“ “Drag Queen storytime” has finally attempted a debut in Davie County. Brought to us by one of the recent businesses to move in downtown.

One of the top rules of running a business, you listen to your customers feedback, you know your client base. This type of event is not wanted in our county. When downtown leadership allows businesses to move in to fill store fronts that don’t reflect the morality of the community these things are bound to occur. How do we stand in opposition to businesses we don’t agree with? Contact the owner and try to voice your concerns. When a resolution is not met, don’t spend your money and spread the word about not supporting the business. Bad word of mouth reviews are like wildfire in a small community.

Why the owner would jeopardize any of her business for this event is mind-blowing. This is not representative of our county. You have an opportunity to fix this or you can continue to divide. Finally, where are the church leaders in Davie County? How long will you stay silent on issues that do not glorify God within this community?”

The post circulated quickly on Facebook under a group titled “Parents for Kids Health”

It framed Regina as a threat before most of the county knew her name. It reduced her bakery to “one of the recent businesses.” It implied that morality had a zip code and she had crossed it.

Inside her building, she was testing cookie recipes for children who, as she would later say, “just like stories.”

Outside, the argument had already begun.

Regina did not arrive in Davie County to provoke it.

She arrived in North Carolina at a very young age. Grew up biracial in this mostly white, conservative town, raised in a mostly white family. “I have a lot of feelings about it,” she says, which is both an understatement and a boundary.

//

Her love of baking began in her grandmother’s kitchen. Her grandfather is a pastor, and church was constant, Sundays, choir meetings, fellowship halls humming after service. Her grandmother baked for all of it. Regina wanted to be wherever she was: measuring, stirring, watching butter soften under warm hands. Her grandparents showed love through food. Most of her memories of them are anchored in it, special occasions marked by something rising in the oven.

“For me, food has always been joy and community and comfort,” she says. “I always knew I wanted to be a part of that for other people.”

It all stems from her grandmother. “I wouldn’t do the things I do now if it weren’t for my time with her.”

//

She left for Charlotte to attend culinary school and lasted long enough to recognize what she did not want. “I like cooking because I like feeding people,” she says. “Hearing stories. Making it for people.” What she found instead was a culture mostly built around margins and scale. “The heart was kind of gone.”

So she stepped away.

She worked in restaurants, bakeries, breweries - learning by immersion rather than instruction. She helped build bakery programs from scratch. Wrote recipes. Ordered ingredients. Planned menus. Often the youngest in the kitchen. Sometimes the only woman. Frequently underestimated. She stayed long enough to know she could do it herself.

After leaving restaurant kitchens and working her way through Winston-Salem’s food scene, she spent nearly three years at the farmers market. A folding table. Tents. Early mornings. Regulars who came back week after week.

When she applied for the Heinz Black Kitchen Initiative grant, a national program through The LEE Initiative that invests in Black-owned food businesses , she did not apply with plans for a brick-and-mortar bakery. She applied to widen her stand at the farmers market. More equipment and more capacity.

She saw a baker she had long admired, Cheryl Day, speak about the grant online and thought, almost offhandedly, why not?

She received it.

The award validated what she already knew, that the work she was doing mattered.

Around that same time, she was driving through Mocksville with her now husband. Regina and her grandfather share a quiet affection for old roadside storefronts, former convenience stores, produce stands, and all-around buildings that have been something before and might be something again.

One caught her eye and she pulled over.

She called the landlord. “I can be there in five minutes,” he said. She signed the lease in October. By April, the lights were on.

Queer college students did homework there in the evenings. Fundraisers for abortion access and LGBTQ organizations happened openly. People lingered. She worked alone most days in ten-hour stretches, headphones on, flour in the air. Ownership brought freedom and isolation in equal measure.

Then she scheduled a drag story time. Cookies. Hot chocolate. A loved local performer, Anna Yacht, reading children’s books.

The reaction online was swift and disproportionate. Accusations. Threats. Calls to city council. The sheriff’s department parked across the street the day of the event because of the volume of hostility. Inside, one hundred and fifty people came.

Outside, a few dozen protested.

“The kids loved it,” Regina says. Anna Yacht, who had grown up in that same county, once closeted, stood in front of children as her full self.

What most of us didn’t know is that four days before the event, Regina received a call from her landlord. The lease would not be renewed over “creative differences.” The landlord had been harassed and the controversy, he implied, was too much.

Regina had not broken any rules. But she had disrupted something.

“If that’s what took me out,” she says, “I’m proud of that.”

The bakery closed about a month after the event. What followed was far from a retreat though.

Regina now runs a men’s shelter in Winston-Salem. Thirty men at a time. Cots. Pillows. Laundry. Meals cooked with the same care she once gave to pastries. Many of the men are ankle-monitored. Fresh out of prison. Fresh out of rehab. Many hold jobs and still cannot secure housing. Many carry mental health diagnoses that complicate every step toward stability.

“I feel safer with these guys than I would on the street,” she says. “They would stop a train for me.”

The work is intimate and tiring. She cries often and has watched men recognize her one evening and not the next. She has adjusted her own thinking about addiction and incarceration. “I used to think if you were in jail, you were just this terrible, awful person,” she admits. “And then I meet these guys. Some of the kindest, sweetest, nicest people.” Cooking their favorite meals when she can as a way of giving them something warm or something that says you are still seen.

She pushes back gently against the assumption that unhoused people want to be unhoused, urging local businesses to consider an exchange instead of exclusion. “They’d rather sweep your floors for a cheeseburger than get it for free,” she says. Dignity, to her, is reciprocal.

She once achieved the dream she had set for herself - owning a bakery at twenty-seven. It ended in controversy and applause and a lease termination. Regina will always call it beautiful anyway. Her goal now: “Be happier than I was the year before.”

What Regina will continue to speak about is food. Feeding people. Listening.

The Facebook post warned that she might divide the county and really, she just revealed it.

Writing without a paywall is important to me, but writing does take time. If you enjoyed this post, consider buying me a coffee! It would make my day <3

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Photo by: Megan Moore of Merritt Media (NC)

Illustration by Sunny Wu

Muscle Memory

the shutting off of the alarm

buttoning buttons

i take a deep breath in

& then another

squint my my left eye in the sun

pick my lips till they almost bleed

turn lights on

turn them off

lean my forehead in for you to kiss

expect the best

check if enough cookies are made

drink some tea

wash hands

driving to your home &

no directions needed

waiting for a shoe to drop

listen first

question

second

third

sometimes a fourth

do you too, hesitate?

lie about your sexuality

look for something sweet

and some bourbon

the lighting of a candle

taking off socks in between the sheets

declaring the bed is your heaven

Karla James

People tend to start stories where they officially “begin”. I like to start stories where one’s body begins.

Yutsil’s story began in Mexico City.

She moved to the U.S. at six, which is an age where you can still believe the world is made of open doors, until you learn how many are locked.

She grew up in North Carolina. Went to school there. Excelled. Did everything that children are told to do when the promise is that education will lead somewhere.

But when it came time for college, the promise stalled.

Because immigration law does not care how long you’ve lived somewhere. It does not care how well you’ve done. It does not care how young you were when you arrived. Yutsil couldn’t qualify for in-state tuition, even though North Carolina was the only school system she had ever known. Which is a special kind of cruelty: being raised somewhere and still being told you don’t belong to it.

So she did what so many immigrant kids do: she worked. She saved. She plotted. This is Yutsil in one small moment. Because she has options: bitterness or alchemy. She tends to choose the second one.

Her first job was at McDonald’s. She was eighteen.

Not because she didn’t have the grades for college, she did.

Not because she didn’t have the hunger for it, she did.

“I was hell-bent on getting a degree,” she said, like the degree was a shoreline and she was swimming toward it in heavy clothes.

She researched states where she could qualify for in-state tuition after living there a certain amount of time. New York happened to be one of them. (It didn’t hurt that it was 2010/2011, the golden age of indie, when you could convince yourself that culture alone could keep you warm.)

She moved to New York and enrolled at Hunter College, Upper East Side, a city that is both gorgeous and indifferent.

Academically, she was fine.

Existentially, it was brutal.

“Not the academics,” she told me. “The staying alive in New York.”

Three jobs. Two classes at a time. A life narrowed down to survival math.

And then, when she came back to North Carolina in early 2013, her life cracked open in a way that only sounds small if you’ve never lived without it:

She finally got DACA status.

We tend to name these things casually, driver’s license, paperwork, the ability to work legally, but the weight of it sits heavy beneath the words. These are things people born here rarely notice. These are the kind of things people take for granted until you tell them you couldn’t have it.

That’s when she started at Chick-fil-A.

August 2013: cashier.

Within a year: corporate office.

Then it went hard and fast and dizzying in the way it does when you’re competent and the world finally decides to reward you for it.

And there’s a line she said that I can’t stop thinking about, because it’s the line so many women, so many oldest daughters live inside:

“When you’re good at something, you think, is this what I’m supposed to do?”

She learned a lot. She also knew it wasn’t the end of her story.

And then she was fired, not for performance or failure, but for an arbitrary time-punch policy.

She didn’t fight it.

“I took the keys off my keychain,” she told me, “put them on the desk, and walked out.”

Sometimes the door that closes isn’t a tragedy.

Sometimes it’s the only thing strong enough to shove you toward your actual future.

“If I hadn’t gotten fired,” she said, “I would have probably been complacent and stayed… and I would really hate my life right now.”

Salem College came next. Political science. A history minor she wishes had been a major. School, finally, not as an interruption but as nourishment.

She worked while studying. Ran Louie & Honey as general manager. Built systems. Worked the floor. Balanced responsibility with curiosity. Thriving here didn’t look glamorous, it looked like endurance paired with agency.

Fifteen years after high school, she finished her degree.

Now she’s in law school at Wake Forest University. Waitlisted at Yale.

If you’ve ever wondered what law school feels like, Yutsil will tell you:

“Torture. Horrible. It’s a hazing ritual.”

Grades drop all at once. Exams are 100% of the grade. There are no little checkpoints, no “you’re doing fine” along the way.

“It’s all essay-based,” she said. “Who wrote the better one?”

Five essays in 4.5 hours plus 41 multiple-choice questions.

“Only masochists survive,” she said, I laughed.

And then she said something else, something quieter, something I don’t want to skim past: It’s hard to focus on studying when you’re living with the fear of what could happen to your family.

“No one outside of this will ever know what that’s like,” she told me.

That sentence has a whole universe inside it.

Her family is what she calls “the most mixed-status family.”

Yutsil has DACA.

Her two siblings and parents are all of different statuses.

Her parents came in their late 20s/30s. Her father is a pastor and a general contractor. Her mother has been a nanny for a decade, underpaid, deeply loved by the kids, and tethered by the emotional trap so many caretakers know: these are my kids.

And then there’s the reality that lives under everything:

ICE rumors in town. Anxiety in the house. The plan.

“If one of us gets the axe,” she said, “we’re all leaving. We’re not fighting it.”

A sentence so simple, it’s devastating.

Because that’s what people don’t understand about immigration, how nuanced it is, how rooted you can become, how your life can be entirely here while the law keeps insisting you’re temporary.

People ask her: “You’ve been here 20-something years. Why aren’t you a citizen yet?”

And she answers with the only honest truth:

“There is really no pathway unless you have a viable U.S. citizen relative… or you’re wealthy. Otherwise, there is literally no pathway. None.”

//

What people miss, when they talk about immigration like it’s a personal failing or a moral puzzle, is how much of it has always been luck disguised as law.

Yutsil knows this because it’s written into her family history.

My mother. Her grandmother. U.S. citizens, not because they planned it, not because they navigated the system better, but because they arrived in a particular year, during a particular war, when policy briefly cracked open just enough to let them through. Reagan-era amnesty. A roll of the dice.

Other families arrived a year too late. Or a decade too early. Or under a different administration. Same work ethic. Same fear. Same love. Entirely different outcomes.

Immigration doesn’t move in straight lines. It moves in cycles. Open, then closed. Invitation, then exclusion. The country has done this before, again and again. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, millions of European immigrants entered through Ellis Island with comparatively minimal barriers. For most, the process took hours or days, not years. With Chinese immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century. With Mexican Americans who were deported despite citizenship. With Irish, Italian, Jewish families once deemed undesirable. With Japanese Americans imprisoned on U.S. soil. After 9/11, the walls went back up. Not because migration ended, but because tolerance did.

Geography is chance. Timing is chance. None of us choose where we’re born or when the rules will change. And yet we keep pretending the system is a test people either pass or fail.

Yutsil, and those like her, live inside that contradiction: a life entirely rooted here, shaped by U.S. schools, U.S. labor, U.S. ambition, while the law insists on calling her temporary.

That’s the quiet violence of it. Not the crossing itself, but the waiting. The constant recalculation. The knowledge that belonging can be revoked, not because you did something wrong, but because the political mood shifted.

Which is why DACA didn’t feel like paperwork. It felt like oxygen.

//

Yutsil refuses to let bitterness be the thing that defines her.

She chose law not to fix everything, but to understand the machinery. To work adjacent to power without losing herself to it. To protect people, especially creatives and small businesses, from being exploited by systems they didn’t build.

She knows her limits. She knows she is an empath. She knows certain kinds of legal work would break her. So she chooses sustainability over martyrdom. She chooses contribution that allows her to keep living.

Her parents support her, not because they expect her to carry everything, but because they know who she is. She doesn’t know how to sit still. She loves learning. She is building something with the long view in mind.

Everything she does now, she says, is for them too. For dignity. For rest.

Toward the end of our conversation, Yutsil said something that made me laugh and ache at the same time.

Her parents support her in law school at 32 years old because they know how she is: she doesn’t know how to sit down.

And also:

“They low-key know I’m their retirement plan.”

She said it with humor, but there was tenderness there too.

“They always tell me, ‘Don’t put that pressure on yourself.’ And I’m like, no. You’ve done so much. I want you to retire with dignity.”

And then, like a spark:

“I also operate out of spite,” she said, smiling through the sentence. “I love proving my haters wrong.”

Spite can be a survival tool.

So can love.

So can a mother who wanted education but couldn’t afford it, and now watches her daughter walk into rooms that once felt impossible.

There’s a moment Yutsil described, standing inside Yale Law School for the first time, that I keep replaying.

“If I could tell six-year-old me,” she said, “who had just crossed the border, had no idea what was happening…that one day she would even set foot inside a law school…it blows my mind.”

This is what this all means to me. This is a record of the long way.

The way people become who they are despite the rules meant to stop them.

Yutsil’s story is not just: immigrant girl goes to law school.

It’s:

a life built through barriers, humor, work, rage, tenderness, systems-thinking, and the stubborn belief that possibility is still worth chasing, even in chaos.

She told me she’s 1/6th done with law school. Two and a half years to go.

“This time next year,” she said, “I’ll be halfway through.”

And then, like a vow:

“I’ve got to buckle the fuck up.”

Under the same moon, we’re all buckling up in different ways.

But some of us have been doing it since we were six.

Note for the Reader:

This piece comes from a conversation with Yutsil Hernández, but it is also shaped by the many conversations we don’t often get to hear: what it means to grow up in U.S. schools while undocumented, how immigration law quietly rearranges timelines, how fear and ambition coexist in the same household.

Yutsil’s story is not offered as inspiration, it’s offered as testimony.

My hope with this series is to make room for complexity, for nuance, for the truth that thriving is not always loud or linear. Sometimes it looks like endurance. Sometimes it looks like choosing possibility anyway.

Writing without a paywall is important to me, but writing does take time. If you enjoyed this post, consider buying me a coffee! It would make my day <3

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If you’re even a little chronically online like I am, you’ve probably absorbed two things by now:
A) 2026 is the Year of the Fire Horse.
B) There’s a quiet collective ritual happening across the internet, people setting goals to be rejected. One hundred times. One thousand times. On purpose.

Why? Exposure therapy, resilience training, a willingness to stand in the doorway and knock anyway. The belief that every “no” is simply proof you are in motion. Proof you are playing the game.

Audacity has always been one of my inherited traits. My husband says it’s his favorite thing about me, the way I genuinely believe I can have what I want. And most of the time, I do. Not because I never hear no, but because I’m not afraid of it.

Below is a list of art and writing residencies currently open, some even paid.
The worst they can say is no.

Northeast, USA

Monhegan Artists’ Residency | 10-14 days on Monhegan Island, Maine. Free room and studio. One residency is specific to Maine art teachers. Stipend offered. Stipend and facilities vary between residency types. $25 application fee.

Tides Institute and Museum of Art | 2-4 weeks in Eastport, Maine. Housing provided, meals not provided. Studios located in downtown Eastport. Various media welcome. Artists expected to engage with the community, schedule regular open studio hours, and host an artist talk. $0-$30 application fee.

Annex Arts | Castine, Maine. Summer residencies available. Subsidized. Some form of community engagement expected. Visual, media, and performance artists welcome.

The Sable Project | 10 days off-the-grid on the side of a mountain in Stockbridge, Vermont. $500 for 10 days with a 6-hour work trade in the garden. A BIPOC partial grant is available. $10 application fee.

Hudson Valley Writers Residency | A few days, weeks, or months in Coxsackie, New York. Free to apply.

West, USA

- Djerassi Resident Artist Programs, 2325 Bear Gulch Rd, Woodside, CA 94062, (650) 747-1250

A residency in Scotland:

Hawthornden Castle Literary Retreat, Lasswade EH18 1EG, United Kingdom, +44 131 440 2180

Applications for 2026 have closed- 2027 applications will open March, 2026. Bookmark it!

A residency in the Arctic!:

The Arctic Circle | an expeditionary artist- and scientist-led residency to the arctic. Details available by newsletter only, just subscribe to it!

Subscribe now

Spencer’s record unfolds like a conversation that didn’t know it was building toward meaning. Moving between memory and preservation, it traces a life shaped less by arrival than by accumulation: early experiments uploaded and semi-forgotten, faith worn like prescription lenses, necessary, imperfect, clarifying. There are (what some may call) detours here: six majors, eight kids, years of helping other people finish their work before starting one’s own, but no wasted time. Each track listens for what lasts: the music that slipped through strict walls, the record sold for someone else’s joy, the therapy that stays ongoing,and a legacy that doesn’t rush itself into permanence. This is not an album about becoming someone else. It’s about noticing who you’ve been long enough to let it stand.

01.SoundCloud, Ten Years Ago

Do you have tracks that never leave the hard drive? They sit there quietly, waiting, not unfinished so much as patient. Spencer has some of those, beats uploaded to SoundCloud almost ten years ago, the kind you describe modestly, like old photos you don’t want to overexplain. They’re okay, he says. “They’re not, like, crazy.” But time does something strange to sound. A decade later, even a rough mix becomes evidence: proof that you were already listening closely, already arranging silence and intention.

Back then, for Spencer, making music wasn’t about audiences. It wasn’t about release schedules or streaming platforms. It was about learning how to sit with yourself long enough to finish a thought. A line of prose. Learning how to layer, how a bass line could hold a feeling… steady, while something else moved on top of it. The irony is that those early tracks were some of the only things he made purely for himself. Those tracks, beats were just enough to prove the idea could exist outside of his body. Everything since has been relational. Shared. Offered.

SoundCloud becomes less a platform and more a timestamp: ten years ago, before DJ residencies, before community ecosystems, before the word legacy starts circling quietly in the background of one’s mind. What he didn’t know yet was that solitude would become rare. That his creativity would be folded into other people’s needs. That ten years later, he would be circling the idea of his own record, not because he lacked discipline, but because he kept choosing to hold space instead. And we are all grateful.

02.Jazz on Tuesdays

There are nights where Spencer doesn’t lead anything. He just shows up. Jazz on Thursdays at Easy Tiger. Tuesdays at Wiseman. Sometimes he plays. Sometimes he listens. Jazz is generous like that. It lets you enter where you are. It doesn’t demand control.

These nights matter because they mirror how Spencer moves through life: adjacent, attentive, responsive. A Creative trying to understand the room itself- in a life filled with gigs, events, teaching moments, and community labor.

In between DJ gigs and sound work, between hosting poetry slams at the Bookhouse and turning community rooms into temporary sanctuaries, these interludes matter. They’re the breaths between movements. The proof that art doesn’t always need an outcome. Sometimes it just needs witnesses.

03.Spiritual Engineering

We ended up joking that Spencer should tell people he has a master’s in Spiritual Engineering. Half joke- half confession.

He started college trying to be a literal engineer. Six majors later, he landed in general studies, STEM on one side, literature on the other, before eventually earning an MA in poetry, which would sound like the opposite of engineering until you listen closely.

Poetry is architecture for emotion. DJing is physics. Community building is logistics. The through line isn’t confusion. It’s calibration. An instinct to understand ecosystems: emotional, communal, spiritual.

Spiritual engineering isn’t about fixing people. It’s about building bridges between spaces that would otherwise never meet. DJs do this without naming it. Poets do it by accident. I think Spencer does it because he knows what it means to be gifted and unsure of where to put it. He connects musicians to venues, people to each other, ideas to environments. He creates conditions where something meaningful might happen.

It’s not glamorous work. It’s infrastructural. And like most good infrastructure, you only notice it when it’s missing.

04.Six Majors, One Direction

Six majors sounds chaotic or looks like indecision until you realize they all pointed the same way: toward meaning-making.

Dance came first, church productions, jazz-influenced choreography, bodies learning theology before language arrived. Choir followed. Then writing. Music was always the root system, even when it wasn’t the visible tree. Direction doesn’t always look like focus. Sometimes it looks like exploration with integrity and his parents weren’t strict about careers. The freedom his parents gave him academically, try this, try that, became the blueprint for how he moves through creative life now. He explored widely, knowing some paths would dead-end, knowing others would loop back around later with maybe better timing.

Curiosity refusing to shut up.

05.8 Kids

At one point, there were eight kids in the house. Four biological siblings. Four foster siblings. High school. Middle school. Authority structures colliding. Too much emotion for square footage? Spencer doesn’t romanticize it. He names it plainly: “That shit was crazy.”

There are things he blocked out, not out of denial, but necessity. Survival demands selective memory. What remains can be visceral to a child: the intensity and the noise.

But something else grew there too: endurance. Work ethic. The ability to navigate differences without flattening it. Living with that many people teaches you how to read a room quickly and how to take responsibility before anyone asks.

Interlude: Listen to Spencer’s playlist titled “Spiritual Engineering” while you take in the rest of his story - including December-Artificial Christian in which he is a part of.

06.Christian, Without Glasses

Spencer still calls himself a Christian, but not the inherited kind. The examined kind.

For years, faith was defined for him. Over time, it became something he dismantled for himself, and rebuilt. He explored Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam through relationship. He read scripture with adult eyes until it said something new.

He talks about Christianity like a pair of glasses. Without them, the world blurs. With them, he sees shape and meaning, not certainty, but clarity. He doesn’t need Faith to be simple. He needs it to be honest. That lens shows up everywhere- in how he forgives, how he believes communities should function. Removing it, whether in music or writing, would mean misrepresenting how he actually sees the world.

07.Busy Body

Before meeting, I asked Spencer to think about his favorite albums. One from childhood and another in adulthood. Luther Vandross’ Busy Body was his childhood pick. It played in the background of an otherwise tightly controlled musical childhood. Christian Contemporary Music dominated the house, and the burnout became heavy. So when Luther showed up, it mattered.

Music outside the approved category wasn’t rebellion; it was oxygen.

Busy Body becomes a metaphor later, a reminder that curiosity, even when constrained, finds its way in. Spencer has always been paying attention to what moves people. He notices patterns. He watches systems. He listens between tracks.

08.Midnight Marauders

Enter A Tribe Called Quest, his adulthood pick, like contraband and stays like scripture.

Midnight Marauders wasn’t just an album; it was sonic education. It taught him that intellect and groove could coexist. Without writing a whole thesis, I will say, this wasn’t just an album. It was education. Rhythm with rigor, playfulness with precision. It shows that culture can be thoughtful without being heavy.

Spencer sold the record recently, generously, and immediately regretted it. That’s what we love about Spencer- he’d rather give up a piece of something he loves, for someone else to enjoy it also. The scratch on track 5 doesn’t matter. What matters is that the music taught him how to listen to people, to himself, to systems.

09.Therapy, Ongoing

Therapy isn’t a breakthrough moment here. It’s maintenance.

Spencer talks about forgiveness as the choice to stop punishing someone. Not reconciliation. Not proximity. Release. It’s a definition shaped by scripture, experience, and hard-earned boundaries.

He’s ended friendships. Learned to recognize when someone, himself included, is acting out of character. Growth, for him, looks like selectivity. How to apologize, in person, and be able to say “yeah, I was out of line.” How to leave without spectacle. Choosing sustainability.

Even DJing, the thing that pays the bills, has required renegotiation. As artists and creatives, we all come to a point where our art is turning into income, and that can nearly break our relationship with art itself. Weddings, bar gigs, and requests that maybe were stripping away his agency convinced him he was done. At one point, he was down to one last item to sell off- until the music called him back. What changes isn’t the work or the art, it’s the boundaries.

10.Outro: Legacy Without Urgency

Spencer is thinking about legacy now, softly.

He doesn’t need to be remembered loudly. He wants to leave something accurate. Poetry already does this for him, commissioned pieces, performances, moments that mark time. Music feels heavier, more involved, but also inevitable.

When he imagines his future sound, it’s house music infused with soul, gospel, R&B. Spiritual music without explanation. Something he could still play at ninety years old.

Legacy, for him, isn’t about output volume. It’s about resonance. Adding something honest to the canon of whatever this is, this city, this ecosystem, this life.

No urgency. Just intention.

The record is still being made.

Find Spencer at p.s. edekot

A Note for the Reader from the Writer

You don’t have to make what Spencer makes to recognize what he’s doing. You don’t need turntables, a mic, a chapbook, or a room full of people listening. What this “record” offers is permission to move at your own pace, in your own art, to honor the seasons where you are holding more than you are producing and to trust that attention itself is a form of creation. Spencer’s work reminds us that creativity can look like care and refusal. That the way you show up for others, the boundaries you learn to draw, the patience you practice with yourself, these are not detours from the work. They are the work. If you leave these pages feeling less rushed, more honest about where you are, or newly willing to listen, then something has already been made.

Isn’t there a strange violence in asking a resting world to hurry?

Every January, the air hums with the same frequency.

Across time zones and languages, millions of people inhale at once and decide:

now.

Now I will begin. Now I will fix. Now I will become.

There’s something real in that, something electric.

Humans are porous. We are made of energy, tuned instruments, forever picking up on the collective swell. It makes sense that we feel it: this global tightening of resolve, the synchronized reaching forward. Even if our bodies are tired, the world is buzzing. Even if the ground is frozen, the atmosphere says go.

And yet,

It is still winter.

The body hasn’t agreed to the calendar.

This season isn’t asking for momentum; it’s asking for restoration. The nervous system knows this. The bones know this. If your body wants to move slowly right now, you’re not behind, you’re listening beneath the noise.

January has been branded as a clean slate, a productivity checkpoint, a ritualized overhaul. But the earth is quiet. Trees are not rebranding. The soil is not optimizing. Nothing in nature is sprinting toward reinvention, and yet we’re told to diet, decide, hustle, become new, then do it again next year, and the year after that.

Each January I remember that the year didn’t always begin in winter. Once, the new year arrived in March, when light returned, when thaw made movement possible. That’s why October means eighth month, and December the tenth. Spring makes sense as a beginning. Spring is when things actually start. Winter is for low light and softer expectations.

So maybe January holds a paradox.

A collective energetic push and a biological invitation to pause.

A shared human longing for renewal layered over a season that says: not yet.

If you feel no desire to reset your life, launch projects, or surge forward, that is not a failure. That can be intuition.

And if you do feel the pulse, the subtle pressure of everyone else beginning, know that you don’t have to resist it or obey it. You can translate it. You can let it warm you without letting it rush you.

Refusing a manufactured timeline CAN be an act of sovereignty.

Your home and your life are a universe you get to build. Most of us were never taught that we could shape our days, our rhythms, our sense of time, that we could choose when to begin.

January doesn’t need your ambition.

It needs your attention.

Make your tea. Sit somewhere quiet.

Let this month be a pause inside the hum.

We’ll begin when the earth does.

If the point of religion is to worship then I have certainly knelt at every altar that lies beneath us. Between us. I have lifted my face to weather. I have bowed to fruit ripening in its own time. I have placed faith in fire poppies that only open after ash, in lodgepole pine cones sealed until heat frees them, and in redwoods drinking fog;

because if life can rise from burn and survive on mist, then so can I.

I believe in eucalyptus that sheds and returns, in roots that trust ash more than untouched soil. I believe in the patience of things that do not bloom until the world finally makes room.

I do not kneel toward heaven. I kneel toward what survives.

I do not believe in man appointed by God. I believe in dew arriving without spectacle. In moisture that gathers while we sleep. I believe in destruction that is not the end. I believe in growth that does not rush and survival that does not announce itself.

I have prayed without words to the bodies that carry us, fail us, heal anyway.

I have knelt without knowing I was kneeling, in fields, in kitchens, in the pause before a breath releases itself.

If there is something watching over us, it is the work itself, the long, unseen labor of continuation. Ash becoming soil. Fog becoming forest. A world that keeps making room. And me, learning how to live inside it.

“I couldn’t believe I remembered it,” she told me. The house had been gone for years, but the rooms, and what they held, were still intact inside her.

Nisha is an Indian-American architect and educator, a woman who thinks in floor plans and feelings at the same time. Her work sits at the intersection of care and geometry: what it means to make a life inside four walls when you have known loss, migration, and being told “that’s not for girls like you.” The house she remembers most clearly is not the largest or the most beautiful, but the one where seven people tried to build a life inside a modest upstairs unit of a two-family home in Bayside, Queens.

Her story lives in rooms. The ones she grew up in, the ones she was locked out of, the ones she now designs for other people. This is the house of Prasad, and the rooms she continues to create.

Foyer

Before Nisha ever thought of herself as an architect, her life was already organized around thresholds. Her mother came to the United States from South India in the 1970s, in her late twenties, conservative, deeply Catholic, and fiercely practical. Her father followed later, an English professor in India who arrived in New York only to find that “nobody wants an Indian man with a thick accent teaching English here.” His career scattered into mortgage work and real estate, his sense of self bruised. Sadness and alcohol filled the gaps no one named.

On weekends, when he had open houses, he brought Nisha along because he didn’t have anyone else to watch her.

“I’d be there from nine to four in these empty houses,” she said. “People would come and go, and I would just wander, looking at everything, the trim, the light, how bright it was. I loved the emptiness. No one ever questioned why this random Indian kid was just roaming around.”

That foyer, the literal entryway of strangers’ homes, became her first classroom. She watched buyers crossing a threshold, imagining a life they didn’t yet have. She felt the quiet of rooms that weren’t lived in yet but were ready to receive someone’s story. Those days taught her something she didn’t have language for then: architecture is not just walls and square footage. It’s the feeling of stepping into possibility.

Living Room

In the upstairs flat where her family of seven lived, you climbed a set of stairs and landed in an open living-dining-eating area. The proportions were odd. The TV sat far away from the couch, with a stretch of “dead space” between them where the Christmas tree went every year.

Just off to the side of the living room was the window that Nisha calls “the sad window.”

“There was a foster house next door,” she said. “I would stand there and look out and watch the kids. It was always the Hispanic and Black foster kids getting beat. The white kids weren’t. It was crazy.”

The living room may be where we’re supposed to unwind. In Nisha’s childhood, it was also where she learned to see the world’s inequities framed, literally, like a show. She witnessed violence she couldn’t stop and patterns she couldn’t yet name, all from the safety of her own family’s upstairs unit.

Today, when she designs living rooms, she thinks about sightlines and what they hold. What do you see when you sit on the sofa, a TV, a window, a neighbor’s house? Do you feel exposed, surveilled, cocooned? The living room is never just a couch and a rug; it’s a stage where you learn, often very young, which stories are allowed to be comfortable.

Kitchen

The kitchen in that upstairs house sat right in the center, the heart of the layout. Two full-height walls enclosed it, with an island opening back to the living and dining area. Nisha remembers standing at the kitchen window as a child, the one that faced that same foster home, watching and absorbing.

But what she remembers most vividly is her mother.

“If you looked through the opening from the living room into the kitchen, you’d always just see the back of her neck,” Nisha said. “She was always cooking.”

Her mother worked double shifts as a nurse, 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. at two different hospitals. Sometimes, when Nisha was sick, she would sleep with the brother who is now a doctor. Other nights, she floated from bed to bed: her sister and brother’s shared queen bed, the bottom bunk, the top bunk, her parents’ room. There was no bedroom of her own, just a rotating arrangement of shared bedframes and caring siblings.

In the middle of that controlled chaos, the kitchen stayed ordered and alive. Seven people, almost no clutter. “We never had excess,” Nisha said. “The only thing we had too much of was encyclopedias. Every two years she’d buy a new set. For seven people, there was never mess.”

Her mother propagated plants everywhere. Monstera’s, pothos, bits of green trailing up and over the island, nailed into the wall so they could climb. Decades later, in Nisha’s own North Carolina home, her partner did the same thing: trained plants to climb over their island.

“I realized I had recreated it,” she said. “Wherever my mom was, there was green.”

Now, in kitchen renovations, Nisha gravitates toward central islands, light that shifts throughout the day, plants that move like a second architecture. She thinks about the ergonomics of care: how far the sink is from the stove, where a child might stand to watch a parent cook, where a plate of cut mango could be set down at 2 a.m. for a daughter pulling an all-nighter at the table.

Hallway

Between the kitchen and the bedrooms ran a hallway that Nisha, as a child, believed was endless.

“I remember this hallway felt like the longest hallway of my life,” she said. “Now I realize it wasn’t.”

Next to the kitchen, a bathroom that five siblings shared. At the end, two bedrooms, a balcony off her parents’ room. At times, the family would find themselves locked out of the house and her brothers would climb the balcony column to reenter.

Hallways are often treated as wasted space in American design, something to shrink, eliminate, or turn into a gallery of family photos. For Nisha, that stretch of floor between kitchen and bedroom was an endless stream of lava that needed 4 pillows to cross over.

What felt endless at seven becomes compact at thirty-seven. Design lives in that shift in perception: how we remember distance versus what it actually was.

Bedroom

In that first house, there were two bedrooms for five kids. Nisha’s sister and one brother shared a queen bed in their room; the two older brothers had a bunk bed and a long desk lined with encyclopedias. Nisha, the youngest of five, didn’t have a bedroom.

“I would go from bed to bed to bed,” she said. “Every night someone took turns having me sleep with them. It felt normal and fun to me. I never thought to ask for a cot.”

Her understanding of what she was “allowed” to want had already been shaped by culture and scarcity. When she told her father in eighth or ninth grade that she wanted to be an architect, he told her architecture was “no place for an Indian girl.” Her sister, who wanted to be a lawyer, got the same answer and was pushed into medicine instead.

Her brother, an engineering student, told her it would be too hard for her. “And he was the cool brother, so it hurt.” she said.

So she did what many daughters of immigrants learn to do: she obeyed on the surface and rebelled in the margins. She enrolled in New York Institute of Technology as a biology major, took on loans in her own name, and secretly registered for architecture classes. She overloaded her schedule, carrying an impossible number of credits, and eventually abandoned the pre-med route to officially switch to architecture.

By then, the family had moved to a Cape Cod-style “house-house” in Garden City Park, in Long Island. Nisha didn’t have her own room there at first either, not until her siblings left for college and her father died when she was fourteen.

“It ended up just being me and my mom in the house,” she said. “I finally had rooms to choose from, but it was because loss had emptied them.”

When Nisha designs bedrooms now, she thinks about more than storage and bedside sconces. She thinks about the claim a child gets to lay on space, or doesn’t. Who is allowed a door they can close? Who wanders, quietly grateful for whatever corner of a bed they are offered?

Dining Room

In the second house, a poorly insulated sunroom had been converted into a dining room by the previous owners. It was freezing in winter, barely used except for big gatherings.

When Nisha started architecture school, her mother quietly let her take it over.

“I’d be in there in the middle of the night, wrapped in a blanket, gluing models together,” she said. “My mom didn’t understand what I was doing, but she was proud. She’d wake up at two in the morning, and suddenly there’d be cut mango and hot chai next to me. Then she’d go back to bed.”

The dining room is supposed to be about eating and hosting, but here it became a studio, a liminal workspace where Nisha’s future took shape under a single hard light. Her mother, who had once pushed her away from architecture out of fear and tradition, shifted into a quiet supporter who made space, literally, for the mess, the foam core, the X-Acto knives.

It’s a pattern Nisha sees in so many of the homes she works on now. The “formal” dining room that sits pristine and unused, full of inherited furniture no one wants to touch, while real life happens around the kitchen island or on the floor of a playroom. She is more interested in how a family actually lives than in what a room is labeled.

Basement

Some stories live in the rooms you never see on a floor plan.

Her father’s alcoholism was like that, acknowledged in fragments but never named outright. “No one would call him an alcoholic,” Nisha said. “But he was. He’d drink for four months, then be sober for a long time, then drink again.”

*(Nisha does recount with fondness that her father was sober during the Christmas season, and that was her favorite time of the year.)

So was her queerness. Throughout architecture school and grad school, Nisha had a girlfriend. She never came out to her mother.

“My therapist, who was also queer, told me, ‘You are not less out because you choose to protect what’s left of your mother’s mind, if you have to live in a world where you just preserve what’s left of your mother’s mind, then just live that way. There’s no shame in that and don’t feel guilty.” Nisha said.

When her mother died on December 30th, Nisha’s belief in anything good collapsed. “I stopped believing in Jesus, in heaven, in all of it,” she said. “I was so angry.”

Her therapist told her that her cynicism would be temporary, that one day she’d believe in goodness again, in reunion, in something beyond this. Nisha didn’t believe her. And then, three or four months later, the therapist died, and Nisha went to her funeral.

“I remember sitting there and suddenly thinking, ‘Okay. I believe in heaven again,’” she said. “Because if there is no more after this, then I never get to see my mom. And that’s unbearable.”

The basement and attic are where we tuck away the things we can’t look at every day: old beliefs, complicated parents, the parts of ourselves that don’t fit the script our community wrote for us. Nisha’s work is shaped by that knowing. She has learned how to hold complexity, tradition and rebellion, faith and doubt, cruelty and tenderness, without needing to rearrange it into something tidy.

Guest Room

By twenty-three, Nisha had a bachelor’s in architecture, a master’s from Columbia in architecture and urban design, and a phone call from an old thesis professor who had become chair of her undergrad program.

“He called me and said, ‘I need you to come teach a class for me,’” she said. “I was twenty-three. The students were my age or older. I had a panic attack before my first class. I hated it at first.”

She kept going. She taught technical classes, 3D modeling, rendering, then studio courses, the heart of architectural education. When she moved to North Carolina nine years ago, UNCG’s department chair asked her to teach a fourth-year studio. She said yes again.

“I never thought I’d want to be a teacher,” she said. “Now I look back and think, oh my god I was meant to be a teacher.” Nisha’s father was a teacher. Her grandfather was a headmaster. It was in the family all along, really.

Teaching is a kind of guest room, you open a space that isn’t quite yours and isn’t quite theirs, but is made for them to grow in. You prepare it. You hold it. You watch people move in and then move on.

Nisha is also stepping into another kind of public room: starting in January, she’ll become president of the Winston-Salem chapter of the American Institute of Architects. She’s already been cold-calling local firms, pushing them to submit work for design awards, trying to wake up a sleepy scene.

“We actually got more firms to submit this year than any year before,” she said. She’s been nominated for a Young Architect Award and an Educator Award*, both recognitions that point to the dual nature of her practice: building spaces and building people.

*By the time of this publication, Nisha was in fact awarded Young Architect of the Year and Educator of the Year by the AIA North Carolina-both awards she dedicated to her parents.

The Rooms We Create Now

Lately, Nisha has been leaning into smaller projects but will take on anything that feeds her soul.

“I’d rather do four small projects that actually transform people’s lives than one big project that just inflates someone’s ego,” she said. “In Europe, in Latin America, in India, the proportions are modest. They design with climate and community in mind. Here, it can feel like it’s excess for nothing.”

She designs with Indian efficiency, remembering monsoon houses with tile floors that hold the cool, walls that release stored heat at night, small slits at the top of walls that let hot air escape. She carries patterns, colors, and climate knowledge from South India into Southern American houses, even when it shows up in subtle ways: a breeze block wall, a shaded courtyard, a splash of vibrant tile.

And always, there is green. Vines trained to travel over an island. Plants in corners where clutter could have been. Light hitting walls in ways that feel familiar, like the back of a mother’s neck, like a childhood house that no longer exists but still stands inside you.

When her siblings visit from New York and walk with her through Reynolda Gardens, they laugh and say, “You’re giving mummy right now,” as she stops them by the roses to take a photo. On a beach vacation, when she unpacks a cooler full of crostini, meats, and banana bread to avoid resort prices, her sister says it again: “You are mummy right now.”

We inherit rooms even when they’re gone. We carry their proportions, their rules, their ghosts. We recreate what hurt us and what held us, and, if we’re paying attention, we edit.

Loss doesn’t empty a room; it stretches it. Grief is not something you outgrow; it’s something you grow around. The architecture of a life doesn’t erase what was there before, it builds alongside it.

In the house she lives in now, so similar in layout to the one she grew up in, Nisha is continually rewriting those rooms. There is no sad window facing a foster home, but there is awareness. There is no little girl without a bed of her own, but there is a designer who remembers what that felt like. In every project she takes on, from a humble kitchen renovation to a full-scale home or business, she is asking the same question:

What kind of room will this be in someone’s memory?

In the house of Prasad, the answer is never just square footage. It is mango slices at 2 a.m., an encyclopedia-lined desk, a hallway that shrinks as you grow, a dining room turned studio, a guest room that becomes a classroom. It is the rooms we create, and recreate, to survive.

At its core, “soft control” operates on the tension between vulnerability and dominance. Manipulative women frequently use tactics such as:

• Love bombing: overwhelming a target with gifts, letters, (as-close-as-you-can-get) physical closeness.

• Trauma dumping: sharing deeply personal stories to establish emotional leverage.

• Defensiveness and derailment: shifting blame or redirecting conversations when confronted. Ignoring your feelings when they are brought up-or blaming you for having them?

• Status anxiety: excessive concern with appearances and the opinions of others.

These behaviors blur the line between extreme insecurity and aggression. The manipulator often positions herself as the victim, making any challenge to her behavior appear cruel or unjust.

Contemporary feminist spaces, while often built on ideals of solidarity and empowerment, can inadvertently amplify toxic female behaviors. Online accounts suggest that women high in Cluster B traits—including narcissism, impulsivity, emotional dysregulation, and manipulativeness—find these environments especially fertile.

Such individuals thrive in collective identities, often using group solidarity as a shield. This can be the same circle of friends without making any new ones or the same workplace (without moving onto any new ones) Reputation destruction, cancel culture, and covert campaigns against disagreeers are not anomalies in these spaces but rather mechanisms of maintaining dominance. Unlike men, who often resolve hierarchy disputes through direct confrontation, women rely on behind-the-scenes social coercion. Thus, toxicity becomes normalized under the guise of “feminist justice.”

One of the most insidious aspects of toxic female behavior is the cultural acceptance of perpetual victimhood. When women are taught that all struggles stem from patriarchy, men, or external forces, they are spared the responsibility of self-reflection. This cultural script encourages the weaponization of suffering: to be “hurt” is to have power, and to be challenged is to be oppressed. This mindset not only undermines personal maturity but also corrodes female solidarity. True solidarity requires accountability; toxic solidarity demands silence. As a result, female-dominated spaces unfortunately often stagnate in cycles of drama, suspicion, and exclusion.

Be Authentic! B - B - Authentic!

Resisting toxic female dynamics requires clarity. It requires distinguishing between those who have insecurities and those who are insecure. The former can grow, the latter can only consume.

Authenticity, rather than compliance, must be the foundation of female connection. This means rejecting coercion disguised as care, resisting victimhood as a social currency, and embracing directness even when it risks rejection.

Clarity will eventually arrive. I have learned to stand alone in that clear light, to see the difference between care and control, empathy and envy, sincerity and strategy. Years ago, I learned to let go of the box and/or to stop worrying about how others perceive me inside it.

To firmly reject those who perform for approval.

I have learned that the people who dislike me most often dislike themselves most.

Reader, if you find yourself confused, in vicious cycles or at odds with someone you don’t really respect, do not seek their understanding. Just be, standing upright and honest in a world of disguised claws, unafraid, unbound, unashamed.

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I am American -I am Female -I am soft and rigid
I am rough - firm - unshakable 
I am honest and full of lies 
when I tell my children it is worth living
I am head of household, -I am hispanic? 
There is only White or Black or Asian as an option
I have never committed crimes though I have dreamed of them
I am single I am divorced I am remarried
I am confused - I am light
I am spiritual -I am a non-believer of your “God”
I am a little sister. I have been a teen mother.

I am rich in -
Love
Health
Fortitude
Desire

I am poor in -
Time. 

I am all that I need -I am baptized 
I am a daughter of the universe -I am a lost sheep, 
can I be lost if I choose to wander?
I have stolen - I have been a giver
I am delusional - I am always aware
I live paycheck to paycheck - I pretend to be white
I pretend to be hispanic - I eat tortillas and I make them poorly
I was born on U.S soil, I have parents who were not
I am American - I am human and all gender - I am gross and cutthroat

I have confessed, have you? 

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