On urgency, gold, and the refusal to bow.

What are you waiting for in a world that keeps telling you to wait?

Paulo Coelho once wrote that one day you will wake up and realize there is no more time. He was not speaking of clocks or calendars. He was speaking of the theft that happens when systems tell us to wait. Wait until the economy stabilizes. Wait until the right leader arrives. Wait until it feels safe to live out loud, resist openly, create without apology. Waiting becomes its own kind of obedience, and obedience is the soil where fear takes root.

But time does not wait.

So I am declaring this October Audacity October. If men can appear on national television and declare with full confidence and their whole damn chest that women are nothing more than vessels for growing other people, then I can declare that this month belongs to us and those who support women's rights, human rights, diversity, and dignity for all peoples. Our existence, our defiance, and our survival will be lived with audacity. Audacity is how we stay human when the world insists on our silence.

Do It Now Day: October 14

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On George Floyd’s birthday, I am proposing to offer this date as Do It Now Day. A day of resistance, memory, and action. Urgency is the antidote to oppression. Delay is the most reliable trick of authoritarian power. Silence is complicity.

NOTE: This is not a command to hustle harder. It is not permission to burn out. It is an invitation. Call your mother. Write the story. Start that French lesson. Leave the job that is draining your life (if possible). Vote, even when the line is long and the outcome uncertain. Create in a time when creation itself feels like rebellion.

The shirt is gold on purpose. Gold is stubborn joy, survival, and illumination. It is what endures through fire. For centuries, gold crowned kings and fueled empires. On Do It Now Day we reclaim it as radiance, as the glow of communities that refuse to disappear.

Nullius Rex (aka No Kings Day): October 18

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Four days later comes No Kings Day. A march, a protest, a declaration. Nullius Rex in latin means No One’s King.

For too long we have been told that crowns are sacred and that power is divine. We are told some are born to rule and others are born to obey. Here is the truth. Crowns are hollow without our fear to hold them up. When we refuse to bow, the spell breaks.

Nullius Rex is a line in the sand. No kings in our courts. No kings in our pulpits. No kings in our classrooms. No kings deciding who is allowed to be safe or free. No kings writing policy for a nation that belongs to its people.

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What I Believe

I believe in common dignity. In food on every table. In women’s health and research as a priority, not an afterthought. In education that equips rather than indoctrinates. In libraries that remain free. In communities that survive and thrive not by sameness but by difference.

I believe gold is not a crown but a light. Not the hoarded wealth of the few, but the brilliance of survival shared widely.

I believe audacity is necessary. Speak. Act. Refuse silence.

Too often I see how outrage gathers for white men who lose a microphone while the silence is deafening when Black women lose entire platforms. American media tells on itself in who it rushes to protect and who it quietly discards. I know this story because I live it. In my career, in my writing, and even in my medical care, I have been dismissed, disbelieved, and treated as disposable. My pain is often weighed against others’ and deemed less urgent, less real, less worthy of care. That is the cost of being first on the chopping block and last in line for recovery. And it is why I write, why I create, why I keep speaking. Because I refuse to be erased.

Square Up

Do It Now is the invitation. Square Up is the stance. To square up is to meet the world as it is, not bent, not bowed, not erased. It is how I walk into a doctor’s office that doubts my pain. It is how I sit at a desk in industries that profit from my words but question my worth. It is how I keep writing when headlines remind me that Black women are the first to be silenced and the last to be believed.

But Square Up is not mine alone. Times get hard for all of us. We all face days when the weight is too much, when silence feels easier, when survival itself asks more than we think we can give. To square up is to face those moments without surrender. Shoulders back. Chin steady. Eyes forward. It is the posture of survival, the audacity to exist fully when everything around you says shrink.

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The Work

This October I plan to release a new holiday collection, finishing my book, and gear that fund both my survival and our collective care. Fifteen percent of profits support women’s health research, HBCUs and skills-based education, and the fight for books and free expression. Survival cannot be charity. It must be circulation. Gold shared, not hidden.

Do It Now Day and No Kings Day are not just dates. They are declarations. Urgency instead of delay. Dignity instead of cruelty. People instead of kings.

Sometimes this is scary. Scary as hell. The weight of it all, the uncertainty, the doubt. But fear is not the end of the story. Sometimes moving while you are scared is the truest act of courage. Sometimes taking the step before you feel ready is what keeps the world alive.

Grief is not a weapon. Truth can be.

Check your registration. Vote in your local and special elections. Wear gold. Refuse crowns. Choose audacity. 

Do it now. Square up. Be audacious.

PSA
I charge for my work because the work is how I live. I also commit 15% of all profits to women’s health research, education, and food security because both things can be true.