Pleasure Politics (Leisure is Political)

Survival Journal #1

This semester I‘m taking a Sociology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies class on activism, social justice, and Black feminist epistemology. This is the best way I can sum it up because even my professor has mentioned she’s not sure the title, “Healing and Social Justice” really gets it right. We’ve read the introductions to Sarah Ahmed’s Feminist Killjoy Handbook and Adrienne Maree Brown’s Pleasure Activism so far, and the two hour and a half long sessions we have per week just haven’t been cutting it for the kinds of discussion that unravel and have to be cut short. Time constraints aside, it’s only week three and it’s been, well, a pleasure!

One of our assignments for the semester is to keep a Survival Journal. We are tasked with doing one thing every day for pleasure. This can be a ritual: one thing we do every day for the entirety of the semester or different things more like a bucket list or dopamine menu— but we’re asked to keep a journal of our experiences, and at the end of the course we will connect the personal and the academic in some longer, more sophisticated project-paper-structure.

Today, we were asked to go through two lists: one with pleasurable activities and one with nonviolent political actions, and pick 5-7 from each separated by what we were most familiar with, what we’d be interested in trying, and what we found strange/curious/were unlikely to do/try. I assume part of the intention behind this was to give us ideas for our pleasure activity and our survival journals, but another was to show how the personal and the political can/do connect, especially when we consider varying contexts and scales to which we apply these activities and actions.

Among both my pleasurable and political activities/actions were those that revolved around writing and speech. Under familiar: researching a topic of interest (53), talking on the phone (64), petitions, reading newspapers/journals (6.) Under want to try: public speech (1), letters of support/opposition (2), teach-ins (50), doing arts and crafts (67.) Under strange/curious/unlikely to try: debating (4) and clearing my email inbox (43.)

I saw one of my friends repost a graphic on their Instagram story encouraging people to write their own manifestos and share with their friends. I like the idea of encouraging folks to be willing to share their thoughts and opinions within their circles so as to engage people in more casual/low-stakes/supportive community dialogue/debate. I think this is why I like posting to my Instagram story so much— I love the time-sensitive low-stakes opportunity to hear a bunch of opinions from my friends and acquaintances about serious and non-serious stuff. Even when I think I’m shouting into the void/speaking into an echo chamber, my friends will challenge me, tell me they think/see something differently and why, and ask me questions back, and it’s so wonderful having the kind of relationship with folks where you know you can agree, disagree, and challenge in a kind and safe way. “Safe” meaning, the mutual respect and assumption of good intention is there and true.

Anyway, I’ve been struggling with the idea of getting off or limiting my presence on traditional social media again— as a number of my friends are considering what’s gone on in the past few weeks with TikTok and Meta. I won’t get all into that, but on a personal level, I know there would be real benefits to withdrawing from participation on these platforms, as well as real costs (specifically related to access to communities I cannot always be physically part of and people whom I no longer have any physical proximity to), so I have come to no resolutions and instead have just decided to mind my business and take action whenever clarity strikes! (Let me know what you are doing on this front if it has been on your mind.) What I always come back to is this: the blog. I love my newsletter-meets-blog and I love the blogs my friends write and if you’re on Instagram, you know I’m constantly making pleas to get more of y’all on here and brain dumping in long form. I love it! What can I say?

All of this brings me to say: writing and sending out my newsletter-meets-blog is both a pleasurable and political activity/action. I have a complicated relationship with claiming “activist” as an identity, especially because I’m still working through long-buried soft-spots from when I was talking up a storm about confederate monuments in my hometown as a 16 year old, but I love local action— I love action that begins right where you’re standing and is directed at/for those in your immediate communities. At the dinner table, over coffee, in church group, at book club, at run club, on the Instagram story, somewhere sandwiched in that 9 minute voice memo update to the bestie who lives abroad. Your immediate folks. I also love action that is more for your neighbors and the strangers who are only one or two introductions away from knowing you, but there’s something I really love about community action within arms length. I think this is overlooked a lot in the intention to do as much as we can, to be productive with our action. Adjacent to this point is one about martyrdom and our preoccupation with it, but I’ll get to that in another post. My point for now is: I don’t need to be a big rock that makes a big splash and a lot of ripples in the lake that is my larger local community. I am happy to be a skipping stone on the pond that is shared with my friends in relative proximity.

So relative proximity: that brings me to here, now, you and me, what we’re doing in the space between me writing these words and you reading them.

I don’t know if I’m ready to write and publish my manifesto— though it would be a cool practice to document it and see how it changes over the years— but I am interested in exploring the overlap between pleasure and political through my favorite personal and public/community oriented activity: the blog!

All of this is a long winded way of saying, I’m gonna document my semester Survival Journal here. There’s more I wrote under familiar/want to try/unlikely including: wearing symbols (19), entering a competition (85), laying in the sun (62), and lysistratic non-action (57), and many more that I didn’t put on my quick short list. I’m already in the process of some of these, but there are others I can be more intentional about. What would it look like to host or attend a teach-in? What newspapers/journals can I be more intentional about reading? How might silence support me in my pursuit of personal pleasure and/or nonviolent political action?

Ahmed wrote, “Survival can thus be what we do for others, with others.” So, I will be trying to get out of my routines and ruts and inviting my friends along too. A week and a half ago, my friends and I had a vision board night where we ate mid-takeout and sketched out pretty collages and bucket list bingo boards of our goals this year. It didn’t matter that it was halfway through January and we only had 3 magazines to work with for collages— it was about gathering and taking time to slow down.

Last semester, almost every Friday, my friend Katy and I spent two hours at our favorite coffee shop just chatting. Because Katy is in law school and I’m in a PhD program at a different university, its hard to find overlapping free time, but our Friday coffees have become our commitment to our friendship and slowing down. We don’t have to give into the belief that we’re too busy for the extremely necessary dimension of wellness that is friendships/relationships. And rolling it into the purchase of a sweet treat adds a special perk. We often use this time to go beyond surface-level updates— our conversation sprawls wildly and before we know it we’re talking about justice, hope, God/the universe, and moments that haunt us from childhood. We started this ritual up again this past Friday and even though I always struggle to roll myself out of bed, this kind of depth, even if bounded by a relatively short time frame and limited to just once a week, is such a life source.

Also this past weekend: My boyfriend and I love competition and we decided to make our own 75 day challenge to invest in the infrastructure of our leisure time. We modeled it off of 75Hard, but picked five “rules” each that aligned with our personal goals— how we’d like to spend our time and habits we’d like to build. In the introduction of Pleasure Activism, Brown says that structure and discipline can bring immense pleasure. I think this is true, and I found myself feeling joyful at the alignment/timing of the topics in this class and the actions in my personal life. Even making this silly challenge with my partner is a kind of mixing of personal pleasure and political action. The political being in a kind of roundabout way that we are making intentional choices to carve time away from traditional/capitalistic “shoulds” to invest in our leisure and personal development. There’s another blog to be written about 75Hard and its “mental toughness” run-yourself-into-the-ground-to-be-superior BS, but I think there is a political act in scaffolding pleasure throughout your daily life, especially at the intersections of my personal identities and in this contemporary moment.

Two of my daily rules for 75 days is to spend 30 minutes reading exclusively for leisure and to spend 30 minutes writing or journaling. I have been writing in my end-of-year letter to self that I want to write more poetry, essays, fiction (all of it!!) and I’ve yet to get myself into a rhythm that has me actually producing drafts that could go towards my still hypothetical chapbook and still hypothetical novel that I’ve been thinking about for yearsssss now!

Another daily rule is to spend 45 minutes moving my body intentionally— walking, running, stretching, lifting— it doesn’t matter as long as it’s sustained and intentional! Just 45 minutes of commitment to my body is the easiest way to set myself on track for a good day or to manage whatever comes my way in a challenging one. It is amazing how just 45 minutes of movement can completely change my frame of mind. That’s what people always say, and I know it sounds annoying because even I think it’s annoying when people say this, but it’s true.

Also at the beginning of this semester, on the last day of signups 3 hours before the form closed, I came across a local run race training group through Fleet Feet (the running store, yes, yes— odds are they do this very same thing in your town multiple times a year, you should look it up.) I’ve been slowly building my fitness base back since the disaster of my torn ligament this time last year. I’ve missed running— I’ve missed the freedom it gave me. Knowing I could just sign up for a half marathon on a whim and run it that weekend. Knowing I could run commute 5 miles and back and it really wasn’t a big deal. Knowing I could just get out for an hour and clear my head with a few laps around the park. Talk about freedom! I now know the value and the cost of that freedom and I’m taking as many precautions as I can to protect it. I put a half marathon on my New Year’s Bingo and I put that I want to beat my PR (2:12) which, honestly, is doable… as long as I take things slowly and with care. So, this run group, though a pretty significant expense, felt like a commitment to that goal and a chance to get out of my comfort zone.

This weekend, I went to my first group run and it was not exactly what I’d expected. It was easy— too easy— and I had to wrestle with myself as I was getting annoyed: remember that you want and need slow. I have to trust the process. Everything was right: I was placed in the correct pacing group, I’m on track to be able to make my goal of beating my PR, and all that’s required of me is to show up and take things easy.

I’m trying to get out of my own way so I can feel all of the pleasure that is to come with achieving my goals, including reveling in all of the hard work I’ve put in over a long period of time. A lesson I’m learning is that many times discomfort is required for pleasure— at least the pleasure that is not cheap and quick— the pleasure worth working for.

I think there’s a lot of truth in that sentiment for political action, especially on the local level and within challenging communities that you love despite [insert all of the reasons]. There’s a reason we keep investing even when we get burned, when it feels we are swimming against the current, when we feel more bitterness than anything else… Again… there’s another blog to be written on this, and I know many of you here know just what I’m talking about.

So, here we are— my first few weeks intentionally investing in my own survival at the intersections of personal pleasure and political action. In truth, I know I’ve been doing this a lot longer than a few weeks. Investing in self pleasure, community, and the intersections between personal fulfillment and altruism, are the only ways to sustain our commitment to our bittersweet communities. But there’s something— a power, an added dimension of meaning— in naming and claiming your intentions and sharing it with others.

If you get a chance to look at the lists linked above, tell me what actions/activities you’re participating in these days as part of your own survival. What do you want to try? What do you think?