✍️ #PrideOnThePage Week 2: RESISTANCE (Power, Protest, and Survival) (June 8-14)
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🛡️ Week 2: Resistance (Power, Protest, and Survival)
We step into firelight now—into the places where we drew the line, raised our voices, or simply endured.
This week is about clarity. About edges and echoes. It’s about saying: I exist, still.
What have you had to hold, protect, or reclaim?
What lives in you because you didn’t give up?
Runs June 8–14 on Substack Notes
Friends, welcome to Week 2 of #PrideOnThePage. This week is called Resistance—and it invites you to explore the ways you’ve survived, asserted, reshaped, and reclaimed.
We’ll write from the boundary and the burn, the silence and the scream, the things that tried to erase us and what we’ve kept anyway.
Each day from June 8–14, I’ll post:
one word
a poetic spark
and an invitation to reflect—in your own form and rhythm.
Your response can be a poem, a list, a note-to-self, a blackout text, a quiet question. You don’t need to make it beautiful. You don’t need to make it public. You just need to be honest.
Whether you’re writing to remember, to resist, to witness, or just to process—this space is for that. This week is a place to say no, to say yes, to say this is mine now.
I’ll post the next prompt on June 8. I’d love for you to join me.
With fire and care,
Jay 🛡️🖋️
🛡️ Week 2: Resistance
Power, Protest, and Survival
Power, protest, survival. This week centers the language of boundaries, defiance, and what remains after fire. These prompts hold space for grief, grit, and fierce clarity.
Here, we write from the burn and the boundary. From what we’ve survived, reclaimed, and said no to. This week honors your fire—your fierce clarity, your right to define yourself, your refusal to be erased.
#PrideOnThePage Day 8 (June 8): BOUNDARIES
✨Draw your boundaries like constellations—visible only to those who know where to look.✨
What have you had to protect to stay whole—and who still doesn’t understand the map you’ve drawn?
Boundaries are not just limits—they are stories of self.
This prompt invites you to chart the lines between what you offer and what you owe, what you carry and what you’ve laid down.
#PrideOnThePage Day 9 (June 9): STORM
✨Become the eye of the storm. Speak from its center.✨
What have you survived that others only remember as weather?
What quiet did you carry through the wreckage? This is about the clarity within you, not the chaos around you. Write from the stillness you built while everything else broke.
#PrideOnThePage Day 10 (June 10): SILENCE
✨Let silence be a character. What has it seen, and what does it refuse to hold?✨
Where has silence kept you safe—and where has it betrayed you?
This prompt asks you to give silence a voice, a memory, a threshold. Let it speak for itself—or let your voice finally rise in its place.
#PrideOnThePage Day 11 (June 11): RECLAIM
✨Take back the word they tried to bury you with. Set it on fire.✨
What have you been called that you now wear with pride—or refuse to carry at all?
Reclamation is an act of rewriting meaning. This prompt invites you to speak from your scar, not your shame. Burn what was used to silence you. Raise it into something living.
#PrideOnThePage Day 12 (June 12): MARCH
✨Write the sound of marching feet from beneath the pavement.✨
Whose protest echoes through your own voice?
Whose courage built the road beneath your pen? Today’s prompt asks you to write from solidarity and movement—from history’s pulse and your own. Whether you march with your feet or with your words, let the cadence carry.
#PrideOnThePage Day 13 (June 13): ASHES
✨Ashes don’t lie. Tell the story they couldn’t burn.✨
What truth remains, even after the worst?
What ember refuses to go out? Some stories survive by changing shape. This is your chance to write from what remains: charred, glowing, true.
#PrideOnThePage Day 14 (June 14): FIERCE
✨Speak as the blade, or the shield. Or both.✨
When did you choose to protect rather than perform?
What does it cost to stay sharp and soft? Fierceness doesn’t always roar. Sometimes it simply stays. This prompt invites you to name what you’ve defended—and what that has made of you.
This challenge will continue with a new theme in week 3.
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 🏳️🌈✍️
💚 If This Moved You
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a space for poetry, photography, digital art, and queer reflection.
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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 🐾💚
Prompt… Protest
Today so many with good intentions will protest, peacefully please I pray.
Today I attended an author symposium at a KC Library.
The subject was writing queer characters, and reading, supporting all aspects of our community. I learned a lot.
Often our allies ask in this month of pride for recommendations of queer writing.
This brings me back to the prompt. PROTEST.
I protest the fact that cis heterosexual allies make an effort in June. Are we not real the rest of the year? Do we not bleed, work and live our lives 24/7 365?
As with Asian/ Indian/Black people shouldn’t we all be supportive all year?
We are grateful for the exposure of our community this month, don’t get me wrong.
Our community is here, queer and not going anywhere.
I PROTEST that as writers many feel they should include different races, gender and sexual orientations when, shouldn’t we be concentrating on writing the best story we can.
Crossover stories so good they defy labels. I don’t want my stories pigeon holed to only LGBTQ section of a book shelf. But it is important to include all humans. I get that.
We need to bypass the stereotypes and labels and PROTEST when hetro typical people say my Gay neighbor, my Lesbian cousin, My Trans friend…. If gender is not the issue of a conversation DROP IT.
We all are humans, we all Iive on the same blue marble called Earth.
We all need to support each others rights to be who we are. It should be so normal that we can speak about others and the last thing we think of is their sexuality.
Just my thoughts on PROTEST today…
Write on dear ones, Diana
Hope Flies
I kicked the ashes aside.
Gathering my superpower,
Rooting in hope.
I reignited my flame,
Polished my twinkle,
Sashayed through a blur of blues and reds and golds!
I stumbled, oh yes! I grazed my knees, my pride, my dignity.
But do you know the strength of
hope,
joy,
and love?
Ashes disintegrate.
But hope remains magnificent.
Hope flies.
(Written in the taxi in a traffic jam!)