I wanted to do a huge party and have a genuine launch, I wanted everyone to know that the reason I am the Loud Mouth Brown Girl was because I was arrested for having a panic attack on an air plane. I wanted the world to know that I am dealing with mental health issues, and Professionals who refuse to acknowledge or validate my experience by pretending it didn’t happen.
I wanted to discuss the real trauma of realizing that cops and Medical professionals alike would rather you pretend your rapes didn’t happen than actually fight for the justice that the oath they take at the start of their jobs promises they will get for you.
Yes, I had big plans for this website, and I still do, one day maybe next year I will throw a great and grande party, celebrating my success at learning to vocalize my experience, and the reason I haven’t done it yet is exactly that.
I am still learning to put words to my experience, learning to speak as a survivor is a language I am only just beginning to understand, and that’s part of the reason I am still writing as the Loud Mouth Brown Girl, because this website is about learning what it means to be a survivor.
For most of my life, I was addicted to the pain and I learned to live with it in a way that taught me how to make it look like I was perfectly happy in all areas of my life. It was only this year when I had the opportunity to separate myself from my abusers, that I started to understand what it really means to have a safe space to heal.
Learning that my Psychiatrist has decided without asking me any questions about my experience, that my claims of rape are delusional threw me for a loop at first, until I realized his opinion doesn’t matter to me. I am taking my medication each month because it helps, and I am doing what I need to do to heal, regardless of what he thinks. I don’t need his validation any more than I need to hear the truth from the men who raped me.
I know what they did, so does my family and close circle of friends. My abuse has been validated, but not every woman gets that.
Being told however, that an experience of rape is actually a dillusion is incredibly dangerous, and I know that because for a very short period of time I genuinely wondered if I’d made it up.
No, I did not make up the idea that someone stuck a knife into my vagina, that happened. No I did not make up what Chad Wilson did to me, that happened. He raped me. Repeatedly through the years, no I did not make up what the Adrenaline Mob did to me, they raped me, repeatedly through the years.
These things happened to me, Keith Rainier molested me, Officer Harms raped me while he told me about how he was going to get a job in the Sex Crimes unit one day, these things happened, they weren’t dillusions, and only because one man who does believe that I made them up thinks so…I get to wonder if I am crazy, because there is no proof of my claims.
This is what victims go through every single day, we wonder, we cry, we beg for mercy and we learn quickly there is no mercy for us, because even when we do share our stories we still have to validate them somehow for those who are willing to listen, and that is how we lose our voice.
We forget what words to use to validate what happened to us, we forget how to vocalize why we stay away from certain people or situations, because to us it makes perfect sense.
The element on the stove burned my hand, why the fuck would I turn it on again much less touch it again?! I wouldn’t, so I stay away from the people who are connected to my rapists, no matter how much it might hurt them it hurts me more. They have each other to lean on, but I am figuring this stuff out on my own as I go, and that’s what it means to be a survivor.
I will always be learning, and re-learning how to speak English in a way that helps those on the outside understand my experience, and some days I will struggle more than other days.
I have to relearn everything I thought I knew about myself all over again, and remember this is coming from someone who was confident and strong and powerful who lived through twenty plus years of sexual abuse and didn’t give up. I know that I am strong, and powerful but I no longer feel safe in my own skin, and that’s because of what was done to me, not because of choices that I made consciously with all the facts in hand.
Lindsey McKeon once told me that we choose the paths we experience on this earth, long before we actually live them. That used to piss me off, because if that were true I want to choose again, I chose wrong. Largely, and more importantly, because I think a certain part of that is true.
We choose the experience we’re going to have by every choice we make throughout our lifetime, but no matter what choices we make, no one deserves to be raped, tortured, hypnotized into forgetting, wash rinse repeat, for any length of time, let alone more than twenty years.
I experienced that, I went through that in my life time and there was never once anyone to help pull me out until the abuse had long since ended. I am not bitter about that, I am stating a fact, because I have learned that I have the right to tell my truth my way, and no one can take that away from me. No matter who they think they are.
I’ve never broken a bone, not in my life…fractured a couple, but I’ve never broken a bone, so I don’t know what it means to heal from that. Much like not dealing with the abuse being put onto my shoulders, I’ve never done this healing thing before, so if I ramble on, and you still read my posts I appreciate you, because at the end of the day I am not here to teach you how to heal.
I am here to keep a record of the things I have learned about myself so that if something happens, this website can stand as a reminder that I existed, that I had a life and maybe if I am lucky, I inspired at least one person to realize they’re going to be okay.
And we are going to be okay. It’s going to take time, and we’re going to get frustrated. We will get lazy and selfish, we might even become a little manipulative, and we’ll recognize those moments when the flashes of anger and bitterness come out, and we will correct our behavior.
Because we aren’t like them, we are not our abusers. We are the ones who are joining a movement, in this website, in our workplace, at home, in our relationships. We are putting an end to the days when our safety is out weighed by the protection, comfort and safety of our abusers.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 