“Sex is the most common behaviour among humans after birth, breathing, sleeping, and death, and too often we still feel shame or bite our tongues when it comes up [in conversation].” (Brown, Pleasure Activism)

I grew up in a context where sex was primarily talked about in one way: wait until marriage. Outside of that, there was no real engagement with it. My parents certainly didn't know how to have the conversation with me; I often joke about how my first (and only) sex talk with my dad happened after I was married. Within the church, it was framed in this hyper-focused yet taboo way that left everyone thinking about it but with no real honesty. There was abstinence commitments, confession, shame, nervous jokes—and that's about it. It's been wild watching many adults I know (including myself) struggle to understand what a healthy conversation about sex really is in the aftermath of leaving or disentangling their upbringing in some way. Now many of us are parents ourselves and trying to figure out how to course correct but without really having done the work of healing our own shame and trauma around it.

Until we can figure out how to talk about honestly and healthily, it's hard to imagine any real change taking place. I'm grateful for challenging books like this that push me outside of my comfort zone and help me begin to do some self-reflection.

I just finished the final book in Tana French's body of work (so far) and I don't think I've ever so voraciously enjoyed a bunch of novels before.

If you haven't read (or heard of) Tana French, she writes murder mysteries set in Ireland. At times they even flirt with horror. The mysteries are compelling, but her character writing is even better. She writes in the first person and is particularly skilled at writing an unreliable narrator. The book I saved for last, the Witch Elm, did this in a way I will be thinking about for a while. It was a takedown of white, male privilege that unfolds in a slow burn throughout the book. It had me questioning my own life at times in some real introspective ways.

The book confronts you with questions of whether or not you can trust your own memory on how certain events played out, especially when it comes to assumptions of how those events may have affected other people. My own adolescence is somewhat wrapped up in a haze of generalizations and a certain degree of distance or detachment. Like the narrator, at times a lot of my memories feel unmemorable. This book challenges the assumption that others, particularly people less inoculated by privilege, experienced things the same way.

"When my body feels good, my life feels good, and I want to keep going, and fight for my right to exist and love and grow and evolve." (Brown, Pleasure Activism)

This is something that I think about a fair bit. As someone who suffers with a degree of chronic pain/discomfort and anxiety, I find it to be a rare time that my body actually feels like it's in a good place. What I have found, however, is how to pursue those few times that it does. Walking, for instance makes me feel good. Being outside in the fresh air, moving at a brisk pace, puts both my body and mind at ease. Pain is reduced, my anxious thoughts are calmed, and life feels good. I'm more energized for relationships or creative things. Conversely, when I go for long periods of time without walking, my body and mood deteriorate. I become irritable and just want to lie down and be left alone. I'm a worse person all around when I'm not walking.

“Part of the reason so few of us have a healthy relationship with pleasure is because a small minority of our species hoards the excess of resources, creating a false scarcity and then trying to sell us joy, sell us back to ourselves.

On a broad level, white people, and men have been the primary recipients of this delusion, the belief that they deserve to have excess, while the majority of others don’t have enough… or further, that the majority of the world exists in some way to please them.” (Pleasure Activism)

Whew.

As someone who has benefitted from the system as it exists, I need to still understand (and disentangle) how my own relationship with pleasure has been broken as a result of this delusion. How have I bought into and perpetuated this system for my continued benefit? And how can I begin to seek a healthier approach to pleasure?

"We learn to love by loving."

A short line from an essay in a book I am revisiting (started a while back and got sidetracked). It's an idea that resonates deeply with me. Many years ago I remember seeing a collection of short films and one of them contained this idea of a man who reinvested his time to care for his dying wife; despite planning on leaving the marriage before finding out she was sick. The film ended with this line, "by choosing to be a man in love, he became a man in love once again."

Now, I don't want to oversimplify this; there are all sorts of considerations when dealing with relationships like this. But the thing I want to come back to is this idea that love is learned through practice. Specifically, I want to highlight the spirit that the author of the above quote is coming from. Love, not just in a romantic sense but as a revolutionary act, is something that needs to be practiced. Self-love, self-less love, self-giving love—these aren't things that you can feel your way into. You can only learn them by doing them.