Feeling Good While the World Burns

A trans man and psychologist reflects on the role of pleasure amid tragedy and oppression

It’s January 16th, less than a week away from the inauguration of a president that has repeatedly promised to further criminalize and marginalize groups of people outside the hegemonic class - including groups that I belong to. My dear friends’ beloved cat is dying. A new Republican-led Congress with “MAGA” energy is already moving forward incredibly damaging legislation. Los Angeles is on fire and I have seen countless friends of friends reporting that their houses and everything in them are entirely lost, a reality that is devastatingly common among the Palestinians in Gaza. My clients are suffering various tragedies and/or experiencing distress stemming from horrid mistreatment in their past. The unimaginably wealthy men who own tech monopolies are using their money and platforms to push our sociopolitical reality in harmful directions that serve them and their class.

And I feel good.

I have had a morning that went exactly right. I got a full night’s sleep, woke up gently, and snuggled with my cat while my partner got her day started. I emerged into early daylight and sipped on some warm broth, then ate nourishing food, and put on the most comfortable clothing (including a TRANSA hoodie with a quote reminding me of the power of my/our transness). I then went to a local float spa and leisurely prepared for a 60-minute float, at least half of which I spent with the lights off in utter darkness and quiet. I never feel more at peace than after a float session. I can share more about that another time, but just know that it is powerful. And now I am sitting with delicious coffee post-float and I feel amazing. My thoughts are clear and moving at a pace I can keep up with. I feel an emotion like hopefulness in a very corporeal way - not an intellectual or cognitive experience of being hopeful, but an embodied feeling of safety and pleasure.

Oh no, I think with a shudder. I’m not caring enough. I’m not paying attention.

Yikes. My immediate cognitive response to feeling good is a self-critical thought that I’ve disengaged too much from awareness of and care about the suffering and injustice in my life and the lives of others. And this isn’t true. As I am writing this and reflecting, I don’t actually believe that I’m disengaging to a damaging degree. I won’t run down the list of evidence I can offer myself that I am participating in resistance and care to a degree that mostly satisfies my sense of moral and ethical commitments, but I do have a list that I ran through to challenge that critical and fearful response.

Still, I’ve so strongly linked caring and fighting to feeling bad that my automatic response to feeling this good is that I’m doing something wrong. And I don’t think I’m alone in this. Sometimes there’s a survivor’s guilt element to this as well: why do we get to or deserve to feel good when others are suffering so awfully? And we project this whole thing onto each other. We see laughter and might think or even say, “How can you have joy when people are starving?”

But my friends, we must have joy when people are starving and incarcerated and oppressed and dying. We cannot survive to resist and to put work into our communities and dreams if we are shells of ourselves, divorced from all pleasure.

I’m not offering a novel concept. Adrienne Maree Brown, building on the legacy of thinkers like Audre Lorde, published a book in 2019 on “the politics of feeling good” titled Pleasure Activism. In it, she argues (among many things) that our bodies are “are structured for” pleasure and that “there is no way to repress pleasure and expect liberation.”

“I have seen, over and over, the connection between tuning in to what brings aliveness into our systems and being able to access personal, relational, and communal power. Conversely, I have seen how denying our full, complex selves—denying our aliveness and our needs as living, sensual beings—increases the chance that we will be at odds with ourselves, our loved ones, our coworkers, and our neighbors on this planet.”

I want to clarify that while pleasure certainly can be erotic and plenty of Brown’s book (as the cover might suggest) focuses on this aspect, there are also a lot of kinds of feeling good that aren’t sexual - see my experience of this morning. And I will also say that neither Brown nor I are advocating for a hedonistic life motivated solely by the pursuit of pleasure. My mother recently published an essay (or blog post? what are we calling these substack entries?) on balance, and that principle or construct is certainly relevant here. If we are only striving to feel good, I do believe we will turn away from the important realities and resistance and care work related to suffering, and this is harmful. But if we are resistant to feeling good and not intentional about seeking out some pleasure in life, we will - to borrow Brown’s words - be at odds with ourselves and others, not adequately resourced to do good. Brown’s book also reminds readers that there are ways in which activism can be deliciously pleasurable. We need to engage in the work when it doesn’t feel good sometimes - often, maybe; but it’s also important to know that pleasure and activism (i.e., resistance and care work) are far from mutually exclusive.

If you’ll allow me to offer an assignment or prescription to you who are reading this: do something that feels good today. Plan for something that feels really good in the next four days. And take time in the next week to reflect on how you can structure the work you will do to resist and respond to suffering in the coming months so that your resistance and care work themselves feel good.