Cherry Picking Pleasure

Athena Dixon on how imperfection can lead to a sweet life

Digging through a bag of refrigerator-cold Bing cherries, my fingers are stained with dark juice. I spit the pits into a plastic bag next to me then sink my fingers back into the cool fruit for my next prize. My bedroom windows are open and birds are chirping in the golden light of early evening while I dig into the bag again, testing the firmness and color of each piece of fruit, trying to find the one guaranteed to be sweet when I bite into the flesh. I’m almost always right in plucking the best cherries from the bag, leaving the ones slightly bruised and too soft at the bottom with the pits and stems. I’m picky about fruit. I like my cherries like I do my grapes, apples, pears, plums, nectarines, and peaches—hard to the touch with no give. I take extra time with all of them so I can ensure there are no surprises or rot with my enjoyment. By the time I’m halfway through the bag, I’ve sorted a good portion of the cherries into the do not eat pile. My grandmother would be ashamed at how wasteful this is, but I’ll take the guilt for the perfect bite.

I’m guilty elsewhere in my life, too. Guilty of ruminating, developing, and musing about pleasure and joy and all the ways it can show up in my life. Of trying to cherry pick the best experiences and habits so I can prove to myself, and sometimes others, I’m moving forward positively, that I’m more than the same cycles that keep my life moving. That I’m more than sleep, commute, work, commute, eat, write, sleep, wake, repeat. I sort through all the options around me, testing each of them, until one of them seems to be the remedy for what ails me, whether that be boredom, fear, anxiety, depression, or restlessness. By the time I discard what seems to be not quite right I’m left with a trail of options but not too many choices. But I won’t say the cherry picking isn’t sweet.

Even with those discarded possibilities, the ones I know are still good just not perfect, I’ve still managed to gather little luxuries and mantras and indulgences. I’ve fostered my quiet and solitude, too. I’ve solo traveled and wandered alone and made so many efforts to center softness in my life. I’ve learned to set harder boundaries and stand up for myself more. The game plan is there. I know all the steps to take. But I’m still guilty of planning and not doing despite my best efforts. I’m still guilty of finding the best there is and giving it away because I think it makes me more worthy to eventually receive something good myself. I think, in some ways, I’ve made this journey more about the path and not the destination, more about others and their opinions than myself. I can lay out the perfect way to go but what happens if I barely take a step? What if I keep giving away what I need and end up starving in the wake?

I haven’t always been guilty of this kind of cherry picking. I started my pleasure journey in earnest and I’ve had a great time doing so. The path I’ve set up for myself is beautiful. That much is true. And I still know quite well the reasons I started prioritizing this kind of habit. I tend to run myself ragged by trying to be everything to everybody or keeping my name alive by doing events and engagements or by rarely saying no. The summer I took three months of FMLA, I was in the midst of a decision. I’d grown fond of the idea I was living into a year of radical pleasure, kind of a year of selfishness that would allow me to think of myself first and give the best of who I am to the woman in the mirror before I handed over pieces of me. I wanted more days like one in my bed with the sack of fruit in my lap. For a while I lived just like that. Until the selfishness, no matter how honorable, started to turn to guilt and I began giving myself leftovers again.

Now, coming up on two summers later, that year has come and gone. Back then, radical pleasure meant something else. The idea was based on breaking and dismantling. I’d always felt confined—in my body, my brain, my life. I always felt like the cherries at the bottom of the bag. Like I was ripe and ready but not quite aesthetically pleasing enough to be the prize. That first year was meant to be as uncomfortable as it was pleasurable. It was supposed to shake me free from everything that had been weighing me down. I was supposed to take the time to learn myself from the inside out and discover my imperfections weren’t ever holding me back. I was doing that by living into a life and an image never meant to be mine.

I did learn something that year. I learned the foundation of my pleasure and joy. I learned what is required for me to feel safe and more whole than when I started. I can press against my flesh now and see where I’m soft, not on purpose, but by life’s bruising. I can feel where I stand firm and I can most certainly taste the sweetness I’ve invited into my life. The biggest lesson has been, however, that all of this new knowledge doesn’t necessarily look as I always imagined. Some days it’s nothing like I expected.

In the end, I’m like the cherries. After the first round of rooting around in the bag, I’ve taken the best of the best with little effort or consideration for myself. I get what’s left and sometimes that’s barely enough to taste. But I know now to pay attention to the other cherry-picking days. Like the next day after the fruit has spent another night chilling in the refrigerator and all that’s left is the stone fruit I didn’t want but may still be viable. The extra cold firms up the flesh and I pick out the best options again.

By the third and final day, I’m fishing around in the sack just hoping I missed something good. I never finish a bag in full. Sometimes my life is like this. I can have everything perfectly in hand but the result is still sour. The flesh of some of the cherries is deep red, the stems a perfect green, the shape of them round with juice I know will be sweet. Then I bite into disappointment. Sometimes on the third day of rooting through the bag, I’ll test my luck with the cherries left behind—the too-soft ones, the bruised ones, the misshapen. I bite into them still chasing sweetness and there are always surprises. Some of them are rotten or turn to mush between my teeth, but some of them? Some of them burst perfectly no matter how imperfect they appear on the outside.

I can’t lie and say my cherry picking has changed. I still sift through the bag and press my fingers into the fruit. But I know the flesh yielding isn’t a failure now. There is still sweetness to be had even if it isn’t aesthetically pleasing or fully whole. So what’s life at the bottom of the sack? Life is a little misshapen but still soft and sweet. Choices, while not always pretty, are still here and often they are the best option for being nurtured.

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.