A Pleasure List: Knowing and Claiming What Feels Good
Queer Joy Practice #5
This is How To Queer Joy, a newsletter dedicated to LGBTQ+ mental health and joy practices, written by a queer psychologist.
This week’s practice: create a pleasure list. Knowing your pleasures can help you appreciate them, seek them out, ask for them, and remember them when times are tough.
Hi, hello, welcome, or welcome back!
Last week, I described how queer joy is more than just feeling happy, and I asked you to practice feeling your feelings. (Pretty important topic! If you missed it, I encourage you to check it out.)
But feeling all of your feelings—including painful ones—is not an easy practice! To balance that out, this week’s practice is a way to focus on the “positive” part of queer joy1: making a pleasure list.
Why Pleasure Matters for LGBTQ+ Mental Health
Pleasure is “a feeling of happy satisfaction and enjoyment.”
When people talk about queer joy, they’re usually talking about queer people feeling joy and pleasure. Often this pleasure is framed as a form of resistance, protest, and reclamation—and it is.
We are surrounded by messages that LGBTQ+ people are sick, sinful, or broken. Messages that we suffer because we are queer or trans. So, when a queer person feels pleasure and lives a fulfilling life, they inherently disprove those stigmatizing stories.
Queer public displays of affection. Wearing gender-affirming clothes. Attending pride events. Simple acts of intimacy, joy, or pleasure can become radical acts. When our pleasure comes from celebrating queerness, we proclaim:
We’re joyful not despite being queer, we’re joyful because we are queer.
This does not mean that a queer person has to feel happy all of the time to prove they’re OK. Or that queer people should ignore or just “get over” the hard parts of being queer.
Being human involves grief and pain. Being queer involves pain and oppression (at least in this world/timeline). Within that, appreciating pleasure is important.
Pleasure contributes to life satisfaction. Pleasure is a big part of any “life worth living” (a concept from Dialectical Behavior Therapy I mention a lot).
Pleasure helps us feel alive. It helps us connect to our inner goodness. It helps us connect with other people.
Feeling pleasure as queer people sustains us within the work of advocacy, activism, and liberation—both by building our resilience against discrimination and pain, and by acting as a guidepost for the more-pleasure-filled future we’re trying to build.
There is so much more to say, and others say it much more eloquently than I can here2, but the point is this: pleasure is an important part of queer joy.
Barriers to Queer Pleasure
Sadly, there are many barriers to pleasure for queer people.
As humans, we have a cognitive bias and tendency to focus on painful emotions and negative experiences, rather than pleasure and pleasant experiences. Thus, as queer humans surrounded by anti-LGBTQ+ news and events3, it can at times be harder to hold onto the positive aspects of our lives.
Also, various mental health difficulties, trauma experiences, and social conditioning cause LGBTQ+ people to dissociate or lose touch with their bodies. It can be a struggle to actually feel pleasure when we feel it.
Beyond that, queer people often grow up learning that our desires are “bad” and that we shouldn’t trust their inner experiences. (I talked a bit more about this in a previous post about reconnecting with childhood passions.)
So, often, a big part of feeling more pleasure is actually identifying what you like. It’s simply knowing and claiming what feels good to you.
How To Create a Pleasure List
Make a list. Really. Just spend some time writing down things that give you pleasure.
Some ideas:
Sensory pleasures. What foods do you love to eat? What smells do you love to smell? What music or sounds do you love to listen to?
Activities. What are your favorite hobbies or special interests?
Connection. Which people do you enjoy being around? What do you love doing together? Where do you love being with them?
Touch. How do you like to be touched? How do you like to touch others? What feels best to you sexually or sensually?
Memories. What photographs spark joy when you look at them? What memories give you pleasure to remember and think about?
Queer Joy. What helps you celebrate your gender, sexuality, or LGBTQ+ identity? What helps you feel fully alive and thrilled to be exactly who you are in this moment right now?
Struggling to think of things? Have a short list? Totally OK.
But if you want your list to be longer, make a point to pay attention as you go about your day. Notice the small glimmers of pleasure when they happen. Or, purposefully try new things and run “pleasure experiments.” Add to your list as you can.
Keep in mind: Pleasure does not require consumption! You can find and feel pleasure without buying things.
Finally, be honest about what feels good to you. There’s no right or wrong here. This list is just for you. (Unless you want to share it! I’ll write more about that another week.)
Don’t Sleep on This One!
This queer joy practice is a practice of deeper self-knowledge, self-validation, self-acceptance, and self-empowerment.
Better knowing your pleasures can allow you to better ask for pleasure, seek out pleasure, or savor pleasure when it happens.
You also can refer to this list to help you get through painful times, either as a list of potential coping strategies to try or as a reminder of how you’ve been in pleasurable times (and can be again).
As always, let me know how it goes! Reply to this email or comment below. I’ll be making my own list and sharing some of it soon—join me?
<3
Kiki
P.S. It seemed time to recommend some other Substack writing again! This week, Venusia came across my algorithm, and I’ve loved everything of hers I’ve read thus far. Check out “The Psychic Rupture of Second Puberty: Being the Parent your Inner Child Needs!” or others!
Of course, pleasure can feel *very* heavy and not-easy for some people. If that’s you, be kind with yourself as you try this practice.
If you want to learn more, I highly recommend engaging with adrienne maree brown’s work, including the book Pleasure Activism.
As well as news/events that are racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc etc etc.
Omg not the shoutout! Thank you 🫶🏾🥰🥰this piece is gorgeous! We all need queer pleasure