I’m Anissa Nishira.
I love books and babies and talking and coffee and lipgloss. That’s really all you need to know. But I suppose I will tell you a little bit more.
I grew up a laugh-too-loud, overly dramatic Black girl that always sat on the front pew in a mostly white Southern Baptist church. The poster child for purity culture, I kissed dating goodbye with dreams of marrying whichever youth group boy I had deemed my “best friend” at the time. I signed a True Love Waits card on the Golden Gate Bridge, went to church camp and youth conferences, had a daily Quiet Time and had the loftiest goals of becoming a Youth Pastor’s wife… because ya know, girls can’t be youth pastors. Trust me, I tried.
It was honestly a super fun childhood that didn’t feel traumatic at the time, followed by four years of basically church camp masquerading as Higher Education at a SoCal Christian university. Follow that with five more years of working at a MidWest Baptist Student Union and I basically spent my teens and twenties in recurrent “situationships” with boys that told me I was “too good for them” or that we were “just friends” despite all the non-dates we had been on. #fuckpurityculture.
Some of you knew exactly what all that meant and others are like “WTF???”
It has been a weird life.
I intentionally started to pull on the thread of the proverbial (very frayed) sweater of my life the day I found out the tiny human I was growing in my body was going to be female. It dawned on me that if most of the things that I had been taught growing up were taught to my daughter, I would throat punch someone. (Not condoning violence and also: don’t mess with my kids).
I slowly and carefully started taking apart all the things I had lived with absolute certainty. I, like some of you possibly, spent a couple years trying to stay in the spaces I was familiar with—changing words to worship songs under my breath, being more “open” and just trying to enneagram-nine my way through deconstruction. Thankfully, my growing family stumbled upon other people that were trying to figure out how to deconstruct what felt like their entire lives, parent their children without the Bible or all the platitudes and certainty we had been promised, and not fall apart completely while doing so.
Finding your people can feel like an insurmountable task. But you did it. You’re here. I am forever grateful that I didn’t have to do the scary work of deconstruction alone.
And you don’t either.
Deconstruction was both the scariest thing I have ever done and the most freeing. I’m still discovering new things about myself and learning to trust myself (as opposed to all that “lean not on your own understanding” BS). I used to think I would want to reconstruct my faith and now I know I don’t have to in order to be whole and loved. Feels so ironic since the unconditional love bit was preached to me my whole life and yet came with so many conditions. Now I get to be all the things “the church” never let me be: loud, bossy, Black, fun, and full of fire and magic. Now I pray to goddess or the Universe— if I pray at all. I am discovering & reclaiming my heritage in Black midwifery. I’m finding my way in new traditions and stories and I still like Advent and sing Christmas hymns, too. I can do both. I do what I want.
I used to be scared that if I let go of Christianity I would have no place to belong, after all I dedicated my entire life to it. Had I been wrong all those years? And what do I do with my strange mystical experiences? I declare that they all belong and that I can’t change or explain away the past but I can see that while some of it still angers me, some of it just is. It’s only part of my story.
I hope you hear yourself in our stories this season. I hope you find yourself nodding in your car and yelling “Yes! Exactly!” while on a treadmill next to some unsuspecting gym-goer. Or in tears on the beach or by a lake as you realize you really aren’t alone even though it feels like everything is coming apart at the seams. I’ve been there, too, new friend. More than anything I hope you feel less alone and more alive.
Happy you’re here, Heathens.