FEATURE ARTICLE: "THE PLEASURE OF HOME"
By Ziakeya Sherelle, The Pleasure Digest
There’s a certain type of peace that comes from closing your own front door.
That click… that silence… that moment where the weight of the world stays outside and you finally get to exhale.
I didn’t always know how deeply housing and pleasure were connected. I thought pleasure was something you created through candles and body oils and soft sheets. And yes, those things help. But pleasure, the kind that lives in your nervous system, requires something much more basic: safety.
When Black people talk about survival, it’s not poetry — it’s muscle memory. It’s growing up in neighborhoods where police sirens are the background music...we call that hood ambiance... and landlords hold power over your peace due to their greed or don't GAF about the property they manage...ever had a slum lord??? It’s knowing the rent might rise out of nowhere, or family might need to squeeze in again, or the building you’ve called home could be sold to the highest bidder — leaving you scrambling to hold on to the pieces of a life you’ve worked hard to build.
And how can you rest, how can you soften, how can you play…when your body is constantly waiting for the next disruption?
I live in one of the most expensive cities in this country — Boston, Massachusetts. A place full of universities and innovation, yet too many Black folks struggle for the simple dignity of housing stability. We deserve more than to just live here. We deserve to flourish here. We deserve mornings where sunlight hits our face through a window we pay for without fear. We deserve to walk barefoot across floors we feel belong to us.
A home is not a luxury. Not a reward.
A home is the foundation of Black pleasure.
Because once you are housed, truly housed, your body can finally come out of survival mode. You can feel your shoulders drop. Your breath gets a little deeper. You might stretch more. You might dance in the kitchen. You might run the shower hotter and longer because you’re not worried about who else is counting on you to move faster. You might explore pleasure with another person, not as distraction from stress — but as joy, as connection, as choice.
Housing gives us permission to feel good.
To be soft.
To be human.
For over a decade, I held a stable federal job. A “good job.” The kind our parents tell us will keep us safe. I made too much money that disqualified me for affordable housing — and not enough to actually afford housing in Boston. Stuck in the middle, with nowhere soft to land.
And I couldn’t understand why my health kept declining. Why my spirit felt like it was shrinking. Why my body was always tired in a way sleep couldn’t fix.
There was a time in my life when a bath was my sanctuary. Hydrotherapy is what I know it be now, has been my medicine since I was a little girl — the one place my nervous system knew how to let go. But for years, I didn’t have access to a bathtub of my own. For years, my body missed a ritual it depended on. For years, pleasure disappeared.
I wasn’t resting — I was surviving.
Friends, even some family, would offer me a place to stay, a bathtub to rest in. And I appreciated it. Truly. But sleeping in someone else’s space is not the same as having a home. Their noise was not my silence. Their smells were not my comfort. I couldn’t step out of the shower naked or let eucalyptus steam fill the air. I couldn’t burn the incense that makes my shoulders drop. I couldn’t blast the music that brings me back into my body. Even the food they cooked — if it wasn’t part of how I nourished myself — overwhelmed my senses.
I was grateful… but I was unwell.
Housing instability is not just about having a roof over your head. It’s about not having access to the everyday rituals that keep your nervous system regulated and your joy alive. It’s about needing permission to exist in your own body.
It is painful to feel like pleasure is a luxury you have to earn.
Sixteen.
When most people my age were only trying to finish homework and figure out who they were becoming, I was already learning how to secure a roof over my head and navigate a world that didn’t care where a young Black girl slept at night. My body remembers the panic of not knowing where I belonged. My nervous system learned early that safety was temporary. So when I speak about housing and pleasure, I’m not theorizing — I’m testifying. I’ve lived this. I am still living this. And that’s why I’m telling this story now.
There was a point where all I had to myself was a single room — a bed, four walls, and the constant reminder that the bathroom and kitchen were not mine. A woman’s single-room occupancy sounds like a safe haven on paper. But survival is not the same as safety. And it’s definitely not the same as pleasure.
There were days I held my bowel movements because the shared bathroom felt like a violation. I would open the door and immediately close it again — the smell, the grime, the way neglect hangs heavy in the air. No one prepares you for how humiliating it is to have to choose between your dignity and your bodily functions.
And the shower… Lord. There is nothing healing about roaches joining you when you are naked and vulnerable. Water is supposed to wash away the day. It’s supposed to soften the jaw you’ve been clenching and release the tension riding your shoulders. But I would rush — heart pounding — just to get clean enough to face another day. The idea of luxuriating in hot water, letting my hair get fully wet, or deep-scrubbing my skin turned into fantasy. I couldn’t even breathe deep in that space without feeling like something might crawl on me.
When you don’t have a home where your body can relax, your nervous system stays locked in defense mode. And a body that cannot relax cannot heal. It cannot feel pleasure. It cannot fully live.
Housing is not just an address.
It’s a regulated breath.
It’s a softened spine.
It’s the ability to be naked without fear.
So when we talk about housing policy — especially in a city like Boston — we must talk about pleasure. Not as a luxury, but as a human right. Because unstable housing breaks the body down:
• cortisol levels rise
• immune systems crash
• digestion suffers
• intimacy becomes stressful or impossible
• joy feels far away
How can we tell Black people to focus on their health, relationships, and emotional well-being while forcing us to live in environments that make us sick?
A home should be the place where our rituals live.
Where we return to ourselves again and again.
Where we love, cleanse, stretch, slow down, and feel good.
Where healing is possible.
Where pleasure is allowed.
If the state truly believes in the health and future of Black communities, then policy must guarantee more than shelter — it must guarantee spaces where our bodies can thrive.
Because pleasure isn’t the reward for housing stability.
Pleasure is the proof that housing stability exists.
We deserve homes where we can soak our bones in hot water without fear.
Homes where we can light incense and let our bodies unwind.
Homes where we can dance in the kitchen, stretch on the floor, and cook the meals that feed our souls.
Homes where pleasure isn’t something we hide or postpone
— but something we practice daily.
My advocacy is simple:
Provide housing where pleasure can exist.
And you will witness our health improve,
our relationships strengthen,
our communities thrive,
and our spirits return to us.
Because pleasure is a human right — and housing is how we protect it.
We deserve pleasure.
We deserve peace.
We deserve home.
MESSAGE TO US
Because while policy must change, we also have power in our own hands.
We as Black people have always innovated our way toward survival — but now we deserve to innovate toward pleasure, toward thriving, toward being held. Part of that means positioning ourselves for stable housing earlier in life: not just wishing for it, but planning for it. Speaking the truth of our situation. Manifesting with intention and following it with action.
Financial literacy is a pleasure practice.
Saving is a pleasure practice.
Learning how to navigate housing assistance, first-time homebuyer programs, and community land trusts — that, too, is pleasure work.
And we cannot do it alone.
Housing is communal by design. It is built for families, partnerships, shared resources, shared responsibility. Some of us have tried to survive independently for so long that we forgot that unity is a housing strategy. We heal more when we have people we trust around us. We grow wealth faster when we rotate and share what we have. We stay safer when we build a home together instead of separate.
We don’t have to wait for systems to save us to start building the soft, restful, joy-filled lives we deserve. We can stack our resources. We can buy back our blocks. We can secure pleasure-filled housing not just for ourselves — but for our children, our lovers, our elders, and those who follow after us.
Because pleasure doesn’t only arrive when a place is given to us. Pleasure also grows when a place is created by us.
With Pleasure,
Ziakeya Sherelle
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