Chasing Dreams, Finding Faith: A Humans of NIC Feature

Anya Hills is a senior in high school who is dual-enrolled with NIC studying for her associates in music. This is what she shared with me during our conversation.

“Ever since I was a child, music has been my main dream. Some girls wants to be a ballerina or an  an astronaut. But for me, since I was a kid, I’ve always had this dream of being a musician and being on stage, literally the childhood cliché dream. Most people let go of it but I’ve held on to it, because this is what’s gotten me through a lot of hard things.

“My parents were handy in their work lives, but when it came to the parenting side, they were not very healthy people. I was raised in the yelling matches and the screaming and the breaking of plates. And any conversation, any small comment could make the situation go from a zero to a hundred if you stepped on the wrong line.

“It was really a combination of neglect, verbal abuse and emotional abuse. It never got bad enough for any physical problems. Corporal punishment was about all I ever got in that category.

I remember crying on the couch at midnight as a five-year-old simply because of the dysfunction.

“Nobody in their own respects, in their own situation, had the empathy or care or effort to help the other person out or show that they loved or cared for the other person. It was always immaturity, just emotional immaturity from start to finish, and nobody had the will to change anything.

“And in the end, those conversations, if you could even call it a conversation, it was more of an argument, more of an attack on each other. Those attacks always ended in one way or another with a conclusion ‘that’s just the way it is.’

“Now I see my parents about 10 minutes a day in passing.  Any interaction I have usually relates to something concerning school and them screaming and yelling that I’d better get everything done for graduation.

“But this dream [of music] has been what’s gotten me through all that. I’ve always asked God, ‘where did this [my dream of music] come from? Why am I so committed to this?’

“I was put in public school and I was surrounded by people who were toxic and never wanted to self-improve. Being in public school surrounded by thousands of them every day, made me feel that I was drowning in that culture, and hanging on to my dream was the only thing that kept me afloat in terms of the self-improvement journey that I was going on.

“Hopefully in the future I’ll get to go to a bigger college with a larger network and hopefully a bigger city because I really want to go out of state. I’m going to get my four-year somewhere in something in performance and music production.

“I believe that the music is what’s pushing me to do better.  I’m doing this because I want to get far. I want to make this a career and do it as my life passion, not just because it’s a hobby or some small thing.

“I want to do something that’s not the basic pop song with the four chords and just the repeated melody, but I also don’t want to just put out full orchestra scores. We’ve already mastered music. We’ve already figured out how to sing properly. We already have opera singers that have mastered the art. We already have music theory that’s dissected everything in ways not many people understand. I want to bring that back to music and yet still create something that the uneducated public can appreciate because you’re not going to give a ton of high schoolers an orchestra symphony.

I want something that is reviving the music that we feed our society and our generation that is still appealing to their ears, something that is bringing back the beauty of the art that we know we’ve already mastered.

“I could also go on the whole religious rant if you want me to. My mom’s a Mormon and my dad is a disfellowshipped Jehovah’s Witness. I say I was raised Mormon, but I wasn’t fully raised Mormon. I was more the anomaly of the church who was like a really consistent guest.

“We stopped going to church, and then when I moved to Washington and my mom’s relationships with the Mormon church kind of fell apart. But when I came back to the same house in Coeur d’Alene, after five years being away, I was chasing after Jesus, and I was still trying to figure out who God was and what it means, and if this is something that I should be pursuing. And the Mormon church was all I knew in terms of Jesus, so I just went to the Mormon church.

“Then my mother’s best friend, who’s practically a grandmother to us, her husband died and she turned to religion in her grief. So she, my mom, and myself were exploring churches with for her. That’s when I came to Heart of the City in Coeur d’Alene.

“I walk into this Heart of the City church that’s a totally different kind of Jesus. I walk in, and I see everybody in their normal clothes. There’s music blaring, there’s a smoke machine. The lights are turning different colors. There’s a stage with a full band playing pop songs. And I’m like, what kind of psycho? What did I just step into? We’re standing in the back row, and I’m just listening to this music with my hands folded.

“I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know how to feel about any of this, I am just baffled. And I’m listening to that music, and it sent me crying. I actually went to the bathroom before they even gave out communion and I just cried. And that was what told me to stay.

It was the music that just hit me in a personal spot, because I love music.