To my dear friends Nimona and The Witch of Blackbird Pond

It’s hard to know when the self-hatred started. Just like scientists point to a necessary set of events and chemicals for life to form on Earth, many elements set the stage for me to decide that I was the worst thing ever and needed constant reform. The religious environment I was raised in, especially in my adolescent years was heavy on the shame and fear to control youth. God was always this wonderful entity and we were lowly awful humans who had crucified Jesus with our sins, broke god’s heart constantly, and were worthy of eternal hell and damnation. The teenage years aren’t known for inspiring self-confidence and self-worth on their own. What I was told at church confirmed everything I feared to be true about myself. When your pastor and youth group staff are regularly telling everyone how awful they are and getting mad when you have questions, that doesn’t lead a young person to assume that their curiosity is valuable and normal. Religious trauma setting the stage, check. The next item was consistently feeling like an outsider in my age group. Whether it was middle school bullying, Girl Scout bullying, high school isolation, or just my keen awareness that I was different in how I moved through the world from my peers, by the time I was in high school, I was convinced I was one of the worst people and had to earn their value. I earned my value through good grades and good deeds but none of it was enough because I would be foolish and make a mistake which would necessitate more good grades and good deeds. The never-ending cycle of trying to earn worthiness ate me alive. Failing a college class wasn’t just failing a class, it was an indictment of my value as a human being. So this all set the stage for when I graduated college, got negative professional feedback, and assumed that my boss who was going through immense personal turmoil at the time was right. It was awful. How could I have not seen it? I’d had a sneaking suspicion my entire life I was a burden to everyone around me and not someone anyone would want in their family and here was evidence! 

Now one would hope that after several psychiatric hospitalizations and two intensive outpatient therapy hospitalizations, I would have gotten a clue that I wasn’t this awful creature and that I would’ve started maybe being nice to myself. Wrong! If I couldn’t prove my value through grades and a prestigious job that would help people, I would fix all my ills with therapy! Imagine my disappointment when going to therapy religiously didn’t yield the results of me becoming this worthy person. I still think that a large reason I keep going to therapy now is that I’m afraid without the accountability I have with my therapist I will descend into an overly harsh, critical, mean person. It’s only now I’m starting to realize that there was nothing particularly awful with me, to begin with. I was a different kind of kid and young girl. Differences are easy to pick at so I was bullied. So says human history. The words that were spoken over me as a child that became my identity, were labels used by adults who were exhausted to try and simplify an already messy and complicated family life that they weren’t equipped always to handle. I didn’t have an awful temper, I was a child in pain who couldn’t regulate. The adults whether they be parents or people at church were using the lenses they knew to use, no one meant any harm. The problem is that I believed what people said I was and spent at least a decade trying to either prove them wrong or work hard enough to be worthy of a different label. I still have nightmares that the popular girl in the youth group tells me no one liked me after all, they just tolerated me. I’m no longer interested in my old labels. I don’t want to spend the next decade trying to prove I’m not Gollum. I know I have faults and I know how I need to improve but I am not interested in fighting dragons that never existed. Now we come to where Nimona and Hannah Tupper fit into this story. 

The Witch of Blackbird Pond is one of my all-time favorite books. A short synopsis is as follows. Kit Tyler is forced to move in with her Puritan family members after her grandfather dies. Having been raised in the much more liberal British colony of Barbados, Kit commits a series of faux pas that the Puritans find too much to bear. These include being able to swim, wearing a dress that is too fancy for church, and having children re-enact a bible story. She befriends a local outcast named Hannah Tupper. Hannah is an old Quaker woman who has been ostracized for not being a Puritan. Soon these two women are joined by Prudence who is abused by her mother and not allowed to go to school. I spent many afternoons with these women, feeling at home and safe. The pain they were enduring felt familiar and like home. Nimona is the story of another outsider who is feared because she is not understood. At the end of the movie, Nimona in her full dragon form, walks toward the center of the city to kill herself by piercing her heart with the sword of her former best friend who reviled her.  She had come to believe she was as awful as the whole city told her she was. The irony in both these stories is that those who are treated so horribly by society still seek community. They still want to be seen and known. I would argue that the hatred of these outsiders indicates more about those persecuting them than the persecuted. Punishing Hannah for not being a Puritan is a means of deterring others in the community from practicing a different faith. It’s a means of controlling the majority and getting the outcome those in power want. Nimona is not a threat to anyone. If you have watched the film, they blame a fire that destroyed a village on her. At the end of the movie, it is revealed that the fire was started by the villagers who carelessly knocked over a lantern while trying to kill Nimona. Those who are reviled by society or by individuals are rarely the monsters we are told they are. The next time you go to be cruel, ask yourself first, what are you so afraid of?