Lessons Learned During a Year of Radical Pleasure and Beyond

Athena Dixon on a retrospective of pleasure

On the hot summer day I decided I wanted to live into a year of radical pleasure, I wasn’t quite sure what that meant. I knew that there needed to be a change in how I lived my life. I was burned out like so many of us are, but also realistic enough to know that didn’t mean I would wake up the next day and quit my job. Bills still needed to be paid. I needed health insurance. I live in the United States of America and no matter how burned out I was, the business of living in this country would keep grinding. I had to figure out how to work on that burnout. And I also had to find strategies that would allow me to move to the fringes of the kind of life where I knew I would be able to breathe at least a little bit more freely.

So, what was the plan? It started off with the material. I won’t lie about that. My vision of what pleasure and freedom amounted to was the ability to lean into luxuries, even if I called them little. There was the Chanel face wash and moisturizer. The fine leather notebook. Lots of linen and the fashion sense of a coastal wife. Tiny gold jewelry and a rotation of signature scents. I splurged and justified and splurged again. I figured I had the money to do it so why not? And if I could trick my body into thinking this meant that I was living a life I really wanted then the job was done. Except it wasn’t. It didn’t matter how many Chanel boxes piled up in my bedroom or how many first class flights I took. I was still waking up at 3 a.m. nearly every morning covered in sweat and hoping against hope that this was the day I would be able to leave the rat race behind. Except it never was. I was still commuting to my desk with the bottom of my stomach falling out with no end in sight. There was nothing I could buy that would fix that.

I had to move onto a second plan. What I settled on was a combination of the luxuries I afforded myself with a more practical sensibility. Luxury wasn’t money. Luxury was time and rest and grace. I leaned into it even if at first it felt like I was wasting time and resting too much. What I had been craving, what I’d needed, for so long wasn’t the illusion of a luxurious life. What I’d been looking at was the soft girl aesthetic that told me that neutral tones and a minimalist lifestyle were the hallmarks of a woman who wasn’t stressed about much of anything. Some of that aesthetic very much aligned with my desired life, but the rest of it was ill fitting. So I started deconstructing. What about that life was the pleasure I was seeking? After writing about joy and pleasure over the life of this column, I’ve come up with a few ideas.

First, radical pleasure is relative. What’s radical or revolutionary in practice for me is light work for one person and terrifying for another. You can’t compare what makes you feel good with anyone else’s version of happiness or joy. Over the last couple of years I’ve pushed away from the idea of guilty pleasures or indulging in “unserious” pursuits. I like romance novels and stories about fated mates so I read them without shame. I don’t have to justify their intellectual value or balance them with any other “serious” work. I can be honest that I want to just enjoy the hours of my day. Sometimes that looks like a deeply serious research rabbit hole and others it’s me giggling over a TikTok video about the latest online discourse. What became important at this step was I learned to define my days not by the external expectations I’d carried for years, but via what made me feel a wide range of emotions outside of stress and worry.

Second, there were bound to be false starts. I’m a creature of habit. I wake up at the same time every day, drink the same drink, drive the same route, perform most of the same actions. I’ve honed my routine via years of necessity and some of it needed to come with me to my “new” life. The rest of it was ripe for change, but life can sometimes be muscle memory and over my radical pleasure journey I’ve fallen back into old ways of thinking and living just as often as I’ve built new, healthier habits. I’m consistent in seeing my therapist bi-weekly, but I still drink too much soda that makes me jittery. I stop myself from having to produce all the time, but I still make copious to-do lists like I’m always bound to the idea of production. Falling back into those habits isn’t failure. I’ve started to look at these habit patterns as road markers. Maybe going back to the muscle memory of something I need to let go of is bringing me back to the same starting point so I can try a new path again. There’s no shame in that. The goal is movement and it’s okay if it’s not always forward.

Third, the goal may change. That’s okay. I learned I wasn’t a static being who was on a journey with a set destination. The entire point of living into a year of radical pleasure was the forward movement. It was the experiences and the discoveries that kept me traveling toward a true sense of myself. That kind of inner and external work is something that lasts a lifetime. Pleasure is always in motion. It should grow with you, exist with you, and that is never static. It took a minute but I finally came to understand the purist of pleasure is not perfect and it is not fast.

Fourth, pleasure is a mind, body, and soul pursuit and it’s not going to always be balanced. Each of these pursuits enrich your life in their own way. It goes back to the ideas above. There is no failure if I spend more time paying attention to what my physical body needs. It needs that time and energy and so I give it just that. Maybe joy is in my mind and so I loop the same song over and over while I puzzle through why it makes me feel the way it does. Or maybe it’s my spirit and I have shaky conversations with a higher power. I don’t have to force it because joy is unbridled. It comes from something I can’t replicate on a whim. I have to feel something spark inside me and then follow where it leads me.

My year of radical pleasure was over a long time ago, but the idea is still ingrained in my everyday living. It’s still a work in progress, too. But I’m confident my joy and happiness don’t look like anyone else’s. They’re unique to me because only I can determine what I need in the moment, what I need in the short term, and what I need for a lifetime.

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.