Radical Pleasure, Volume 1

The first installment of a new monthly column by author Athena Dixon

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.

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.