#POTP 26: FLIGHT—The Unfolding of You
Embrace Your Authentic Power Beyond Systemic Fear
#PrideOnThePage Day 26 (June 26): FLIGHT
✨Take flight—do not escape, arrive fully here in your life. Name where you land.✨ What space have you claimed that no one else could name for you? Flight can be a departure and it can sometimes be a homecoming in motion. This is the moment of return—to yourself, to freedom, to air you chose.
Describe the view.
The Unfolding of You
There’s a particular kind of fear arriving just before something important is about to lift. I know it well. This fear means being grounded again, not gently, nor by gravity, but by the same people and systems teaching me to mistrust the very idea of wings. Before I’ve even managed takeoff, I’m bracing for the next attempt to clip what’s barely begun to grow.
I’ve lived most of my life in that tension. The constant effort of trying to stretch into something freer, all while preparing to be told I’m already too much. Even now, I wouldn’t say I’ve truly taken flight. I’m still in the awkward, underpowered flapping stage. Still holding the weight of years where I gave up entire parts of myself for a fragile promise of safety. Still worried any visible movement toward autonomy will be met with consequence.
This isn’t abstract. My body keeps the full record. I know I won’t find healing here in Germany—not any further than I already have. My fascia holds this truth more clearly than any journal ever could. The tightness in my jaw, the weight in my pelvis, the exhaustion in my feet—I don’t need another person to interpret the signs. I’ve learned to read them myself. The bracing stops when the conditions change.
And here, the conditions haven’t.
What I hear—spoken aloud or implied—is always some variation of this:
“If only you were a little less bitter. A little more willing. Less judgmental. Less demanding. Less rigid.”
The message is packaged in concern, sometimes even in love, yet the subtext remains:
You are the problem. You could belong—if you’d just stop being so you.
This is how systems maintain themselves. They invite participation while setting terms punishing full expression. They pretend to make space, then require you to prove you’re worthy of taking any. If you refuse to perform the version of yourself making others comfortable, you’re cast as ungrateful, difficult, or broken.
For most of my life, I believed them. I stayed in roles asking for obedience, in environments demanding self-erasure, in structures dressing control up as care. I sacrificed creativity, freedom, and voice to feel marginally less alone.
Then something shifted. Not all at once, nor because I had some grand realization. It began in the body. After a skydive of all things.
I landed differently that day—physically and fully. Something in me unlocked. I laughed in a way I hadn’t in years. I had energy. Ideas. A sense of internal spaciousness I hadn’t experienced since childhood. My system wasn’t on guard. My mind wasn’t scanning for exit routes. And for a few rare hours, I trusted my own experience without second-guessing its validity.
That moment didn’t last forever. Yet it showed me what was possible.
Not long after, Rebecca named something not yet made into my own language. “I can feel your wings growing,” she said. Not as metaphor, nor as comfort. As fact. And she was right. I could feel them too.
Then came the backlash. The small retraumatizations adding up. I began to hide them again. Pull them in. Protect what I hadn’t even fully tested. Because the truth is, when you grow wings in a culture punishing flight, the danger isn’t falling. The danger is they’ll break you mid-air and tell you it was your fault for trying.
So I stayed grounded. And something stayed with me: the knowing.
I know I’m not imagining the tightness I carry every day. I know the tension didn’t originate in me. I know I’ve given up more than most people realize just to survive the day-to-day friction of being misfit in my own culture. And I know I’m not alone in this.
This is the cost of growing wings in a system punishing flight:
You learn to hold your breath as you stretch.
You learn to self-censor before anyone else has to.
You learn to listen inward, because every external message is gaslit by comfort narratives denying the truth of your experience.
And you learn—eventually—healing isn’t always found in trying harder.
Sometimes it’s found in leaving. In refusing to brace anymore. In reclaiming the parts of yourself never too much, only too alive for a structure built on control.
That’s where I am now.
Not flying gracefully.
Just reclaiming my right to try.
Reclamation is the act of retrieving, recovering, or taking back something that was lost, taken, or denied—whether it’s land, identity, voice, power, or a sense of self. In a personal context, reclamation is a conscious process of restoring what is rightfully yours, often after periods of neglect, oppression, or disconnection. It involves recognizing your inherent worth and agency, and actively choosing to reclaim parts of yourself, your story, or your life that have been diminished or suppressed.
While the term "reclamation" is not explicitly used in classical Buddhist texts, the spirit of reclamation resonates with teachings on returning to one's true nature (tathāgatagarbha), recovering mindfulness (sati), and restoring the mind to its natural state of clarity and compassion after periods of delusion or suffering. The Buddha often spoke of "recollecting" (anussati) wholesome qualities or the refuges, which can be seen as a form of inner reclamation.
Because the systems around us will always suggest if we just bent a little more, softened a little further, gave up one more edge of our truth, we’d finally belong.
Inspiration for nurturing reclamation
Reflect on areas of your life or aspects of yourself that feel lost, silenced, or neglected, and set an intention to welcome them back. Journal about what you wish to reclaim—be it your voice, boundaries, creativity, or cultural heritage.
Meditate on the Buddhist practice of "recollection" (anussati), such as recollecting your own goodness, the Three Jewels, or moments of clarity and strength.
Set gentle boundaries with people or situations that undermine your reclamation process.
What they fear isn’t our failure to conform—it’s our refusal to keep collapsing.
The Way Wings Remember
Refusal
is quiet clarity.
I remain whole
in places that ask for less.
I bring my shape
into every space I enter.
I stay close to what is true.
Insistence
is breath that keeps arriving.
I trust the rhythm inside.
I let each inhale
anchor me deeper
into what I already know.
I continue.
Reclamation
is gentle return.
I welcome back
what had waited.
I gather the pieces
never lost, only resting.
I hold them now,
and I call them mine.
Emergence
is flight that begins
with presence.
I lift
not to leave
yet to arrive.
Each movement expands
the space I live in.
Each unfolding
is a yes.
Wings don’t rush.
They remember.
So do I.
So I’ll ask the question keeping me honest:
What part of you are you ready to reclaim, even if the world still insists it was never yours to begin with?
Hint: Look at the places where you feel a sense of longing, loss, or quiet yearning—these may be invitations to begin the process of reclamation.
Let me know in the comments.
Thank you for walking this path with me.
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Jay, I have to admit I was surprised to read your view of yourself in this post because it is so different from how I experience you through your work. You write: “That’s where I am now. Not flying gracefully. Just reclaiming my right to try.” From my perspective, you are flying gracefully—soaring, even—through challenges, and still making space in your orbit for all of us who are trying to keep up! If I extend the metaphor a bit more, I picture it as you circling back from time to time, to make sure we’re all still with you, before fearlessly charting the path forward.
You are a beacon for the queer community. You not only belong but are a central, benevolent presence. The societal systems that tell you to be different are not hospitable to humanity. I hope that you keep resisting societal pressure to collapse or to be any different than you are. Thank you for sharing your vulnerability. <3
This post is tremendous. Your trauma embedded in your fascia, the moment of freedom. I wish for you an unfolding and forgetting. True flight. I am reclaiming love, myself. After 18 years in the distorted funhouse mirror of someone's mental illness (and my own dysfunction staying there), I am letting myself fall into, be grounded by, union with an amazing human.