Go Have The Fucking Conversation

When you finally decide that you are ready to unpack all the trauma and start making an honest effort to climb out of the closet, you are in fact making a commitment to healing the pain you’re experiencing.

It’s not an easy journey and anyone who has had to heal from abuse will tell you this. It will be one of the hardest things you ever have to do, because you’ll spin through the emotions. You’ll lash out and you will hurt those you care about in an effort to rid yourself of the toxic negative energy that the abuse brought out.

It starts, or it should start, with an honest conversation with your friends, family and supporters. It’s time and it is one of the hardest things you will ever do because some will support you, others will overcompensate, and others still will quietly or sometimes loudly, see themselves out of your life.

Healing from abuse will change everything you think you know about yourself as you discover what you are truly capable of doing with your life.

I know it’s hard because I’ve been there, there was a time I would have rather died than ask for help, and there was that time that I very nearly did die because I refused to ask help, even and especially when it was over.

I thought I would, when it was over, just go back to my old life like nothing had happened and everything was fine. I quit my job without meaning to and found myself drifting and losing control of everything over my thoughts and being.

I couldn’t understand who I was without my job, and that only gave me time to think about everything I survived, which sent me down a shame spiral that ended me up in a mental hospital not once but three separate times in the last two years.

I know how hard it is to have the conversation, I’ve had the fucking conversation and I watched every person I ever cared about as they walked out of my life like we hadn’t just had a massive conversation, largely because I asked them to.

I needed time, and still need time to come to terms with everything I’ve been through and I can’t do that if I have to make other people comfortable in my company. I need to be alone right now to digest and release all of the things I’ve learned about myself in the last year, but at least I had the fucking conversation.

On Twitter someone announced the other morning that they lost a friend to suicide. There was a time, and still other times when I understand how that might feel like the better option. I fucking get it, it would be over quick and then I wouldn’t be in pain any longer.

But the pain reminds me that I survived, it reminds me that my body has grown and changed over the last two years in ways it was never allowed to before. It means that I am fucking free, that I can still feel and have emotions, and the good days outweigh the bad immensely.

I’m not okay. I am tired and I am scared and I am sad and I am frustrated, but I am not going to give up because I refuse to make it easy on the ass holes who raped me and tortured me for the better part of twenty years.

In a million years I wouldn’t take back a single freak out, or moment of the last two years, because I am finally free of my past. It can’t hurt me anymore, not the way it was hurting me before. There are new ways that I am hurting in, physically mentally and emotionally, but I am not alone in my pain.

I have a support group of Doctors and family members who know what is happening with me, who check in on me and who are there when I need to reach out. I am not alone, and the people who are no longer in my life no longer have anything they need from me. Our journey has in it’s way come to an end and now I am preparing for whatever comes next.

That’s what having the fucking conversation did for me. Imagine what having the fucking conversation could do for you.

Sending all my love to those not yet ready to have the fucking conversation,

Devon J Hall