Pleasure is a Pursuit

For a long time, I had been building myself to be self-sufficient. It was important to me to know how to create value and insulate myself from hurt. I thought I could do that while still remaining vulnerable enough to learn and grow.

One gray day in London, in my mid-twenties, I realized pleasure had no room in my life. I didn’t even know what pleasure was. I had incorporated a synthetic version of it into my days, as tasteless food that I needed just to keep going. Going where? Doing what? Why? Pleasure, I’ve learned, is not a skill or an idea you just decide to live with. It’s a personal practice. Since that day, I’ve been opening myself up to understand—with my whole being—what pleasure feels like to me. Initially, I intellectualized it. I read, I searched, I wrote. With years, I started to feel and recognize it. I noticed the importance of patience, openness, how one needs to welcome and sit in pleasure, to feel like one deserves it. I started to see it in other people, in living beings who didn’t equate pleasure with waste, who relished it—and I tried to learn from them. 

The most vivid way I can describe it is through my friend Cici and her shower routines. We were college roommates in our early twenties. She called her cramped little room “my sanctuary,” and always kept the lights dimmed. The day we met, she had bought a cheap cacao lotion, because her sanctuary needed that scent. She showered slowly, then put oil on her wet skin, pat-dried her body, and spread cacao lotion really fast. She then lit a candle and laid on her bed. I watched, perplexed, seeing all that as a waste of time. Why put both oil and lotion on? Don’t you have homework? 

Almost 12 years later, I am still working on living my life the way Cici showered. 

In the very early days of Feeld, a Member answered a survey by telling us that they felt seen and real for sharing what brought them joy and pleasure (in their case, it was roleplaying with their partner and other people). I was in my early twenties when I read it and couldn’t believe what we had done. I had never seen or heard of people being asked, in a public forum, what brings them pleasure. And I had never seen anything close to that being done in a way which looked and felt nice. Feeld has always been about permitting and giving care to our pleasure, about practicing the joy for life—the fullest pleasure of them all. I guess to permit myself to do it, I needed to see it’s as true for others as it felt for me. 

Someone asked me recently how it feels seeing Feeld as it is now, having been there from the beginning. I realized I have no nostalgia for the old times. I carry the memory of trying my best, of warmth from seeing the effort and passion of everyone I was working with, of the certainty that we were going in the right direction and that people who didn’t believe in us would soon change their mind. But I don’t long for the past. If anything, I long for unknown feelings and experiences at times still to come in the present and future. 

I believe in evolution, progress, change. I’ve always seen Feeld as an idea that can change minds for the better, empower us to make choices about what we’d like to experience in our relationships, and inspire us to be more curious. 

Our curiosity for our bodies and sexuality gets methodically incapacitated when we’re young. We’re taught to ignore, avoid, and hide our sexual curiosity without any consideration for the cost of diverting such energy and need. We’re never taught to seek nor communicate consent, to dig into our minds and see what we want and then express it. Feeld is the closest I’ve ever gotten to communicating this perspective and opportunity to the world. So, making Feeld as impactful and accessible as possible is my goal; seeing it grow is beautiful, scary, new.

It’s taken me years of building Feeld, talking to our communities, journaling, reflecting, and experimenting to understand how pleasure feels when you truly welcome it to your life. It feels like floating on your back in water and looking at the sky. Like staying very close to the tea leaves when the hot water touches them first—to hear the leaves open. Like traveling to see old friends, making strange gifts, saying yes whenever the body twitches with hesitation. Like relishing embarrassment and pride alike, and having flowers around. Like knowing in your bones that life is now, it’s whatever you are doing at this moment—accepting the weight and inevitability of that, the joy and the freedom it gives. Like using our privilege to make a choice to welcome joy and offer it back.

We’re all in this world for so little time. It’s a glimpse of a particle of a millisecond. One day, we think about something we want to do. The next day, the time has gone, the body has decayed, the mind has moved, the world is rearranged, the thing no longer makes sense, but the remnants of it—the desires, the wishes—they linger, like a signature scent.