Wild Lion*esses Pride by Jay

When Healing Means Losing Everything—and Finally Enables Freedom A year inside a biological marathon where retraumatization moved in, and this community became my anchor. Episode Description A year ago, I sat in the same grey, snowy town of Einbeck, Germany, carrying an ache in my chest and a debt that was never mine. Today, I am 58. And the reckoning has arrived. This episode is a first-person ac...

1 PM or Decoding a 120-Year Extraction Einbeck, December 2025. I’ve been sitting with it all day. Or rather, it has been sitting on me. It started with a modern spark—a request for a resume to work as a cook. It seemed like a “nothing” task, but as I began to trace my path to the kitchen, I realized I wasn’t just writing a resume. I was performing an excavation. I was digging through layers of “pr...

🎙️ A Stream of Consciousness on Nature, Power, and Belonging” 💭 In this meditative, free-flowing reflection, Jay follows an intuitive pull toward Central and South America — a region where rivers are granted rights and nature itself is written into the constitution. From the philosophies of Theravāda Buddhism to the Indigenous wisdoms of the Andes, Jay explores what it means to live with the livi...

Liz Gilbert walks all the way to the river with her story whole When what was called too much becomes the victory of wholeness What culture once called “too much” is becoming the measure of victory. In this episode, Jay traces how Liz Gilbert carries her story whole, how rawness itself expands into triumph, and why living untrimmed is the real success we can all claim. Episode Summary What does it...

How to Stop Fighting and Start Understanding My Personal Guide to Using Needs to Build Bridges Instead of Walls. Today I am experimenting. This iisn’t some neat essay. Think of it as me talking from the middle of a rut. And here’s the thing about ruts: they don’t have clean edges. They’re muddy, uneven, and you can’t always tell if you’re climbing out or sinking deeper. I'm in the middle of losing...

Your Feelings Are Not the Enemy They might feel all over the place, yet they are not your enemy. Feelings are information. In this episode, Jay explores the first step toward building an unshakable foundation: practicing emotional self-awareness. Drawing from personal experience and influences such as Nonviolent Communication, Buddhist psychology, Ubuntu philosophy, and the psychological clarity o...

Find Your Unshakable Foundation This episode begins with your personal journey from a life of "survival autopilot" to the discovery of self-loyalty . It details how this internal shift connected you to a sense of dignity that became a new, unshakeable foundation for your life. The episode then expands on this personal experience by introducing the core metaphors of the wildfire , the trench , and...

This is a poem that has long been working within me. Yet I lacked its final arch, the bridge. I found it in Maya C. Popa latest share of August 11th. I cannot afford her membership, and still can use her prompt. Therefore I am grateful as Maya gave me the last needed strand to weave my poem into a final shape. Her prompt is: ”The August theme is end of summer. It’s a feeling as much as anything. F...

From Surviving to Rewilding the Truth of Who We Are A reflection for PrideOnThePage Day 14 Fierce on shedding the mask and reclaiming the untamed self Episode Description The shield wasn’t just an idea. It was structural. It lived in my fascia, my jaw, my voice that had gone missing. It lived in the silence I wore like armor and in the bracing that kept me safe—and kept me locked in. In this episo...

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This is my response to Day 1 of the PrideOnThePage challenge Day 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...

🎙️ We Rise to Remain – A Spoken Anthem for the Margins Have you ever known a space not built for you? A structure, a language, a collective narrative that simply couldn’t contain the intricate landscape of your being? In this episode, released for German Diversity Day 2025 , I invite you into the story behind We Rise to Remain —a poetic anthem shaped by resistance, art, rhythm, and survival. Spoke...

FROM THE GRENZLANDMUSEUM TO THE STREETS OF AMERICA I walked through the remnants of the border today. The watchtowers. The fences turned inward. The silence forced on a people monitored by their neighbors. The flags of ideology that looked different but functioned the same. Germany lived through both extremes. The right devoured lives in fire. The left locked freedom behind concrete and glass. Ind...

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wildlionessespride.substack.com/subscribe

We Remember How to Begin Again Writing Poetry Toward Healing Connection and a Way of Being That Remembers We Belong We Were Never Meant to Fit Their Frame Part 2: A Movement Toward Hope, Belonging, Connection, Peace, and Love (guided by the voices within, and between, us) ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜 🩵🤍🩷 🤎🖤 💛🤍💜🖤 HOPE “The Voice That Never Fully Left” An emergence from beneath the conditioning There is wa...

I Write What the World Forgot to Feel Writing Poetry Toward Belonging, Healing the Nervous System, and Remembering What Matters We Were Never Meant to Fit Their Frame Part 1: The Anatomy of False Promises– Justice, Equality, Equity, and the Illusion of Inclusion 1. Poem JUSTICE [EXHIBIT A: a door that only opens inward. EXHIBIT B: my body, framed as weapon and evidence, but never as witness. EXHIB...

The Mesa Never Promised Mercy How Culture Shapes Our Inner Landscape: A Poetic Reflection on Identity, Healing, and Self-Expression NaPoWriMo Day 27 The Prompt: And now for today’s optional prompt. W.H. Auden’s “ Musée des Beaux Arts ” takes its inspiration from a very particular painting: Breughel’s “ Landscape with the Fall of Icarus .” Today we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem tha...

Ode to the Silent Thunder Cycle You are the soul this poem and this music are reaching for across time and silence. This work, Ode to the Silent Thunder , was born from a place where memory and music entwine — a place where history trembles beneath our feet and demands to be witnessed again. Poetry and music have long carried what could not be spoken aloud: the broken prayers, the songs of resista...

Where Music Becomes Connection In this episode, I explore how music becomes more than sound — how it becomes connection , memory, and transformation. Inspired by two NaPoWriMo prompts (Day 24 and Day 25), I share a deeply personal reflection and two original poems shaped by a powerful concert experience with accordionist Martynas Levickis. The first piece, Sound Woven Through Steel , recounts how...

You Deserve Clarity When Faith Is Used for Control An essay that gives you the language to see how Christian nationalism turns belief into political control ✨ Episode Description: In this deeply personal and historically grounded episode, Jay—writing from Germany as a queer, neurodivergent, non-binary lesbian—offers a clear lens on how Christian nationalism distorts faith into a tool for exclusio...

The way sound can slip beneath the surface—into memory, into muscle, into places where words haven’t yet been able to tread—it’s profound. And it’s real. It happened in response to the following Video within the ARTSTACK Poetry challenge: 🖋️ Write a poem inspired by Teezo Touchdown - UUHH (Instrumental) .🎧 Include a 30-second audio clip (of the instrumental, your voice, or other relevant sounds)...

Prologue | As Nature Knows Not all endings are tragedies. Some are contractions—waves of breaking and becoming, as raw as they are necessary. If we look to nature, we see it clearly: Birth is not quiet. It is not clean. It tears. It floods. It demands everything before offering anything. Even spring, so full of bloom, begins in the shattering of ice. In the thaw. In the splitting open of seed and...

A Collection of Poems from April 7–9, 2025 Episode Summary: This episode gathers five poems written and compiled between April 7th and 9th, 2025, as part of my National Poetry Writing Month practice. One is a prompt-based original. Four are found poems—shaped from the shared sentences and voices of fellow writers on Notes. Together, they explore queerness, resistance, wildness, emotional truth, an...

Thank you Lise Tilly , Ronald Mcknight , Kendall Lamb , Andrew Lynch , Dawn Roe , and many others for tuning into my live video with Christine Castigliano ! Join me for my next live video in the app. Welcome to the Canyon: A Journey into Creative Healing We gathered in a live sacred space—an energetic field designed to hold the unfolding process of creative healing. Not a finished product, not a f...

🎙️ Hope in the Canyon: A Personal Letter to you in the Face of Fear and Loss In this solo episode, I open the canyon of my life—layer by layer—and speak directly to you. I share my journey through identity, trauma, and the slow, ongoing work of reclaiming my true self after decades under toxic shame. This isn’t a highlight reel. It’s a deeply personal invitation to sit with grief, complexity, and...