I can feel that to my core, that phrase. So much more to who I am today than ever before. I am officially a published writer, okay granted Buy Me A Coffee isn’t the Publishing House I imagined I’d be writing for when I was a child.

But no one gets it right the first time out of the park, except maybe Nora Roberts or Stephen King…and even they have editors.

It means that I am really a Loud Mouth Brown Girl offering advice on Mental Health through sharing my own experience, for actual money.

For every person that signs up, I am more confident that I will be on my way to one day creating something new that no one else has ever thought of creating through the written word before. My confidence is growing, and sometimes I admit it gets shaken by other humans designed to push my buttons, but it almost always returns.

A little stronger each time, a little more confident, a little more powerful each time I get knocked down because I still get back up.

I remember one day walking into a Dollar store and seeing a kid misbehaving, their mother looked frustrated and I just looked at her and said, “you know, you’re doing a really good job.”

She was so grateful for those words and they were so fucking easy because I could tell she really was doing a great job at being a mom. I don’t know what it was that made me think that, I’ll probably never remember, I just remember thinking, “that’s a good mom.”

For years I put my writing on the back burner because I thought I wasn’t worthy of investing in. I didn’t study the craft the way I am trying to do now. I didn’t practice it enough to make me really confident that it could or would go anywhere.

However with the shift in social media apps companies like Buy Me A Coffee are making it easier for content creators to get paid for their work, and there is a certain validation in knowing someone is willing to pay for your work.

It’s a confidence boost to know that your work matters to another human being, and it feels good to know that you are on the right path. It’s the little signs that show us where we need to go.

Whether it’s a literal sign that says “Go here” or a specific thing happening at a specific time, the signs are always there leading us in the right direction, we just have to be willing to acknowledge them when we see them.

This can be scary because sometimes the signs tell us that something bad is going to happen and frankly we’ve had enough bad, but the signs also tell us that we can succeed in any challenge that comes our way because we’ve been preparing for new challenges our whole life.

“Life is a series of unending annoyances and tests designed to challenge everything about ourselves.”

I feel like pushing myself to put my writing out there, to see if I can make money writing in even the smallest of ways, is my way of paying my dues. Preparing for the day when I am on all the fancy shows talking about where my writing comes from.

If I don’t at least try to promote some paid content then I’ll never know if I can make it to the next step in my writing journey.

So with all that said if you’d like to read my paid content you can view it here for five dollars a month, less than the cost of a cup of coffee.

I’ll still have my posts here of course, but I need to start creating a job for myself, I need to make my time here matter, every single day, and pushing myself to write more about different topics is the best way to challenge my commitment to being a full time paid writer.

I hope you’ll consider joining me on this new part of my journey,

Love always,

Devon J Hall