

I’m writing this on a Sunday. My skin is soft from my shower and my fresh sheets are smooth beneath me. The fan next to me is a soft roar mixing with the sound of rain and cars outside the open windows of my bedroom. I’m going to finish a few more sentences and then walk barefoot across the hardwood floors of my home and get some ice cream from the freezer. And when I’m done I’m going to come back to the page and contemplate some more because Sundays are balanced just as much as they are mine now. Sometimes work and writing creep into them because my spirit wants to expend the energy on just that. So, I do. I do what I am called to without guilt.

As my Sundays slowed down, my idea of what I needed to feel comfortable and relaxed ramped up. Slowing down meant I could linger a bit longer on living in the moment, not preparing for the next item on my agenda or worrying that I was dropping the ball in some way. My loved ones have told me for as long as I can remember that I don’t live in the now. They’ve told me I’m always barreling toward the next thing instead of sitting with what I’ve just done or in the silence of not doing anything. They’ve warned me time and again about burning the candle on both ends and how eventually I wouldn’t have a choice but to slow down because my body would do it for me.

Slowing down taught me to say no and set boundaries that I’d struggled with before. I allowed myself permission to not always be on, to not always be accessible, even to that part of myself so wrapped up in production and accomplishments. Slowing down didn’t mean I was rude or that I was annoyed. Taking these hours for myself didn’t point to a flaw in my character or indicate selfishness. It just meant I wanted to sit in the company of myself. And after so many years of that production and accomplishment cycle and of being all things to all people except myself, I had not only earned that option, I deserved it.

Sundays look far less scary now. There are still nerves. I still fret a bit as the hours move and dusk comes on. I keep working through my lingering fears and doubts, though. I still glance every time my phone lights up with a notification and I make a quick decision if I want to reply or wait until I’m done enjoying my disconnect. I still open and un-open emails because I’m worried about whether I’m taking too long to get back to someone and I’m holding up some vital task they need to complete. And I still gauge if I have the wherewithal to do much more than lounge and laze. But I resist.

I resist by leaning into the silence and the softness of these new Sundays because I need the edges of my life to round and to stop bruising myself by trying to do too much in too short of a time. And that fear is tempered now—by softness and ease and purpose. The Sunday considerations spill over into the rest of the week, too. If it’s a Tuesday and my body and mind call for me to be still, I’m still. The work and expectations of my life are always there. There is always a to-do list or a notification to manage. Me taking this day to be gentle with my spirit will not stop the world.

Busyness is like air in my life—all around and able to suffocate me if I don’t pay careful enough attention. I’ve made the hours of Sunday freedom. Even if there is still routine, that routine is a loose idea. I follow my base instincts on those days. Eat, sleep, relax. There are no solid boundaries except I come first and there is no shame in that. If I can honor these simple ideas then my Sundays will continue to be my soft place to land amid the chaos of what I willingly and unwillingly carry on my shoulders. They will continue to be the soft wind of my fan and smooth cotton against my skin.

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Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.

By the time the Kendrick Lamar concert at Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field ended, my entire body hurt. My ears weren’t ringing as they usually did after most concerts, but I ached deeply. My thighs were tight; the insole of my sneaker was bunched beneath my left heel; my knees felt hyperextended; and the night air was making my exposed arms clammy. I knew I’d have a difficult time walking the next day because despite purchasing a floor seat with an actual chair, I’d stood for nearly the entire show.

For almost three hours I’d bounced and danced and rapped and shouted. I felt the heat of the pyrotechnics flash across my skin and drank overpriced drinks trying to capture another type of buzz. I threw my hands in the air and joined the crowd of over 53,000 people in lighting up the stands during Kendrick, and co-headliner SZA’s, performance of one of my favorite songs, “All the Stars.” Turning my entire body to capture a video of the stadium singing loudly was magic. It felt almost too good to be real. But I was there, sing-shouting my heart out with a smile on my face.

For the months leading up to the concert I’d had my normal fears as I always did when I ventured to a public event. I worried about parking and logistics just as much as I worried about purchasing an end seat so I had plenty of legroom for my tall frame and would cause the least disruption if I had to move. But most times when I go to events like this concert, I have to convince myself to actually show up. I’ve purchased too many tickets to count floating on the excitement of seeing one of my favorite acts live only to sell or give away the tickets at the last minute. Why? Because I’ve found myself irrationally worried about what people may think. Sometimes I go alone and worry that people will believe there’s something wrong with me and I have no friends. Why else would I be swaying softly to the music solo? Other times I worry that even if I’m tethered to a friend someone may find something funny in the tiny ways I let loose—often a little two step here and there or a slightly raised voice singing the lyrics.

It never quite occurs to me that the vast majority of people don’t care. They are in their own bubbles, with their own expectations and memories, trying to live in the moment in ways I seem to be afraid to. At some of these shows I’ve latched onto other solo listeners and we bounce quiet energy off each other until the lights go up and the venue empties.

When my friend and I looked around the row of other fans around us just a few feet from the stage no one was judging us, though. They sipped their drinks and held their phones aloft just like us. They were dressed up or down and they didn’t seem to mind the collective way our bodies pressed and moved against each other as the energy under the May sky increased to a fever pitch. No one laughed at me or even cared that I was singing off key and throwing my middle finger in the air like a bad ass kid because they were doing the exact same thing. All of us were free, living in the moment.

I talk a lot about living into a year of radical pleasure. I’ve learned that it takes some discomfort to get to the kind of ease and peace I desire. The first discomfort that night was standing from my chair while the warmup DJ played a set and moving my shoulders just a little. Then it was pointing one arm into the sky while I used my free hand to bring a drink to my lips and sip. I moved on to rocking my shoulders side to side and bending my knees enough to stay solid on my feet. The rest is a blur. My hands and neck and mouth got involved and before I knew it, I was openly free under the flashing lights. Outside of myself and unfettered.

I knew reality would settle back in the further away we got from the venue after the show ended, and the more days that slipped by on the calendar, but I knew I had the makings of joy in my grasp. I’d tipped myself into something new, someone new. My friend said she’d never seen me like that. And I suppose she hadn’t. I’d always been buttoned up, reserved, shy, skittish. Never this loud and joyous. Not tamped down by fear someone else was watching.

As the concert wore on and the set list grew longer and longer, my friend remarked that every time she looked over at me I was rapping every word. The video she sent to me later shows me turning toward the camera’s bright flash and reciting the lyrics in perfect time with Kendrick on the stage. I remember the moment, but I don’t. I remember because my body tells me I was there via its aches. I don’t remember because I was outside of myself. Full of joy I think she tells me the next day when we’re recovering. I tell myself internally that I’d finally broken free. During those three hours, I didn’t care about anything other than getting to share space with an artist I’d been longing to see again for seven years. I wanted to hear my favorite songs and scream out the punchlines with his other fans. I had to get outside of myself to make this actually possible. Why would I lock myself into a shell after spending so much time, energy, and money to make this a reality?

When my friend and I took the long trek from the venue to a decent place to catch a ride share, we floated among that crowd of fans pouring out of the stadium picking up bootleg t-shirts from overfilled trash bags on the street. Only $20 a pop but the memento was just as good as the $55 shirts inside. People needed something tangible to remember the night more than just the videos and their sore bodies. I clutched two of those shirts in my hands and ignored the pain in my left foot, the small of my back, and the front of my thighs. In the back of the car, as my eyes slid closed, my friend and I giggled and awed about just how perfect of a show it had been, about how freeing it felt to be in the midst of it all.

When we got back to my apartment nearing one a.m., we munched on hot honey pizza and relived our favorite parts. We groused about the $25 drinks that tasted like watered-down juice and complained a bit about how the venue had zip-tied the chairs together to stop people from moving them at will. But where we landed, the most important part of it all, was the joy. Of seeing young kids at their first concert dancing in the aisles. Of couples gazing into each other's eyes and softly reciting lyrics. Of people looping arms around each other and singing at the tops of their lungs. Of each individual moment of happiness and pleasure that being in that stadium brought to the surface.

Before we took to bed for the night, my friend and I came to the conclusion that sometimes you have to get outside of your body to be free. It’s not about forgetting, or even pretending, your body doesn’t exist. It’s about realizing it’s a vessel that carries the life you want to live. That night I wanted to live into joy and all that mattered was that the body I had, aches and all, was the very thing that would carry me into that feeling if I stopped putting restrictions on it.

No one was going to feel what it was like to experience those moments except me. No one would ever understand the race of my heart or the quickening of my breath. I couldn’t continue to let my fear of judgment, really the fear of living too loudly, stop me from doing exactly what I wanted or experiencing the unbridled happiness of throwing my head back and singing like no one was actually watching. Because they weren’t. And even if they were, I'd proved to myself it didn’t matter. I’d tasted my first bit of true freedom and I wasn’t willing to give it up for anyone.

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Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.

The third time I caught myself cursing at another driver on my commute home from work, I started to understand the evening ahead of me had to be full of ease. Navigating the streets of Philadelphia on a normal day is chaotic. Add in some rain and it’s like people forget how to drive. In the thirty minutes between my office and home, I had dropped a couple of f bombs, thrown my hands up in the rearview mirror at a driver who’d beeped at me, and sighed more times than I could count.

By the time I parked, I was done. I sat in my car listening to rain pelt the roof, twirling my hair around my fingers, and just existed. My body ached and all I wanted to do was teleport to my bed. That was impossible so I settled for slow steps down the block and across the street until I reached the steps of my building. I didn’t care about the rain soaking into my hair and clothes. I just needed to be unhurried for the first time that day. I needed to be out of the chaos of my ringing desk phone, emails, and the bumper-to-bumper traffic of the city. Maybe the rain beating down on my skin was the first step to washing the stress of the day off my body.

Since that morning I’d been a little angry. Annoyance mixed with work demands made me snappy. Sure, I’d joked and laughed with my co-workers. I talked to my clients with a smile and respect. But if anyone had truly looked at my face, they would have seen my eyes rolling so far back into my head I’m surprised they hadn’t gotten stuck. They would have seen me taking off my glasses to rub my eyes and me slinking away to the bathroom to get away from the infuriating din of too many voices and the nausea of too many office smells. Being openly angry in spaces like these invites too many questions and too many “solutions.” I didn’t want anything to do with either. Maybe I wanted to be angry. I don’t really know.

What was true was once I settled into my apartment and changed into my favorite sweatpants and cardigan, I started to come down . I thought if I’d given so much of my energy to being upset about things out of my control (the traffic, the smelly lunches, the talking on the other side of the cubicle wall) then I could spend just as much energy on making sure I felt better, too. And what would make me feel better? Double steak nachos in bed chased with an ice cold soda. I could control that part of my day. So, that’s what I did. By the time I licked the last bit of queso and guac from my fingers, I was calm. None of what had made me so upset was likely to change overnight but at least I had something to counteract it. What I’ve been learning as I’ve started to take my journey into living for pleasure is that it can take feeling the full range of your emotions to understand what any of them truly mean.

I think about it like this: If I don't know how anger exists in my body and if I don’t acknowledge it, I’m not really getting anywhere. If I don’t allow myself to feel the tremble in my hands or the headaches that begin right behind my left eye or how I can’t quite get my face to not show annoyance, then maybe I’d have a hard time deciphering what emotions exist in my body when those tells are absent. I let myself be angry, irrational, irritable, and any other negative thing I may feel because if I can dissect what causes me to feel that way, and what eventually turns the tides of that, I’ll have a better basis for what joy, pleasure, and happiness feel like. I’ll come to know that I don’t have to swallow down the bad for the sake of the good. There is no light of joy without the understanding of the shadows on the other side of it.

That doesn’t mean my plans always work. There are days there aren’t enough double steak nachos or trinkets or smutty novels that can reverse the course. On those days I am surly and isolate in my bedroom. I know myself enough to know I don’t want to project that anger onto other people and shift their joy to something sour. I wallow. I cry. I cuss and yell. I toss and turn until the new day dawns. Then I try again.

Sometimes sitting in that anger is a form of pleasure, though. If I think living my life exactly how I want to is the goal, then why can’t anger be a part of that pleasure? The real pleasure is feeling what I want, when I want, and where I want as a means to live into the totality of me. Anger is part of that. It’s a gift of sorts. Not to say it is always productive, but it lets me feel, and for so long I made myself numb in order to be “good.” I treated my anger as some sort of character flaw that needed to be hidden in order to be presentable. I didn’t curse. I smiled and nodded when I wanted to scream. I apologized even when I was wronged. It got me nowhere other than backed up emotionally and cheated out of living fully.

Understand, though, I’m not just freely cursing at people and being mean when I’m angry. It just means that I acknowledge and accept it because it’s a new part of my life. Yes, the goal is pleasure. It’s living a joyous life on my own terms but that doesn’t mean my life is two dimensional. On my walk in the rain that day I let the anger start to roll off me. I concentrated on the tiny dots of water on my forearms and the splashes on my glasses. I felt the pressure of my purse strap digging into my shoulder. I listened to my work ID clattering on the lanyard around my neck. I used all of this to ground myself. I was still angry, still muttering under my breath about the driver who’d beeped at me, but I was coming back to the fuller me. That me could be angry just as much as she was starting to yearn to walk barefoot around her apartment the closer and closer she got to the door. That version of me was already opening the app on her phone to order the nachos so they’d arrive by the time she was changed into the most comfortable clothes she owned. She was already ready to put on one of her comfort shows (Unsolved Mysteries) while she waited.

The anger was there, but it wasn’t alone. That’s why it’s important to acknowledge it. It has its purpose and its place, but it’s not the only important thing to pay attention to. Just like pleasure and joy aren’t the only emotions you should acknowledge. We need all of them to be fully fleshed people living in a world that requires us to be many things, often at the same time. My anger, in whatever ways it manifests, helps me ground. It helps my vision get a little bit clearer.

If I sit with it for just a little while I can start to question what I need or perhaps what I’ve been missing. Maybe my anger that day came from a lack of common courtesy from the other drivers or maybe I was upset I’d recently been required to come back to the office full time after nearly five years. Once I could figure out what I was missing I could start to fill in the gaps. That rainy day it was the nachos and the soda. Another day it could be a few screams into a pillow as a way to vent. Neither is better than the other. They are both means to an end, both steps toward the goal of staying on the road of a pleasurable life and creating the proper guardrails to keep me there.

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Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.

When I moved to Philadelphia in 2015, I knew two things. One, I was running and being in the city meant I was far enough away that no one could catch me. I’d packed my car, a tiny coupe, to capacity and drove the length of the Pennsylvania Turnpike that spring seeking a new beginning. I remember feeling sick to my stomach navigating the curves and tunnels of the road. It wasn’t because I was afraid of the steep drop-offs or the construction that seemed to take up so many of the miles. My stomach pitched and roiled because I was stepping into the unknown on a wing and a prayer.

The move was reckless. I didn’t have an apartment. I hadn’t planned anything other than a bed to crash in for a few weeks and knew that I wouldn’t starve by the time I finally found a place to settle. When I made my decision to relocate, I knew nothing about the cost of living, the area in which I wanted to concentrate my search, or even how to parallel park. I just knew I needed to be away from the version of me I felt no longer fit. I was running because I was so afraid that I would be trapped in my hometown. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to cut it in the “real” world.

There was some justification to that fear. I was a few years out from divorce. I’d been cheated on, lied to, gaslit, and treated like an emotional punching bag both publicly and privately. I’d moved back home to gather up the pieces of myself and put them back together under the watchful eyes of my family and friends. Just as reckless as that move that would occur three years after I slunk back into town was how I treated myself in the years before I decided to leap. I’d let the fear of being hurt again make me stand still. Yes, I’d pieced myself back together, but I felt like I’d break again with the slightest struggle.

There was so much I wanted to do, to prove to myself, but I couldn’t break away from the fear surrounding me. What would happen if I struck out into the world again and fell flat on my face? Could I survive another heartbreak, embarrassment, or failure? Did I have enough strength to pick myself up and try one more time? Fear, for so very long, told me the answer was no. What made me finally decide to leave? I can’t remember, but things moved quickly once all the pieces were in place and before I had a chance to talk myself out of it, I was packed tightly into that coupe heading away.

The second thing I knew about the move was that I could be a new person and no one would be the wiser. The Athena who was afraid of her own shadow at times could be shed, the tatters of her left along the turnpike. Sure, the fear would still be able to rear its head, but I could pretend that it was just nerves about trying something new. All I had to do was decide who I wanted to be and then be her.

That was easier said than done, though. For the first three months I was the great pretender. I joined dating apps and had a brief summer fling. I ran (really walked) two 5Ks. I met a friend who was also brand new to the city and we spent those months clinging to each other, living life loudly. Concerts. New foods. New hairstyles. Tattoos. Parties. And so much more as my one-year anniversary in the city rolled around. And then things fell apart.

The apartment I’d finally scored, in a beautiful area of the city, turned out to be illegal. I found myself in the harsh snows of February trying to move the trappings of my new life in a two-door coupe to that friend’s apartment on the outskirts of the city. Then I spent three months sleeping on her sofa until my world righted itself again.

The fear came back in spades. I was afraid I would have to admit I couldn’t survive on my own. I would have to once again show up on my parents’ doorstep a little broken and rebuild. But there was something different about the fear this time. I knew I could survive it. I had before and this time was no worse than the initial explosion. So, I came up with a plan. Step one was the simplest. I found a new place to live. I moved in with only a sofa and my clothes, but it was mine. It was legal and it was safe. Everything else I needed would come right on time. It eventually did.

Step two was to face the fear head on. The friendship that helped me navigate my first year in the city eventually faded. The calls stopped and soon it was just me responsible for my own happiness. I couldn’t hide because there was no longer someone else exploring a new version of her life, too. I couldn't allow myself to be so afraid that the initial joy I’d been experiencing came to a standstill. It didn’t have to. I just had to adjust.

Unlike the organic fun I had that first year living in the city, this new type of joy had to be much more intentional until it became habit. Left to my own devices, and old patterns, I would have stayed in my safe and legal apartment missing the buzzing opportunities around me. That’s where the list came in. Tacked to my refrigerator since 2016 is a list. 76 Reasons and Beyond it’s called. 76 individual acts of joy and experience I want to bring into my life. I named it that because the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the road that took me from my hometown to my adopted one, is Route 76. It seemed fitting that I honor that transition.

The list runs the gamut. From swimming in both oceans to taking a continuing education course to recording an album and so many other things that would bring me unbridled joy or contentment. To date, I’ve cleared 26. It’s been a slow pace, but there are so many experiences that I’ve been able to live because I’ve pushed myself to have a foundation for joy.

That list, one I see every single day, asks me to live joyfully and intentionally. If I hadn’t written down and lived the experience of being an extra in a movie, then I would have never had the courage to step onto a stage and belt my heart out at karaoke. Had I not made the decision I wanted to commission a piece of art, I would have never had the courage to believe that others wanted to pay me for my art, too. Sometimes I forget the list is there. I rarely consult it because when opportunities for new experiences land in my hands I say yes without overwhelming fear. The fear is still there at times, but it feels tucked away now. It feels more like a part of the experience and not the whole of it anymore.

Writing this made me check what I’d forgotten to catalog (getting a tattoo with my sister and reading 65 new books). I can’t remember the last time I looked at the list before this day because in some way it is ingrained into me now. Or maybe it's the idea of it. The expectation of joy pushing out the expectation of fear. Yes, I’m going to fail. I’m going to fall on my face. I’ve done both so many times. But I’ve survived. I’ve been enriched by that failure, too.

There is no need to pretend that everything is brightly lit. Nor is it all dark. The failure that eventually led me to the joy I hold so close to my heart now was necessary. Just as I was afraid driving across the turnpike almost a decade ago, I also drove with my windows down with the wind whipping against my skin. I sang at the top of my lungs in a fast car with my entire life piled up behind me in the rearview mirror. And even though I was leaving a lot behind, I was headed directly where I needed to be and into the joy that waited.

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Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.

February comes in with a flurry of paper hearts and roses, everything awash with pink and red. The lovers of the world swallow down chalky conversation hearts and cheap chocolate packaged with cartoonish pairings like salt and pepper, avocado and toast, or coffee and milk. Hotel rooms sell out and the morning after the cleaning staff sweep up bushels of rose petals and pop balloons floating toward the ceiling. Dining rooms and restaurants across the world flicker in candlelight and tables are set for two. And it is all beautiful.

Even if I joke that February 14th is Singles Awareness Day, I’m not one of those unattached people who grow angry at the loud expectation that this day for lovers is celebrated by everyone. There are those who complain the day is strictly a money grab and true love gets celebrated year-round outside of the spotlight of this holiday. What isn’t a money grab, though? The commercialization of love and relationships is everywhere. Whether it’s family, a friend, or a lover, it doesn’t matter. There’s a commercial and a social expectation for every connection you may have.

By the time you read this, the explosion of love and the complaints about its noise will have passed and we’ll all be back tucked away into the interiors of our hearts. I’m not sure how I will have spent the day. I likely ordered dinner and maybe had a drink alone. I know that I will not have watched sappy rom coms or texted an ex. What I’m sure of is that I will have had a little bit of a cry and a little bit of a wallow in my feelings about being single. Not as some kind of pity party but more of an acknowledgement of what I’m feeling and a reminder that it’s okay to feel this way.

In recent years, the commercialization of holidays—and what we are supposed to feel because of them—has started to be considered a little more closely by the people selling us the goods they tell us we need. A few weeks out from most major holidays emails begin to flood inboxes reminding consumers they can opt out of receiving marketing messages about Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and other celebrations that may strike a chord in someone wrestling with loneliness and loss.

I haven’t opted out because I love a good deal, but I appreciate the sentiment anyway. I take these emails as a reminder to be gentle with myself and to take what space and grace I need as it comes. In this instance I don’t mind the emails or the paper hearts. Instead, I choose to stay away from social media on those days relationships are at the forefront. I can be happy that my family and friends are loved and cared for. I have genuine joy in knowing that in the wide expanse of the world, they have someone to walk with them. But that doesn’t stop my heart from kicking because the same is not true for me. So, instead of casting my single shadow over their light, I take a step back and love on myself a little bit more.

Over the years, I’ve learned self-love isn’t the absence of desire. There’s no need to pretend that craving intimate, human connection is a character flaw or a sign that you have yet to properly learn to love yourself. There’s this popular idea that single people must survive a gauntlet without admitting the desire to be coupled. “Date yourself” articles and short videos proclaim: Romanticize your life until the romance finds you! Love will happen when you aren’t looking so just live in the meantime! I’d be a liar if I didn't tell you that I’ve tried to cheat the system a few times and self-love my way into a man. It clearly didn’t work.

But love is an action. For yourself first and foremost. This advice about how to be patient and hopeful all seems to hinge on the notion that single people are just living in limbo hoping that eventually they’ll be plucked out of stasis and into the arms of the love of their life. There is always an assumption that the reason singles have yet to meet someone is that we’ve yet to unlock the parts of us that need to be fixed. That there is inner work to be done that makes us unable to be good partners or if we just do all the shadow work and love ourselves just a smidge harder Cupid will finally take proper aim.

Self-love, and self-care, for me is about desire and acknowledgment. I can desire all the syrupy sweetness of Valentine's Day and feel a dip in my spirit when reality is clear there are no declarations of devotion or dinners on the horizon. I can do this without giving up the joy of knowing how to please and pleasure myself all alone on any other day.

Romanticizing your life and dating yourself isn’t a bad thing, don’t get me wrong. The why is where things get a little bit snagged. If the reason you are kind to yourself; if the reason you explore the world; if the reason you make an effort to fully embrace who you are is so that you can find a partner, then it's bound to fail. What part of that type of living honors you as a being worthy of all that is good, both internally and externally? I don’t have to be perfect to find love. I don’t have to be fully healed. What I have to be willing to do is take an honest look at myself and know that even in my ever-evolving self I can desire to be touched, adored, and held.

In this knowledge is the pleasure. There is pleasure in the long term by learning what boundaries to set for myself and potential loves. There is even more in taking the time to know what makes me feel good as an individual so if, or when, the time comes I know how to express that to another person. Each time I discover some new bit of peace or joy I set up another experience I can share with someone else. There is no waiting to do any of this nor is there any part of doing so that guarantees me a partner.

I choose not to opt out of life in the meantime. There’s nothing to gain from me shying away from what I want even if I’m not sure I will ever actually get it. So, I acknowledge the day society deems for declarations of romance and infatuation like a little kid passing out jagged construction paper hearts to a classroom and peering into my decorated shoebox to see if there’s something there for me in return.

Sometimes I find a little bit of sweetness rattling around inside—a brief affair, a date or two, maybe an intellectual sparring partner that makes me buzzing and giddy. But mainly I find kindness that I’ve left myself that is supposed to encourage other people to leave something, too. I know that I’m worthy of the same kind of love and pleasure I desire from someone else. I also know that in the wash of pink and red and February days slipping by on the calendar is the notion that self-love is a year-round affair.

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Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.

A little background before we begin. Near the end of 2023 I made a decision that drove the way I lived my life throughout the entirety of 2024. I decided I would live into a year of radical pleasure. At the time, in the quiet of my bedroom when I made the decision, I had no real idea what that meant but I knew how I wanted to feel. I wrote down images and feelings and all the ways I thought this idea of pleasure could, and would, manifest in my life. This list was a jumble of activities and items running the gamut from jazz clubs to riding in the back of a cab to basking in the sun. I’d also been collecting screenshots and links in my phone and on my laptop and labeled them neatly. Things I Want to Buy. Wardrobe Ideas. Photos of Joy. Writing Wins and lots and lots of folders for every event and trip I took over the years. My TikTok saved videos spanned hundreds of short clips of books I wanted to read, music I’d fallen in love with, and what I called “vibes.” I was a magpie collecting all the shiny bits of my life and environment and cobbling them together into a reflection of what I wanted my life to be.

But even though I was collecting all these bits of inspiration, I wasn’t actually doing anything with most of them. I knew each of them made something in me hum to life—sometimes in my brain or heart or body—and I coveted them. I organized my folders and files while admiring the people and places in them thinking I wanted those same realities but didn’t quite have the confidence to actually go after them and live them out loud. Maybe it was feelings of inadequacy or a lack of self-esteem. What was true, no matter the root of the issue, was I was sitting on the sidelines of the life I wanted and doing nothing to really change it.

Making the decision to live into a year of radical pleasure didn’t start with only that quiet declaration in bed. It also hinged on an argument. That verbal tussling, and a healthy dose of pettiness, helped launch my year of living exactly how I wanted. The argument was a simple one. A disagreement over the literary value of a book I was reading. I remember shaking as I typed a paragraph-long text message about why I was angry and how what I was reading had value. Not that the person on the other end of the message cared, but I did. I cared enough that I decided there would be no more guilty pleasures in my life. Guilty pleasure implied there was some level of shame in what I enjoyed, the things I wanted to do, or what I wanted to feel. And who had time for that as the world was crumbling around us?

When I took away guilt, and the hiding that came along with it, for the first time in my life, I was able to truly, fully enjoy myself. I wasn’t couching my happiness into what other people saw as acceptable. I gave myself permission to indulge in every bit of joy I wanted. Also, for the first time, I shed the concern that my version of joy and pleasure had to measure up to anyone else’s. I made the declaration that what was for me was for me and if that ran parallel to other people’s happiness then it did. And if not? I would happily watch their joy from a distance while living mine.

Like now, a year later and on another late evening in the darkness of my bedroom, my year of radical pleasure is unfurled behind me and continuing ahead. The glow of my phone is shining like a beacon in the dimmed room. There is the taste of citrus candy on my tongue and a giggle in my throat as I slide my finger across the digital page of the monster romance novel I am reading. This is the kind of book that sparked that argument, a book with little supposed literary value or growth potential. But now I don’t care. I don’t care to be angry or justify what I’m reading because it doesn’t matter. What matters to me is that the incubus and the sorceress are in love even as the universe, and a magical agency, attempts to keep them apart. I swoon for the soft way the two main characters are gentle with each other and grow excited to share this book with a co-worker the next day. This is what I’ve held onto so tightly over the last year—the absence of the guilt and shame that used to come with the simple enjoyment of something like this. I used to cloak this kind of excitement beneath a carefully constructed mask.

Before, in the time prior to when I decided to start centering my pleasure and joy, I would have melted into the mattress in the dark, reading about how the giant incubus handcrafted a beautiful dress for his mate to wear and then made her a flourless chocolate tart. I would have held this warmth closely to my chest and never spoken a word. But in this version of my life, the next day I’m spooning soup into my mouth and laying out the plot points while trying not to spoil anything for a friend I’m sure will likely never read the book. But once again I don’t care. I like the jolt of excitement roiling through me and how I can’t wait until my next break so I can read another chapter or two.

It isn’t just this book that makes me feel alive. It is the freedom I feel in shedding the barriers I’d constructed against fully feeling and living. The book, and all the other manifestations of joy I’ve had over the last year, have become more and more solid. The reminders of pleasure I keep in my collections have started to overlap with the life I live. Sometimes this overlap is small, like sleeping in fresh white sheets sprayed with lavender. Other times the pleasure is big, like spending days next to the Narragansett Bay at the Newport Jazz Festival under the sun and buzzing with warmth. But most days the pleasure has just become a part of my normal day. I wash my face with Chanel face wash because it makes me feel fancy just as much as it helps my skin. I spend afternoons conditioning the leather of the vintage Coach bags I coveted when I was a young woman but never owned. In the evenings, I lay in those same lavender scented sheets and listen to music while snaking my body to the melodies before I drift off to sleep. And I keep reading those books with little literary “value” because they make me feel good and help me hold onto the idea that eventually some of the romance or whimsy will spill off the page and into reality.

It takes lots of nerve and worry to live this way. I have to be honest about that. Because it’s not just about buying things or luxury. It’s about leaning into the ease in your heart. About listening to the small voice that sometimes gets drowned out in responsibility and expectation and duty. It’s about honoring the notion that pleasure is not bad and is not only one thing. It’s not just sex and the carnal. Pleasure is what you make it. Living into this kind of freedom can be difficult. It can be scary. Why wouldn’t it be at first? The path ahead of you is dark and it’s your light, the one you’re sparking by making the decision to live this way, that illuminates where you need to go. And what’s the alternative? Standing still in the dark knowing all around you are possibilities and certainties that will help you lean into that ease in your heart? So you have to trust yourself to keep moving forward and defining what all of this means for you.

I never got a response to that text message. I spent the year after I sent it walking the path of pleasure without that person, but I wasn’t lonely. Along the way, the more I talked to people about my decision, the more comfortable I became in letting joy come in whatever form with whoever wanted to join in. I laughed and sang and danced across the country doing whatever my heart fancied. I was soft with myself just like the incubus and the sorceress. No one may have been making me tarts or dresses and I am certainly far from magical, but in the dark of my bedroom flipping pages anything seems possible. That’s what I want to keep living toward—the idea that on the other side of fear is the promise of wide open joy and to make it all come true I just need to settle into the quiet to see what manifests.

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Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.