Episode 1: Threat

Episode 1 of Divesting From People Pleasing. 

As NK gets older, she gets smaller, she gets more and more quiet. But the self loathing voice in her head just gets louder. 

The Heart · Divesting From People Pleasing: Threat

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Divesting From People Pleasing is a mini series written, performed, and sound designed by Nicole Kelly, edited by Chiquita Paschal, and hosted by Kaitlin Prest. Design by Phoebe Unter.  In this episode, you also heard: Melissa Harris Perry speaking on her book Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America.  Produced with the generous support of Mermaid Palace & PRX. 

transcript

Kaitlin Prest:

From Mermaid Palace and Radiotopia, welcome... to The Heart. 

[theme song begins lightly underneath] 

I'm Kaitlin Prest. A couple of years ago, Sharon had an idea for a show that was gonna be called “Self Hatred.” It was about the ways that living in a world that is set up to silence you or suppress you, that the marginalization that happens outside in the world ends up happening inside in your own mind, and that the very understandable rage that would come from being ignored or silenced or left out or placating other people's wants, needs and ideas... That rage, instead of going outward, goes inward. To the self. What does that do to your heart and mind? [sharp inhale] And how do you work through it?

This season is looking at some of those things. It reflects the way that you work through your shit, going backwards and forwards in time, remembering things suddenly and making new meaning out of experiences you thought you already understood. This season, Divesting From People Pleasing is a creation of Nicole Kelly. She wanted to make something about the topic of shame and rage. This is the first episode of three episodes. This is NK...

NK:

Three years ago, I met someone in a bar in Bushwick and she invited me to a workshop called Divesting from People Pleasing. 

[burst of a glitchy beat] 

In Divesting From People Pleasing, we sit in a circle. 

[burst of a glitchy beat] 

Most of the other women in the room are white. Like me, they're polite when it would make sense to be bitchy. We're nice. We say yes because it would be rude to say no. 

[glitchy beat] 

In the workshop, we're asked to think about and name the rules we make for ourselves. 

Facilitator:

I have to. I'm not allowed to. Or, I'm afraid to. 

NK:

These rules are the things that we have learned are acceptable behavior. 

Facilitator:

Who are you afraid to displease? What are you afraid will happen if you are displeasing or break rules? 

NK:

When we do things that break our own rules, things that fall outside of the small window of acceptance, those behaviors can often evoke a feeling of deep shame. In Divesting From People Pleasing, I talk about how self-conscious I am about being too loud, about talking too much or for too long. And then there are some movement and vocal exercises that ask us to break our own rules. 

Facilitator:

And so we get on all fours and we close our eyes. 

NK:

Close your eyes. Imagine that you're a small beast. What does your body look like? Is it covered in fur? 

[softly] Is it covered in scales? 

Do you have spikes down your back? 

[softly] A long snout? 

How big are your teeth? 

[softly] Do you have fangs? 

Now think about your ears. 

[softly] About your tail. 

Think about the size of your paws. 

[softly] The size of your teeth. 

Think about the texture of your fur. 

Now make a sound that evokes the animal that you imagine. You are that animal. You are a beast. You are monstrous. What are the sounds that you would make?

[the sounds of beasts unfurl softly around you. They're hissing and growling. The sounds escalate. Someone cries out, others scream]

My eyes are closed, but all around me, I hear wild animals.

[sounds of women screaming and whooping]

The women in the room have transformed into their least censored, most monstrous, most hideous selves. 

Except for me.

[women roaring]

I'm on the periphery of the room, down on all fours, like everyone else.

[the growls crescendo]

My knees pressed into the hardwood floor. The only woman of color. And my eyes are closed. And I can't be monstrous and ugly as instructed.

[the sounds peter out]

I couldn't make a sound.

[glitchy beat returns]

[scene tape: NK talks to herself, or is in conversation with someone]

NK to herself:

What were the words that I actually wrote down... 

NK:

In Divesting From People Pleasing, I write down a list of my personal rules. 

NK to herself:

These three prompts: I have to. I'm not allowed to, I'm afraid to. 

NK:

A stream of consciousness list.

[NK talks to herself in the background]

A representation of an inner monologue so quiet I hadn't realized it was there.

NK to herself:

I'm not allowed to be demanding. 

NK:

Humming beneath the surface, judging and directing my every move. 

NK to herself:

I'm afraid to be loud and to take up space. I'm afraid to be judged. I'm afraid to be looked at. 

NK:

On some level. I'm afraid of what will happen if I'm not agreeable. 

NK to herself:

I have to keep it to myself. I have to pretend. I have to let it go. I have to make other people comfortable. I have to stay calm. I have to keep it down. I have to hold it in. I have to accept. I'm not allowed to yell. I have to be even. I'm not allowed to go off even when it's warranted. Like at work. And then, what am I afraid will happen if I displease or break the rules?

[scene tape trails off]            

NK:

I have days where I don't have any of these thoughts at all. But the minute I stop. When I'm not watching TV, I'm not answering emails, I'm not scrolling my phone,

[NK repeats what she's saying in the background]

I'm not texting someone, the lights are off. When It's just me—

[NK speaking in a more raw, emotional tone]

Me alone with my thoughts lying in bed. And I'm lying there in the dark and I hear this voice—

 Voice in NK's Head:

[NK's voice, but sullen, angrier] You're a fucking asshole, you're a fucking bitch, you're a douche bag, you're a fucking stupid bitch. And everyone hates you. You're so fucking stupid—

NK:

Sometimes I actually make a sound.

[NK groans painfully in the background] 

I can't even deal with like, what

[sighs]

[more groaning in the background]

I can't even deal with what I'm saying, like what the voice is saying to me, what it's telling me,

[Voice in NK's head drones in the background, barely perceptible]

I'm just like... I'll cry out the middle of the night, like I'll moan in the middle of the night and I think my roommate can hear me like moaning.

[NK screaming, muffled]

I'm just trying to, like, make a sound to kind of drown out this other voice, this other noise. And it's like I want it to go away, but it's just right there. Like, those are the mild moments. When it's like not attached to me, but I'm just like, why won't you go away? Like, let me sleep. And it won't let me sleep. And I smoke a lot of weed. To I fall asleep.

[relieved sigh]

NK:

The gap between ourselves and the earliest humans is small.

[drumbeat fades in]

We are still social creatures. We thrive most when we are part of a group. If left to live alone, we suffer. Our bodies are still wired for connection and still wired to quickly scan our environments for threat. That's instinctual. It happens automatically. It only takes seconds or milliseconds. When the brain scans the environment and perceives danger. It has a stress response called fight or flight. In this highly activated state, the inner ear shifts in order to hear the lower registers of approaching predators. The heart beats faster, pumping more blood from the heart to the muscles, which tense up, making you ready to run at any moment. When poised to flee or fight —

[quick, hard breathing joins the drumbeat]

You also breathe more quickly.

[breathing and drumbeat crescendos]

The greater the threat, the greater the physical response. But if your brain concludes that the predator is too powerful to overcome,

[breathing peters out]

that you wouldn't win against the predator in a fight, or that you wouldn't be able to outrun it, your body's third strategy is to go numb.

[breathing comes back]

Your heart pounds, but your breathing slows down. Until it's hard to take a deep breath at all.

[beat untangles and you hear a couple stray notes]

However, your brain responds to danger the first time is how it responds forever.

I went looking for the origin of my shame, that voice in where else? My childhood! And found that most of my memories were tied to a particular location. A small town in Georgia where I went to kindergarten, first and second grade. It was the kind of town with one grocery store and one high school, the kind of town where everyone went to the football game on Friday nights in the fall. My dad was an officer in the military. And my mom was a microbiologist who got into real estate because she got bored working in a lab. The house we lived in had an actual white picket fence around the yard. But we also have a neighbor who loudly refuses to eat my mom's food at those parties

[archival tape of NK's mom talking to this other mom]

in the VHS tape of Christmas '92 that I found in my parents basement, she's making a really big deal about this. She needs everyone to know. 

[archival tape: bitchy white mom with a thick southern accent says, “we might have the kids eatin' it but I don't know about mom and dad eatin' in. I tasted it.” Another mom says, “Valerie, I think it's delicious”]

There's only one other Black family in the neighborhood, which is mostly other families with connections to the army. And all the army wives hang out and have block parties and swap kids.

[sound of kids playing]

I only remember one other Black kid from school: a third grader, a boy in the grade ahead of me. That year my teacher is always putting me in the corner, for talking, mostly. My mom goes over my teacher's head to get me into the gifted program. 

NK:

(on the phone, to her mom) Because it is a small thing. But it just seems like so weird, you know? 

NK’s Mom:

Yeah, because if she had said that to Daddy, his first reaction would have been: it was racism. And I'd have been like, no, Mark, it can't be that, you know?

NK:

As a kid, I have no idea that these experiences are unique, are different than what the white kids around me might be experiencing. 

NK’s Mom:

This is why I have questions, more... because I don't want to jump to that conclusion. So Daddy will go immediately to that... 

NK:

Or are different than what my parents experienced when they were kids. 

NK’s Mom:

Now I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt. But it's different than the way you grew up and what you experience. 

[we hear the beginning of Do You Know The Way To San Jose? by Dionne Warwick — a series of drumbeats and then ‘60s pop vocal style singing of descending notes]

NK:

Both of my parents were born in the 1950's. My dad is from a small town in rural Virginia. His dad was a farmer who owned his land. My mom grew up in D.C. and her dad was a pharmacist. And when my mom was 16, a high school junior, her family was one of the first Black families to move into a mostly white neighborhood. 

NK’s Mom:

He always made that comment, he said he didn't want anyone to be able to impress us, that we went skiing, we went to play tennis, we did golf. And what he was really saying is, he didn't want anybody to ever think that they were better than us because they were white. 

NK:

When my mom says that she and my dad had different childhoods, she means that she wasn't subjected to explicit racialized violence, the kind my dad experienced, the kind that you think of when you think of Jim Crow. 

NK’s Mom:

I didn't grow up in environment where that happened. 

NK:

But what is the same about them is that they both grew up knowing all of their cousins, their aunties and uncles. They both grew up with a real sense of Black community. And then they met at an HBCU in the 70s, and they both pledged the oldest black Greek organizations and they knew a whole array of Black folks. Who looked like them or like someone they knew back home. And it was new and different to both of them, but it was also familiar and they never had to question their belonging, their sense of Black identity.

[electric guitar riff from Al Green’s “Love and Happiness” plays]

NK’s Mom:

I think that's basically what he was saying. It doesn't matter what color your skin is or whatever you can do whatever you want to do, so someone thinks... 

NK:

And then, 10 years after they graduated, they had me. And then my sister. And they wanted the same things for us that their parents had wanted for them: for it to be easier. They wanted us to have the best opportunities that they could provide. 

NK:

(on the phone, to her mom) Those experiences... were you sort of thinking, even when we were younger, that we need to be prepared to —

NK’s Mom:

I don't know if I was thinking that directly, that, you know, that, you know, exposing you to those things and people that you would know how to act around them, so that that wouldn't be a foreign thing to you. 

NK:

(still on the phone) One of the memories I had that I am writing about is going to department stores, or just being in stores and people not taking your check all the time? Or what feels like all the time to me. Do you even even have any memories of that? 

NK:

(no longer on the phone) I have these memories:

[glitchy beat comes back]

my mom yelling in department stores. 

[NK imitating her mom] Call a manager! you better call a manager! 

Grocery store, cashiers at the J.C. Penney or the Piggly Wiggly. 

[NK imitating her mom] Every time I come in here, you take my checks. I don't why you're not doing it now—. 

Usually because someone is refusing to take her check in a place that has always taken it before. 

[NK impersonating her mom] Call the manager! 

Usually because of a woman, usually because of a white woman who's refusing to take her check. 

[NK impersonating her mom] you've taken my check before, so I don't know why—. 

My mom yells at people in department stores, cashiers, store clerks. Four hundred dollars worth of clothing draped across the register, conveyor belt full of groceries. A white woman refusing. 

[barely perceptible chatter of NK as her mom] 

[NK, in a more conversational tone] I don't remember exactly what was said. More what I have is an emotional memory. 

[fragmented, softly] of a woman

[NK imitating the cashier] Ma'am, I'm sorry, we just can't take checks! 

Of a woman. 

[NK as cashier] I'm sorry, I don't know what to tell you. 

[NK as her mom] You better call a manager! 

Meanwhile, I take on the role of trying to police my mom. 

[NK as child NK, embarrassed, annoyed] Mom, stop! 

Trying to get her to be quiet, just wanting it to be over and feeling really embarrassed that my mom is causing trouble, sometimes even saying to her like: 

[NK as child NK] Mom, let's just go. 

Just wanting to leave. Just wanting her to stop. Just wondering why she's always so agitated. And why is she always so? 

[NK's voice at different volumes is layered, fragments pieces together] Why is she always like this? 

Undisciplined. 

These cashiers are just trying to do their job? And my mom is getting angry instead of accepting what they're telling her. And I don't understand why my mom just won't accept this. They're telling her how the world is. And I don't get why she's like this. 

[faintly, NK as child NK] mom. stop! 

Why is she so...

Why is she so...

Easily provoked? 

Inevitably, a manager intervenes. It's over. She takes her clothes, her groceries. We leave the store. 

NK’s Mom:

Yeah, I don't ever remember that being an issue, because of racism. 

[glitch beat ends]

Melissa Harris-Perry:

Historians have talked brilliantly about this, the dissemblance of, sort of maintaining a perfect exterior in order to push back against any notion that you could be any of these negative stereotypes. 

NK:

In her book on Shame, Stereotypes and Black Women in America, Melissa Harris-Perry describes the stereotypical images of black woman in white media. Patricia Hill Collins called them "controlling images" because they're images designed to discipline. These images—

Melissa Harris-Perry:

Jezebel, the angry black woman image, for example, the mammy— 

NK:

Are meant to produce shame. They're designed to make us feel like we're one dimensional. To make us feel like oversexed, subservient and angry is all that Black women are or can be. Melissa Harris Perry adds to this original list of controlling images by pointing out that there is also a fourth, a fourth image, a fourth stereotype. A controlling image that we created. 

Melissa Harris-Perry:

That in the push back the other way, the strong Black woman emerges as this internal community narrative about the ability of Black women under all circumstances to be able to manage, to be able to do well, to be able to stand up for family, for community. For church. For spouses. And to do so almost naturally. 

NK:

The strong black woman is a political strategy. She's a shame management strategy. For an entire community. 

Melissa Harris-Perry:

That it becomes a kind of racial imperative. If you are weak. If you are sad, if you need help, then you are not only, sort of failing in terms of the general American individualism, rugged individualism, but you're actually failing the race. You are actually generating shame in your neediness, in your desire for help. 

NK:

While I'm in middle school and high school, we live in a small city in Tennessee where I'm not the only one in the school anymore. But I talk like the white girls in my neighborhood. And I wear Chucks and a Green Day T-shirt to basketball tryouts in the sixth grade. I make the team, but I'm self-conscious around the girls who look like me and they can tell. In the girls' locker room before practice or before games. I usually get dressed without talking to anyone. The other girls talk around me, making jokes. When they direct their attention at me, it's to call me whitewashed, which feels like the worst thing anyone could ever say. Because they're pointing out something that I really don't want anyone else to see. I take their teasing as a confirmation of my worst fear. I take it as a rejection. It's not the kind of attention I want, but it's the kind of attention I keep getting. And every time someone insists that I'm closer to whiteness than to myself, I leave my body. I disintegrate a little bit more. I don't go home and tell my parents. I don't tell anyone. I don't cry about it. I don't even react. But I do eventually quit the basketball team. And for a while, I avoid Black spaces altogether

[glitchy beat returns]

Melissa Harris-Perry:

It turns out the shame is not just a bad feeling. Shame actually creates physiological responses in your body. And guess what? If you have those cortisol responses regularly, if you are consistently confronted with shaming images—

[glitchy beat loudly interrupts Melissa Harris Perry] 

NK:

I get older and get really good at pushing everything down. 

I never feel like [layered fragments] I have enough. Not pretty enough for the white boys. Not confident. Not good enough. I'm always worried about not being perfect. I'm always worried about not being smart enough, about not being perfect.

[Melissa Harris Perry's voice braided in with NK]

And over years, the shame compounds [sharp sound of microphone feedback] in college at a very expensive PWI, never talking to anyone, only leaving my room for class—

Melissa Harris-Perry:

Maintaining a perfect exterior— 

[piercing microphone feedback]

NK:

do white people have these thoughts? 

I'm 20 and I start taking medicine for high blood pressure. And doctors can't find any explanation. 

[sound of doctor talking braided in] central aortic pressure...

It's just common in Black communities. It's just genetic. At the clinic on campus, they prescribe me a sedative. In grad school, I start going to parties in white drag. I get So anxious I start to pull on my curls. 

Melissa Harris-Perry:

And so the strong Black woman emerges [pang of feedback] 

NK:

It's making a little bald spot of the back of my head. I'm thirty two and a white woman turns around on a plane to tell me to be quiet. 

[woman] you're screaming, you're yelling. 

And ten minutes later, her eleven year old daughter stands up and turns around and imitates her tone and tells me to be quiet. For years. I just push it down. Internalizing it, internalizing it, internalizing it

Melissa Harris-Perry:

You're actually failing the race

[feedback]

NK:

Until I'm so anxious, until I'm so anxious, until I'm so filled with self-loathing, a constant kind of low grade shame.

[final glitch beat, then a pause]

After I turned 30, my new life is very precarious. For a while, I feel like I'm in a liminal space, like I'm a temporary person between selves. I know I want to be an artist, but I have no idea what that means or how to do it. I move to West Adams, a neighborhood in LA that used to be called the Black Beverly Hills. I want to live near people who look like me. At one point, I adopt the mandate of a local writer and performer and comedienne Amanda-Faye Jimenez, who says her New Year's resolution is no new whites. No new white friends. So simple, so effective.

I start to follow other Black artists and see a lot of Black art. Every year there's this big exhibition of emerging LA artists, and one year the biggest prize goes to an artist from South Central. And the museum is hosting a talk about her work, which is an installation, a room made of sandy white material, the same materials that were used in the construction of the pyramids. The walls of the room are carved with hieroglyphs, images of South Central: lowriders and rows of palm trees and women with cornrows. Pharaohs use the hieroglyphs as archives, and the artist has used this ancient method for a contemporary portrait of Black life.

It's kind of a big deal and it's a big deal for me because I'm finally feeling comfortable. I finally feel like I'm starting to belong in spaces like this, spaces that are for me. The Black curator is in conversation with one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, who's also an artist, and a fairly large crowd gathers around the installation to listen. After the talk, people line up to go inside, and I'm one of the first ones while a long line of mostly Black women starts to form outside.

[glitchy beat returns]

I spend a few minutes looking closely at the carvings, but as I turn to leave, I run into a white woman that I know. For some reason, I'm caught off-guard and at the same time I kind of... snap to attention. I was about to leave, but now I'm frozen. We're in the room, we're in the installation, there's a long line forming outside because only four or five people can be in there at once. And this white woman starts asking me questions. 

[NK's voice slightly filtered] questions about various things that don't pertain to the art. 
Around us, people are leaving and new people are coming in. I see a friend of mine and as she passes through, she whispers, "just so you know, there's like a line forming outside."

[fragments of different NK voices] This white woman taking up space in this installation. And there's a long line forming outside. Lots of Black people waiting to see it. I'm aware of this whole other universe around me. There are a lot of Black artists who I recognize there. It's a very important work for Black people, especially Angelenos. 

But it's like I'm... trapped inside myself. She talks to me and I begin to perform… professionalism. The placation of whiteness that's I've been trained — a sort of placation of whiteness I've been trained to perform my whole life because talking to whiteness is like, a reflex. Like, it's just like it happens in spite of me — she talks to me and I begin to perform professionalism. It's like... a switch is flipped. And it just happens in spite of myself. As if my body responds before my mind even does.

[final glitch beat] 

I hear my own voice leave my body and it sounds like someone else's voice. It sounds like someone I used to be all the time. And I don't want to be that person, but my mind and my body just take over. I just stand there for what feels like a really long time.

[glitch beat comes in softly]

And it's not until later, afterwards, that I feel so much shame. I feel so much anxiety that night. It's a Friday night. And I go home and I'm trying to watch TV and I can't concentrate on TV because I just hear myself telling my brain... This voice in my brain, telling me how stupid I am, how terrible I am, how I'm not Black enough, how it's so shameful that I would like, do would do this to appease and placate a white person in that context. And how everyone saw it and knows how I'm not Black and knows how I'm so like white, you know, white adjacent, like white aligned and I — go out of my way to appease whiteness, make whiteness comfortable, and that they heard me use my white voice that I normally use at work. Which I don't even have to use, like no one asks me to use it. But I just automatically did it. I just used the white, the white voice [gasps for air] and I have so much anxiety, I smoke weed. It doesn't go away. Like usually that kind of calms my mind down but it doesn't go away. So I smoke more weed. It doesn't go away. At this point, it's like 11:00 p.m. I text my partner, I say, like, I can't stand this, I'm I just like having an episode. I feel so fucked up. He's like, what's wrong? And I'm just like, never mind. I can't even tell you. I just feel so ashamed. I can even say, never mind. I stop texting him, I smoke more weed, it doesn't go away. It's like eleven thirty. I decide to go for a walk, I walk for like an hour and a half. Just like walking really quickly, just like, as long as my feet are moving, like one step after the other, they're moving, as long as my feet are moving, then I'm not thinking about these thoughts. The thoughts kind of go away for a second, it's just like, it's like, I feel a sense of relief as long as like my body's in motion. I feel a sense of relief. Like I don't hear that voice. The voice goes away. But as soon as I get back to my house and sit on the couch, like, bam — it's like back. It's like as soon as the door closes, the voice just floods in, like, my entire brain is filled with these thoughts. 

[voice in NK's head starts murmuring]

And I can't take it, I just can't take it anymore. I'm like stoned, like smoking weed isn't working. I start taking shots of whiskey. I'm just like trying to like numb it out. I just want to go to sleep. Like the only way I can escape this voice is if I go to sleep. So I just like drink, I just start taking shots of bourbon until I just feel fucked up enough and tired enough that I can just go to sleep. That's the only way I can escape is just go. To. Sleep. And so I do that until I pass out my bed.

[sighs]

 I perceived threat everywhere: on stage, at parties, in the gazes of strangers, in the gazes of friends. I'm almost always in a state of fight or flight. The shame and self-loathing is about self-discipline. It's this horrible asshole voice that keeps me in line. It thinks it's keeping me safe from judgment. It thinks that if I seek attention, if I do a performance, I'm standing on stage. If I'm talking too loud, if I'm telling a story, if I'm asking for attention. That those are all the reasons, those things are all risky. It doesn't want me to do that. It wants to keep me in line. It's like, shut the fuck up. What are you doing? Like, what do you think you're doing? Who the fuck do you think you are? No one wants to hear this. And no one wants to listen to you. Nothing you have to say is valuable. Just shut up. Shut up. Shut the fuck up. Shut up.

[sighs]

It's a nightmare and it's unbearable. But I'm always telling myself it's fine. Like I hear — I just live in this constant state of anxiety. But I'm just like, it's fine. I tell myself, it's fine. I tell myself it's fine. I tell myself, it's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. I put up with of all of this and I'm fine. I'm fine. It's fine. [pause] I'm fine. 

[Al Green’s Love and Happiness plays]

Kaitlin Prest:

This episode was written, produced and sound designed by Nicole Kelly, NK. Chiquita Paschal is the editor of the series. In this episode, you heard the expert opinion of writer and political commentator Melissa Harris-Perry. Her book is called Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes and Black Women in America. Thanks to Joanna Roberts for creating the workshop called Dismantling People Pleasing that NK attended years ago. And NK's Mom, who had many conversations with NK about her experiences as an upwardly mobile Black woman for this piece.

If you relate with NK's story and you have thoughts, feelings, ideas, stories to share, write to theheart@mermaidpalace.org. Many people helped make the series into what you heard in various big and slightly less big ways.

The Heart is Nicole Kelly, Phoebe Unter, Sharon Mashihi, Chiquita Paschal and me, Kaitlin Prest. You can follow us on Instagram @theheartradio. You can follow me @kaitlinprest. 
The Heart is a production of Mermaid Palace, my new Audio Arts company, and there's going to be all sorts of cool stuff happening. And if you want to know what they are, go to our website at mermaidpalace.org. Or follow us on Instagram @mermaidpalaceart. 

This show is made possible by donations. People who pay for the art that they love. If you want to donate for the art that you love, go to mermaidpalace.org/the-heart, scroll to the bottom and you will see a word. The word is donate. Thank you. The Heart is now a more than 10 years old, queer feminist institution that once in the long past went by the name of audio smut. We encourage you to dive deep down in the feed and listen to the audio we've done over the years. It's a trip and it's worth it. The show was created by me, Kaitlin Prest with Mitra Kaboli and many other artists and audio producers. In order of appearance, Jess Grosman, Nora Roman, Britt Wray, Beansie Staretzky, Mitra Kaboli, Jen Ng, Rider Allsop, Ray Dooley, Samara Breger, Megan Detrie, Sharon Mashihi and Phoebe Wang. Special honor to Mitra Kaboli, the original senior producer and artist. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting. Thank you for being.