ME BEING ME

CHAPTER 1: BECOMING ATHEIST ‎ ‎I had just finished my morning exercise and I don't know if I should eat the food I was craving for or sleep hungry for a while so I could in my head loose a few more pounds or eat and feel guilty afterwards. ‎ ‎It is 7:13am. I know because I am staring at my phone screen. The workout app is still open. "Great job, Agnes! You burned 165 calories!" with confetti. My shirt is wet. Not sexy wet. The kind of wet that makes the fabric stick to your stomach rolls and your back. I am breathing through my mouth because my nose is blocked. My thighs are shaking. ‎ ‎From my room, I can smell what my mother is frying in the kitchen. Plantain. The sweet, soft kind that is almost black, the one that caramelizes. With Mtn rice. The smell is entering my room and sitting on my chest. ‎ ‎And my brain is doing that thing it does every morning. ‎ ‎If you eat now, you wasted the exercise. ‎If you don't eat, you will be dizzy in class. ‎If you eat, you will be fat forever. ‎Maybe I should drink my chia seed soaked inside the fridge. ‎Eat. ‎Don't eat. ‎Eat. ‎Don't eat. ‎ ‎I sit on my cold floor. My fan is making that krr krr noise it always makes on speed one. I am 22 years old and this is how I start almost every day. Negotiating with food like it is an enemy soldier. ‎ ‎My name is Agnes Iboro. I am 22. I am from Southern Nigeria, Akwa Ibom, but we live in Cross River. ‎I am in my third year in school. I am overweight, not curvy-overweight, just big. I am an introvert. I have social anxiety that makes my hands sweat when I have to say "good morning" to a group of people. I am scared of heights to the point that even climbing the staircase to the third floor of my department makes my heart beat like a drum. I am bisexual. I am sexually attracted to women and to gay men. I don't like straight men, or maybe I do a bit. But I do want to fall in love. And I used to be a Christian. ‎ ‎ I was not a good Christian. ‎ ‎People like to say "I was a good Christian before" when they want to tell their atheist story, like they were a pastor or something. ‎I was not, I was a bad Christian who was trying very hard to be good. ‎ ‎I never felt that connection people talk about. You know that moment in church when everyone is crying and lifting their hands and saying "I feel the presence of God.... ‎I never felt it. I stood there, I lifted my hands because everyone else lifted their hands. I closed my eyes because my mother would pinch me if I opened them. I sang the loudest so that no one would know that inside, I was empty. ‎ ‎I did not love God because I felt God. I loved God because my parents loved God. ‎ ‎My parents are middle class Christian people. Not rich, but comfortable. Three-bedroom flat, with POP ceiling, with a big family Bible on the center table that nobody really reads but is there to show that we are a godly home. My father is a deacon. My mother is in Women of Virtue. Morning devotion every day by 6am. No excuse. If you are sleeping, they will knock on your door. "Agnes! Devotion!" My father reads one chapter from Old Testament, my mother reads one from New Testament, then we all pray, While I think of what I was going to wear to school. ‎ ‎But I loved my parents. So I loved their God. Because if I didn't, what kind of daughter would I be? ‎ ‎My childhood was church. Girls' Brigade, with that stiff white uniform and the itchy hat. Bible quiz where I always came second because I could cram verses but I didn't understand them. Youth Convention where they told us girls that our bodies are temples and if a man lusts after us it is our fault. ‎I was 14, already bigger than other girls, wearing a skirt that my mother forced me to wear that showed my thighs, and a youth pastor telling me that I am causing brothers to sin. I remember going home that day and standing in front of the mirror and hating my body for the first time. Not because it was big, but because they said it was dangerous. ‎ ‎I tried. God knows I tried. I fasted. I did 6am to 6pm dry fasting in SS2 and almost fainted in school. I prayed for God to make me slim, to make me less shy, to make me like girls who like pink and straight men who would marry me. Nothing changed. The silence was so loud. ‎ ‎ It started online. It started from being woke. ‎ ‎I was maybe 15 or 16. Lockdown period. 2020. Everybody was on Twitter, on t****k. I was in my room, fat, bored, anxious, unable to go out because even before COVID I didn't like going out. I had a small Twitter account where I was just reading BL threads and retweeting fanart of two boys kissing. The algorithm, that stupid algorithm, started showing me other things. ‎ ‎First it was one thread: "Things they didn't teach us in Sunday School." A Nigerian girl, like me, was talking about how Mary Slessor is praised for stopping the killing of twins, but nobody talks about how she called our people savages and how the missionaries banned our language in schools. I read it at 2am. ‎ ‎Then another thread. Then another. A thread about how the Bible was used to justify slavery. How in 1455, Pope Nicholas V gave the Portuguese king permission to enslave Africans. How they put us in ships, 400 of us like sardines, and the priest would come and sprinkle holy water on us before we died. ‎ ‎Then t****k. A girl with locs, sitting in her room in America, saying "If Christianity was forced on your ancestors through whips and chains, you don't owe it loyalty." And I felt something drop in my stomach. ‎ ‎I started digging. Not because I wanted to leave Christianity. I then went to Google to find proof that this people were lieing maybe, I typed "Christianity was not used for colonialism right?? " hoping to find articles to shut them up. Instead, I found more. ‎ ‎I found pictures. Black and white pictures of white missionaries standing with our chiefs, holding Bibles, while soldiers behind them held guns. I found letters from missionaries saying "We must break the spirit of the native, How to make a n***o Christian." The killing of 4000 Congolese ‎I found how they told our people that Mami Wata was a demon, that Ekpo masquerade was devil worship, that our names like Iboro, Afon, Mfon were not Christian enough and we should be called Agnes, Grace, Blessing. My own name. Agnes. It's not my name. My grandmother named me mfon. But I was called that only at home, cause the English name was superior. ‎ ‎Agnes Iboro. A Christian name sitting on top of an Ibibio name like a colonizer sitting on a throne. ‎ ‎And the more I read, the more I realized why I never felt that connection in church. Because that church was never built for me to feel anything. It was built to make me obedient. To make me small. To make me hate my body, hate my desires, hate my culture, and call that holiness. ‎ ‎They taught us that being fat is lack of self-control. That being shy is not having the Holy Spirit. That being attracted to women and to soft men is demonic. That being afraid is lack of faith. So I spent 18 years thinking I was a failed daughter, when in fact, I was just a normal girl being crushed by a system that was never meant to love people like me. ‎ ‎I remember the night I finally said it out loud. It was not dramatic. No thunder. I was in my room, after scrolling for 5 hours. My mother had just shouted from the parlor, "Agnes, come and lead the closing prayer!" I stood up, my phone still in my hand, a t****k video paused of a historian talking about how missionaries burned shrines in Benin and I sat down and asked myself, If this God is so loving, why did He let them use His name to do this to us? Why did He let them r**e, steal, and kill while singing "Amazing Grace"? Why does the church still act like we should be grateful?, And I whispered to myself, not to God, to myself: "I don't think believe anymore." ‎ ‎I didn't feel scared. I felt light. Like I had dropped a heavy basin of water I had been carrying on my head since I was little and the for the first time I felt like a white Jesus wasn't my savior. ‎ ‎I went to the parlor that night and I led the closing prayer. Because I live in my parents house. Because I am still middle class Nigerian girl and my school fees is still being paid. I said "In Jesus name we have prayed" and my mother said "Amen." But inside, I was no longer there. ‎ ‎Since then, I have been learning how to be without God. It is not easy. ‎ When you have social anxiety, you want someone to say "I am with you." When you are scared of heights, you want someone to hold your hand. When you are overweight and feel ugly and introverted and you think no one will ever love you, you want a big Father in heaven to say "I love you anyway." When that Father is gone, who holds you? ‎ ‎For a while, nobody, not even my parents. I just had my BL stories. My boys who love boys. Because in those stories, nobody is using God to hate. ‎The boys are soft, They cry, they cook for each other, they say "I love you" without shame. They are not straight men who shout, who demand respect, who think your body is theirs. That is why I am sexually attracted to gay men and women. Because they feel safe. Straight men have never felt safe to me. Not in church, not in school, not on the road where they catcall you and call you "orobo" and laugh. ‎ ‎But I still want to fall in love. Not with Jesus. With a person. A real person who will see this big, anxious, scared girl who loves BL and who eats plantain, shawarma and all kinds of junk when she is sad and who doesn't believe in God anymore, and say "I want you." ‎ ‎So this morning, after burning 212 calories, I did something ‎ ‎I got up from the floor. I walked to the kitchen. I dished the jollof rice. Not small portion. Full. With three pieces of plantain and two eggs. And I ate it sitting on my bed, licking oil from my fingers, watching a t****k of two boys from a Thai BL drama getting married. ‎ ‎And I did not pray before eating. And I did not feel guilty after. ‎ ‎I just felt full. ‎ ‎And full is enough for now. ‎ ‎This is Chapter 1, Agnes. ‎ ‎It is deeper, it is honest, and it ends with power, not shame. ‎