The Grief of Pleasure
by Kristine Deer

The old wood floors had a morse code that could be understood from anywhere in the house. The stairs were obvious, you could tell if someone was going up or down and how urgent their movement was. The hallway echoed with creaks and steps while the second floor bathroom door seemed to communicate what mood to anticipate.

That made it easy to know if you had time to do whatever you needed to get away with. Eating ice cream or eight cookies from the porcelain cookie jar that you learned how to quietly close so that your transgression of eating cookies went unnoticed. Or watching TV in the kitchen when you knew full well that it wasn’t allowed because you had to be ‘doing something’ and zoning out was a waste of time. Early addictions. Rebellion. This is how we do things. I want more of that good feeling. That’s not how we do things. I must be bad.

The floorboards were my ally at five when I discovered that the corner of the toy chest was at just the right height that I could saddle up to it until the blood flow restricted and created the most blissful release of energy through my entire body. The kind of pleasure that made my heartbeat pump in my ears, muffling the sound of creaking woodwork.

I learned to hide and not be found. Until, of course, I was. Being a child was a conflating experience of thinking I was simultaneously alone and independent while being observed and revolved around like the center of the universe and then sometimes not at all. Invisibility cloak meets ivory tower. Controlled and forgotten. Like this, not like that. I learned to be seen when it was safe to be seen. Convenient. Not too much. Not worth the risk.

Getting caught. It’s not the same as being seen. But they are essentially the same function. Where one fulfills the soul with the honor of another’s presence, respect and appreciation, the other informs the deepest wells of sensitivity within that you are not meeting someone else’s expectations of who you should be and how you should behave. Getting caught is an inside job for everyone involved. The one who catches sees your behavior as unacceptable, incongruent with how they learned how to be, so they say or not say but make you know how they feel without leaving a bruise. A thousand paper cuts of passive shame. They were taught, or not, shown or not, what was right and wrong, despite perhaps the deeply sensitive part within them that wanted more, to know more, to feel more, to be seen. Their own internal paper cuts influence how to handle these awkward, embarrassing, out of their depth of processing and understanding moments. So the way it’s done continues. Decades of old wounds, some big, some add up to big, some just sting a little if the wrong feelings are felt. Where I hurt is a good indicator of where someone else was hurt. A legacy I had no choice in signing up for.

The one who is caught, knows they are caught, not seen. Regardless of what words are said, or not said, there lingers a knowing that something about you is wrong. Bad. Disgusting. Cognitive dissonance is the legacy I signed up for. A prophecy of depression. Such a beautiful feeling in my beautiful little self, damned by someone else’s refusal to see that beauty within themself.

I hid, enough to experience those self-taught capabilities. The inadvertent thrill that followed made well worn ruts in my neural pathways that light up at the sound of wooden planks speaking in morse code. It sounds like disgrace and feels like freedom. Embarrassment and liberation. A disappointing escape. Remorseful ecstasy. Pleasurable grief.

Someday I hope to cut the cord between my pleasure and guilt. Or stretch it long enough to show me how far I’ve come. Remembering my birthrights. Forgetting the rules of digestible perfection I wrote into law. Forgiving the absence of being truly seen. Grieving for the pleasure that still feels caught.

October 2024
New Jersey, USA