🌈 Week 4: Becoming (Joy, Vision, and Liberation)
This is the week of lift. Of forward motion. Of naming what once felt out of reach—and realizing it’s already rising in you.
These days invite you to write your becoming. Not as a destination, but as a process of loosening, glowing, unfolding.
What are you stepping into?
What joy is asking to be claimed?
Runs June 22–28 on Substack Notes
Friends, welcome to Week 4 of #PrideOnThePage. This chapter is called Becoming, and it centers vision, transformation, queer joy—not as decoration, but as declaration.
Each day from June 22–28, I’ll offer:
one word
a poetic spark
and a prompt that encourages exploration, movement, momentum—whether through language, image, sound, or sensation.
There is no right way to do this. Becoming is not a checklist. It’s a spiral. It loops and lifts and returns again. Some days will feel clear, others like fog. Both belong.
Let this week be a love letter to your unfolding. Let it shimmer. Let it arrive in fragments. Let it change shape.
I’ll post the next prompt on June 22. Whenever you begin, you’re right on time.
With hope,
Jay 🌈💫
🌈 Week 4: Becoming
Joy, Vision, and Liberation
This week is a threshold. Not the end, it's a turning. Here we write from brightness—as truth. Let joy be serious. Let vision be unruly. Let becoming be slow, deliberate, and defiantly yours. What are you growing into? What future calls to you from the other side of survival?
#PrideOnThePage Day 22 (June 22): LIGHT
✨Create or write light without using the word light.✨
What radiance do you carry—and how does it find its way through you?
Illumination doesn't always arrive as sunlight. It could be the glint of laughter, a face in the dark, a truth that warms your skin.
This prompt invites you to describe the glow—without naming it.
Let the metaphor lead.
#PrideOnThePage Day 23 (June 23): FUTURE
✨Sketch the future in fragments. Let none of them apologize.✨
What futures feel possible now—because of who you’ve become?
The future doesn’t have to arrive whole. You can write it in pieces, in gestures, in defiance of certainty. Speak from the version of you that isn’t here yet, and is already watching.
#PrideOnThePage Day 24 (June 24): RADIANCE
✨Make radiance a verb. Let it do something.✨
What do you emit—knowingly or not—that leaves a trace of your truth?
Radiance isn’t passive. It pulses, it insists, it affects the room. Today’s prompt invites you to name what you offer to the world just by being.
#PrideOnThePage Day 25 (June 25): EUPHORIA
✨Describe joy as a rebellion with no need to shout.✨
What kind of joy demands only your presence?
This prompt asks you to write joy without defense or spectacle. Not as performance—more as a full-bodied yes. Let joy sit on your tongue. Let it stay.
#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.
#PrideOnThePage Day 27 (June 27): ECHO
✨Let the echo tell a different story than the original sound.✨
What reverberates in you longer than the voice that caused it?
Echoes distort, expand, carry. This prompt asks you to write from the place after impact—the aftermath that became meaning. Let the echo speak.
#PrideOnThePage Day 28 (June 28): FREEDOM
#PrideOnThePage Day 28 (June 28): FREEDOM
✨Spell out freedom using memories you’ve reclaimed.✨
What moment first tasted like liberation—and do you still carry it?
Freedom is felt before it’s defined. It might be small, quiet, unnoticed by others. And you remember it. Let that memory build the foundation of your freedom story.
PDF will follow….
Continue the Challenge next week:
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
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.
Become a free subscriber to stay connected to future offerings.
Send a one-time donation— or Buy us a coffee every coffee or bowl of Monty’s food is deeply felt.
Become a paid subscriber for $10/month to sustain the work. You can explore the About page for more.
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 🐾💚
Jay, I love what you were doing. We become in fragments, in shimmering hesitations, in doubt, cancellation, setting down the too much to do, to get to what matters I love your questions here as I have been in a transition that is very exciting and also quite new. You are prompting me to write about it. To let myself be vulnerable, To expose a repeated missed experience that leaves me misty.
Big hug to you and Monty. I can tell his supervision is incredibly helpful. Where would you be without him?
Thank you
I wrote my response as a poem.
https://substack.com/@kwinterslatinxpoet/note/p-166570017?r=5bvu75