Radical Unacceptance
A New Framework for Activating Daily Devotional Agency
“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”
― Angela Y. Davis
The full moon in Scorpio rolled around and so did the mirror reflecting my power back to me.
Looking into this mirror I was reminded that a life where I compromise my power, values, integrity or writing practice is unacceptable.
Full stop.
This past weekend I helped my mentor with an event her business and staff hosted to celebrate the local community they serve. They brought together parents, kids and families for a day of food, of moon bouncing, of kite flying, of slime making, of face painting, of…playing.
Our mentoring relationship started early, from serving as my entrepreneurship teacher in high school to starting her own business and scaling it to 7-figures and a 50+ person staff. Over the last 15 years, I have been inspired by and learned so much from her.
Witnessing her devotion to the work she’s been called to do, the team she empowers and the communities she serves fills me with an unshakable belief in my own power and possibility. Witnessing her work also reminds me of all the ways faith is an integral part of the formula. After all, isn’t that why we show up? To be mirrors of eachother’s possibility, eachother’s power, eachother’s desire. I’m overflowing with gratitude just thinking about the ways our mentoring relationship has shaped me across the years.
But this past Saturday?
The mentors were the children.
We painted bright pink birdhouses, adorned with flowers and stars, that could be suspended in the sky as a respite for migrating birds, of course.
We colored our kites with markers 20 shades of abundance and wrote prayers for love, for peace and for our friends. We released control, held tight to the string, and let those prayers get carried by the wind, of course.
We created stories of little black girls who were eaten by a dinosaur, but it turns out the belly of the dinosaur was a time machine that allowed them to traverse new worlds. We painted our faces to match the dinosaurs and the characters in the story, of course.
Inside this abundance of imagination, play, permission and possibility I remembered why I do the work I do.
Creating an abolitionist story about a parallel universe where data farms are data forests and chain link fencing from demolished prisons is used as architectural membrane woven with plant life, of course.
Combining “sankofa” and “cypress” to name that world Cykofa, with the understanding that reverence for ancestral wisdom and interspecies collaboration is the only way to build abolitionists worlds, of course.
Stewarding Seeda School named after one of the characters from Cykofa so I could practice inside an abolitionist world, not in the future but right now, where I’m standing, with the breath in my lungs, of course.
This weekend, I allowed myself to be a student of children who taught me sacrificing play, curiosity and creative expression inside the worldbuilding practice of survival is an unacceptable compromise. They reminded me it is nonsensical, illogical and, quite frankly, impractical given the scope of violence we’re up against. If imagination is the first thing to go inside our practice of survival then, honestly, we don’t even stand a chance.
Mindfulness practitioners, wellness™️ gurus and Zen Buddhism dating back to the 6th Century teach us all about the power of “Radical Acceptance.” Now, I will admit I am a shady writer. I don’t know a black feminist writer who isn’t. There will never be a shortage of ideologies for us to eye roll over…never.
It also feels important to say radical acceptance and mindfulness practice has fundamentally changed my life. My meditation app says I’ve logged over 10,000 minutes of practice, in case you care. And I end everything I publish with the affirmation “so be it, see to it, breathe through it.” This is an affirmation inspired by Yourba’s “ashe”, but it is also inspired by black feminist practitioners Octavia Butler1 and Alexis Pauline Gumbs who deeply understand we don’t manifest new worlds and navigate the storms of change without breathing through a grounded presence that is laced with clarifying acceptance and alchemical power.
Needless to say, I am a fangirl of radical acceptance as a framework for being and worldbuilding at the same damn time.
What I roll my eyes at, what frustrates and enrages me with an erotic charge that I occasionally use to fuel my practice, is all that we have been convinced to accept.
The ways dreaming is beaten out of us before our brains have fully developed. The ways grief and rest are treated as luxuries and poverty is criminalized and treated as a personal failing. The way we livestream wars, genocide and ecological disasters day after day and are expected to go to work to pay the taxes that funds the ecocide and necropolitics. The way we’ve been made to believe this choreography of violence is as natural as rain.
It is not.
It is irresponsible and abusive to ask queer, trans, neurodivergent and disabled black and indigenous folks to accept any ounce of this. The harm woven in the sentence, “that’s just the way it is” is too large to wrap words around.
Enough with “Radical Acceptance.” It has its place, we get it.
Now let’s get curious about what “Radical Unacceptance” looks like.
My values are:
Curiosity
Creativity
Community
Toni Morrison said freedom is about being able to choose your responsibilities2. One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned across 15 years of worldbuilding practice is that if I tend to my curiosity, my creativity and my community, I will always have everything I need. Abundance flows from this trifecta, money flows from this trinity, miracles reign amongst this triptych.
The same way I opened this love letter is the same way I’ll close it.
I am responsible for nurturing my curiosity, which powers my creativity, and allows me to show up for my community. This is my practice of freedom3, therefore a life where I am made to sacrifice my curiosity, creativity or community in the name of survival is unacceptable.
What are the values that provide the framework for your worldbuilding?
How would you move if compromising those values became unacceptable?
What is stopping you?
What if believing that was true was no longer an option?
Octavia Butler reminded us we can build “a long ladder of little truths”4, Zora Neale Hurston said “the dream is the truth,”5 Lucille Clifton said she “made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay”6 and I believe every single one of them. Not because it’s easier, it certainly is not. I believe them because I have decided I have no other choice.
I have decided my desire is non-negotiable, my belonging is not up for debate, outsourcing my erotic power is not an option and compromising my values is radically unacceptable.
I believe them because I operate from a framework of Radical Unacceptance.
Operating from the assumption that compromising our values is no longer an option is a life long practice. It’s a long ladder of practicing inside little truths that inform our daily decisions. We actualize our desire with uncompromising clarity on our values through a series of small steps.
This is what black feminism has taught me, how to be an unwilling collaborator in one’s own death. Revolution is like housework, it is ongoing7. It is a practice of stacking a series of uncompromising movements toward freedom. So that by the time systems of domination ask you to accept their latest self-destructive demand? You’re already gone.
This is the work we do inside The Powerhouse Portal. We create your own framework for becoming unavailable for self-sacrifice, self-abandonment and self-negation. Using that framework we create an offer that calls in the abundance your practice of freedom is ready to attract.
Book an erotic engineering consultation call to learn more about The Portal.
So be it, see to it, breathe through it,
Ayana
🌱 Seed Data Index
“My books will be read by millions of people! So be it! See to it!” — Octavia Butler Journals
“Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It’s not having no responsibilities; it’s choosing the ones you want.” ― Toni Morrison
“Freedom is not a secret. It’s a practice.” — Alexis Pauline Gumbs
“Think. Never write without thinking. First think about how it might happen. Then think about what else might happen. Something else will always happen. That’s why you should only do small things. You can keep control better, writing a long ladder of little truths.” — Octavia Butler, Mortal Words Fragment. Cited in Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing by Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin
“The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.” ― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
“what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay” — Lucille Clifton, poem excerpt from “won’t you celebrate with me”
“When I was an undergraduate, we all wanted to be young revolutionaries. A teacher, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, admonished us: ‘The revolution is like housework – you have to do it every day.’ It is unfinished, incomplete, ongoing.” — Saidiya Hartman in conversation with Sarah Jilani for “The Interview: Saidiya Hartman” published by ArtReview on October 8th, 2025