✍️ #PrideOnThePage Week 1: ROOTED (Foundations of Self) (June 1-7)
Join my fun & free 30-day Pride Month journey to explore voice, identity, and belonging—together. 🏳️🌈
🫚 Week 1: Rooted (Foundations of Self)
Runs June 1–7 on Substack Notes
Friends, welcome to the first week of #PrideOnThePage—a gentle, imaginative invitation to come closer to yourself, and maybe a little closer to each other. This week is called Rooted, and we’ll begin with the foundations of self: names, mirrors, origins, firsts, the language that shaped us.
We begin underground—with the names, stories, silences, and first sparks that shaped us.
This week invites you to trace your queer beginnings, not as a fixed origin point, more as fertile ground.
What formed you?
What did you bloom in spite of?
Each day from June 1–7, I’ll post:
one word
a poetic spark
and a short invitation to reflect or respond in your own way—writing, art, collage, voice note, anything.
You don’t need to follow a set format or share your response (though you're warmly welcome to). You can use Notes, your own post, a private journal—whatever space feels right.
You don’t need to explain who you are. You don’t need to be certain. You just need to begin. And please, don't stress yourself. Sometimes a word, a sentence, a short note is already your answer. You can always return and add to it.
This week, we’re tracing the threads of where we started—and what grew from there.
With warmth,
Jay 🌈✍️
Please don’t miss the brilliant creators who are responding with layered, moving reflections to this first week of creations:
DIANA ADMIRE Kris Winters Jude (they/them) Lady Libertea Alison J! Leeron Heywood Tess McCarthy Rey Katz (they/them) Wendi Gordon Lily Pond Rey Somatics Robin Taylor (he/him) Sunbeamdream Lee Summers Bo Ea WilM Cassandra Zilinsky Keith Aron
🫚 Week 1: Rooted (Foundations of Self)
We begin underground—with the names, stories, silences, and first sparks that shaped us. This week invites you to trace your queer beginnings, not as a fixed origin point, more as fertile ground. What formed you? What did you bloom in spite of?
#PrideOnThePage 1 (June 1): NAME
✨Begin with a word they once called you—and let it unravel into truth.✨
What names have shaped your identity—those you were given, those you chose, and those you’ve had to shed?
Names can feel like mirrors or fences. We inherit them, resist them, rewrite them. Some we carry like armor, others like wounds. And some become a doorway into self-definition.
Today’s prompt invites you to reflect on the language you’ve been marked by—whether spoken in love or in dismissal—and to trace the truth inside it.
#PrideOnThePage Day 2 (June 2): ORIGIN
✨Plant your voice in the soil of your becoming. Let it grow wild.✨
Where did your voice begin? In geography, lineage, rupture, or myth?
Today’s prompt turns our attention to beginnings—not just where you came from, more like how you were formed. Root your words in what shaped you: the land, the silence, the stories told or withheld. What grows from your starting point?
#PrideOnThePage Day 3 (June 3): MIRROR
✨Write as the mirror that once betrayed you—then turned tender.✨
What have you seen in your reflection that changed over time—or refused to?
Mirrors don’t just show us back to ourselves; they distort, withhold, reveal. This prompt invites you to write from the perspective of the mirror, or the gaze that shaped your sense of self. What shifts when you are the one holding the frame?
#PrideOnThePage Day 4 (June 4): WHISPER
✨Let the quietest part of you speak first.✨
What voice have you kept hidden—and what might it say if given space?
Sometimes what we whisper holds more truth than what we shout. Today, turn the volume down. Let silence be the stage for something delicate, small, or sacred to emerge
#PrideOnThePage Day 5 (June 5): FIRST
✨Trace the outline of your first yes. Let the writing live there.✨
What was your first moment of (queer) recognition—of joy, desire, permission?
This prompt invites you to write about a threshold. The first kiss, first refusal, first truth spoken aloud. Begin at the moment when something inside you stepped forward.
#PrideOnThePage Day 6 (June 6): LANGUAGE
✨Break open the grammar of your native tongue. What sings in the silence?✨
What words do you reach for—or resist—when you write yourself?
Language carries power, and also pressure. Today, explore the words you inherited, the ones you invented, or the ones that fail you. Make room for stutters, for rhythm, for silence as syntax.
#PrideOnThePage Day 7 (June 7): BLOOM
✨Describe the bloom that grows from something forgotten.✨
What part of yourself has taken root in shadow—and blossomed anyway?
Today’s prompt calls you to notice growth in unexpected places. What has bloomed without permission, or in spite of resistance? Let it take up space on the page.
Continue the Challenge in the next weeks:
You don’t need to sign up. Just check my Substack Notes or #PrideOnThePage-Hub and the respective Essay for the week each day.
🫚 Week 1: Rooted (Foundations of Self) (was June 1-7)
🛡️ Week 2: Resistance (Power, Protest, and Survival) (Runs June 8 -14)
💗 Week 3: Love (Connection, Intimacy, Chosen Family)(Runs June 15-21)
🌈 Week 4: Becoming (Joy, Vision, and Liberation) (Runs June 22-28)
🏡 Final Days: Reflection and Celebration (Run June 29 and 30)
✨ What becomes of it
By the end of June, you may hold:
Thirty sparks
A thread you didn’t know you needed
A language for something previously unspoken
You might gather what you’ve written and shape it into:
A stitched poem
A reimagined About page
A queer manifesto
A letter to your future or former self
Or maybe you keep it private. Whole. Undisturbed. That’s writing too.
What matters is that you showed up.
What matters is that you wrote.
✨ Why This Matters
Writing opens a door.
Not just to the page, but to each other.
This challenge is about what happens when we meet with curiosity instead of certainty.
When we ask instead of assume.
When we explore the space between what we’ve been told and what we’ve begun to know.
You don’t need credentials. You don’t need a label. You don’t need to be sure.
You just need to begin.
So bring your voice.
Bring your questions.
Bring your presence.
Let’s put pride on the page—together.
With care,
Jay 🏳️🌈✍️
PS – Did you know Mr. Troy Ford over at
is also celebrating Pride month with many cool content? No?? Maybe you like to subscribe to Qstack to find out for yourself!
💚 If This Moved You
If you found a truth in these prompts—if this journey has made space for something that matters—consider supporting the work that holds it.
Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a living studio:
a space for poetry, photography, digital art, and queer reflection.
It’s also a space for care-based consulting, editing, and ghostwriting—rooted in lived experience and radical presence.
Your support keeps this work alive, independent, and honest.
It helps me keep creating. It helps me stay.
Ways to support:
Tap the ❤️ if you read something that moved you—it helps others discover this space.
Share this page with someone else on a path of becoming.
Leave a Comment below and leave a kind word or share your offering to us on this challenge—I read them all, and they matter more than you know.
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Send a one-time donation— or Buy us a coffee every coffee or bowl of Monty’s food is deeply felt.
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Since early 2024, I’ve been navigating the edges of mental health, medical leave, and financial precarity. As I wrote in When Healing Means Losing Everything, I’m in the midst of building something new from almost nothing. This space, and your presence in it, is part of that rebuilding.
🐾 A Note from Monty
Hi. It’s me. Monty.
I’ve been supervising from the keyboard (as you can imagine, I’m very helpful). And I just wanted to say—you did it.
You showed up.
You made room for your truth.
You dared to write something into the world that hadn’t existed before.
That’s a kind of magic.
If Jay’s work meant something to you—if you felt seen, heard, nudged, or nourished—consider leaving a little love behind. A tap, a tip, a share, a thank-you.
It keeps this space soft, creative, alive.
It keeps Jay writing.
It keeps me purring and fed. 🐟
You’re part of this now.
And we’re so glad you’re here.
With a head tilt and a soft paw,
Monty 🐾💚
#PrideOnThePage Day 1 Name
jay as canyon breathes
jay as canyon breathes
emerging from sediment layered by listening,
the name curves where stone leans toward
sky and shadow lingers in colors yet unnamed,
spoken in rhythm older than roots,
carried across mineral ribs
in tones only wind translates,
arriving through pulse rather than mouth,
drawn forward by the widening,
shaped through the gesture of becoming,
neither closed nor defined,
a name unfolding through resonance,
every echo deepens the valley of recognition,
every breath stretches the contour of self
further into space, further into sound,
a syllable flowing with horizon’s quiet confidence,
resting in spaciousness, s
eeded in movement,
held in place by nothing except presence.
You will find my full contribution to #PrideOnThePage Day 1 NAME in this full essay https://wildlionessespride.substack.com/p/prideonthepage-day-1-name?r=1sss7q&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I was sure if I did the tag properly, #PrideOnThePage1, so I posted mine as a Re-Stack of this with a Note. Thank you 🏳️🌈💜🏳️⚧️