It took the whole month of May to put it all together, but I did it. The third volume of pages for Romancing the Revolution includes a whopping 51 pages!! (You can download them here in my Buy Me a Coffee Shop.)
May 2026 was a big month, and it started with a wild amount of ambition, magic, and making-things-happen. If you followed along with my posts on Substack, I got the idea to pitch an idea to Mae Martin back in mid-April. The proposed project? To do some meta philosophical performance art together, of course!
But this didn't just happen on a whim.
I probably wouldn't have had the gall to follow through on such an uncharacteristically bold pitch if I hadn't gone through an expedited gauntlet of facing my biggest hangups and vulnerabilities. Thankfully, since I've been documenting this process, you can witness the trajectory unfurl week by week:
April 8: Radical ways to approach work, and working with the right kind of people
April 22: Flirting with the Abyss (and post-420 reflections after facing my vulnerabilities)
April 29: Romancing our vulnerabilities and asking questions that help us grow how we want to go
May 6: The proposal to Mae Martin (before I even really considered getting printed pages to them)
May 13: The magical unfolding that got my pages to Mae in Denver
There are a couple things I want you to know about May's pages, which yes, INCLUDE THE PAGES I MADE FOR MAE. :P
First, the three pages I sent to Mae Martin are some of the densest, cutest, most personalized pages I've made to date. I spent maaaannnnnnyyyy hours over several days (and nights) on them. It felt good to create, and I had a rare-for-me sort of laser-focused will and discipline to do it. The magic that ensued the day of their show in Denver was also a story to remember in its own right.
I still haven't heard any word back about my project proposal, and who knows, maybe I never will.
But over those few weeks of ideating and dreaming up possible visions and creating a real honest letter with my very own hands, something for sure happened. I was moving through an incredible process of my own making, and that alone was worth the experience. The series of unreal serendipities that punctuated all that hard work felt like ten juicy cherries on top, perhaps a special treat from the Universe for seeing it through and a fantastic way to say, "I see you!"
After all that, getting the rest of the pages together was tough though.
Before hyperfocusing on getting a philosophical project proposal to Mae, a queer and trans creative beacon of our generation, I had intended to focus the May pages of Romancing the Revolution on liberation itself. Fortunately, I already had a lot to work with.
Most of the pages I included in this volume are actually a compilation of several writings I did last May during my May-nia of 2025 (another ambitious month, now that I'm thinking back on it). We had just celebrated the one-year anniversary of Liberation is Local, and I set a goal of writing to share what I had learned about liberation in those weekly community gatherings. The plan was to write every day for a month, but I got burnt out after a few days because I went too hard straight out of the gate (sound like a pattern?). Nevertheless, I did write A LOT in those few days.
In August of 2025, after a very short break, I relaunched Liberation is Local in what was actually its third phase of development. Each "season" of LIL reflected adjustments around how and what we were learning together. I was also paying attention to whether I was learning what I wanted and needed to learn in the space, too, which included creating containers that could also support my writing practice. Each time, the key shift was actually around what and I how I shared in the weekly pages themselves.
This is my second point.
Volume 3 of Romancing the Revolution from May 2026 includes several pages from the third and last phase of Liberation is Local, which spanned August-December 2025. At the time, these pages were also among the first of their kind. That was when I really started exploring what I could put on the page -- my desire was to get more creative and free with it. Rather than using the pages as a mere prompt for the weekly discussions, I also wanted to fill them with more robust content. I wanted to offer something more substantive that captured elements of my actual thought processes.
At the start of the new year, I decided to pause Liberation is Local in January 2026, which ultimately gave way to launching Romancing the Revolution this past March.
What's really interesting to me about this whole process is how much shifted in slow but super significant ways. That much is obvious even when simply tracking changes with respect to my pages themselves over the course of one year.
Look, I'll show you what I mean.
I moved from making a discussion sheet, to incorporating my free writes, to writing with my hand and my voice even more freely (there's a thread in there somewhere about being more vulnerable through writing, too).
Exhibit A - Liberation is Local Page #1; May 19, 2024:
Exhibit B - Liberation is Local Page #54; May 25, 2025:
Exhibit C - First Page to Mae; Sent May 1, 2026:
Thirdly, and finally, I have to make this note.
FOR YEARS (literally, years!), I kept saying over and over again that I wanted to "make my pages." I had a sense for what I wanted them to look and feel like, but I didn't actually know because they hadn't ever fully materialized the way I envisioned quite yet. It's a matter of tools and technology, yes, but it's also a matter of my skills and technique.
To be honest, I still think there's plenty of room for my pages to continue growing, which runs in tandem with my own approaches to writing and sharing and creating and doing. I'm just trying and testing and experimenting and really hoping to lean into the belief that nothing needs to be perfect. It really is a creative process. I have a vision, and a desire, and I'm open to surprise.
But for now, and for the sake of acknowledging just how far effort and commitment and simply showing up to do the thing will take you, even when it isn't quite clear or well-formed or something other people may comprehend or fully understand, I want to also note another one of my refrains.
FOR YEARS (literally, years!), I also said I wanted to make my pages available for download as pdfs. It seems so silly, but it has taken a lot of will to get here. Once I created my new website last fall, I linked to some free downloads ("Reflections for Moving Through" is still one of my favorite collections), but those were only the tiniest drop in the bucket of what I had been creating and wanted to share.
But now, in just the past three months, I've created and/or compiled around 130 pages. What?!? March. April. May.
My mind is blown.
And yet, even this is still just barely offering me a sense of relief and release. I have so much more that I want to create and share. I know I'm doing it, slowly but surely, and I am practicing patience for the process. Lately, I've been describing this particular moment -- these few weeks -- as being in the "sludgy middle," but if my past and mentors' observations and life experience thus far teaches me anything, it's that I'm also already there.
I'm excited for June, and I do expect more pivots. That's par for the course! Stay tuned. :)
OH! And if you want to join the Sunday Zoom calls for Romancing the Revolution in June, PLEASE DO! Since my rhythm is all funky, we'll be talking about these pages from May so you'll get Volume 3 as a pdf in your confirmation email after registering. It's only $10 for members for the whole month.