In a Medium post I talked about how much time I spent curating this website and putting together content for it. I admit I am absolutely addicted to being the Loud Mouth Brown Girl, it is right now my only true life line to the outside world.
But there is a responsibility that comes with being an ally and an advocate to groups of marginalized people, and I haven’t quite figured out what those responsibilities are just yet.
I am only beginning to discover what it means to write about my Mental Health, in ways no one else is doing yet. I am to my knowledge the only Brown girl in British Columbia talking about mental health right now.
That’s terrifying because it comes with a responsibility that I am not entirely sure I am ready for, I am growing my following intentionally so that I can eventually start getting paid for my writing, and in doing so I am exposing myself to complete strangers all over the world, and that’s terrifying.
I will say that the more I talk about the anxiety, depression, stress and trauma the more I find confidence in my ability to talk about it at all. I can only imagine what life would be like if I could finally get some counselling.
I am cautious about the things that I say on this site sometimes, when I talk about what I went through, because I don’t want to deal with the drama of any kind of retribution.
In the past I have completely thrown caution to the wind and I used this website to out some of the men who raped me, I even wrote about the names they used while they pretended to be men I knew.
It took a lot of talking it out with myself and my Doctor for the truth to come out, and now that it has I am genuinely….cautiously optimistic.
The truth is that I may never know who raped me that night in 2016, and I hurt a lot of people when I came out with my story originally, but a year later I am still here still writing, still helping other people share their stories when and if I can, and that gives me power over my own fear.
The truth is that I am a lot more fucked up than I pretend to be, and I am trying hard to learn to stop pretending that I am okay when I am not. This is difficult because as survivors of abuse some of you understand keenly how well you learn to pretend.
Pretending is easier than being honest, because when you pretend you don’t have to actually deal with the sorrow and the pain, you don’t have to face the fears, but the sad truth is the only true escape you get from being a victim comes when you finally decide to tell the truth in whatever way you need to tell it.
For me that manifested originally in dancing, and then painting and drawing, which I’ve never really been great at. I did the things when I first started this blog, that I’d never had time to do, such as painting, and it felt really good, and I think it turned out okay. I’ve included some of the paintings I’ve done in this blog post.
Through dancing came real and truly honest meditation, where I would sit for hours and let every memory I ever had rush through my brain without trying to stop the thoughts. It hurt a lot, to go through all those memories, to listen to them and feel the pain they created as I tried to look at them from an outsider’s view.
I am not pretending anymore, writing helped me pull back the layers of myself and reveal to myself the person I was, versus the person I want to be, and somewhere in the middle I am finding the person I am in this moment and that feels pretty good, but exposing this fresh new version of myself is absolutely terrifying. So what you see on this blog is not necessarily what you get in real life.
Damon Beatty found that out when he ran into me in the mall a few months back, I said a quick hello and found myself making an excuse to walk away and let him talk with my mom, because even though I may come across as an adult woman, in real life I still feel like a child.
I am looking at the world with the eyes of a survivor, I am seeing the world with the curtains drawn back and the silver linings ripped to shreds. The Wizard is gone from behind the curtain and all that remains is a robotic voice telling me to turn around.
The world is just as majestic as it’s always been, but I’ve seen a darkness that I cannot unsee, and so in real life I am a child, wondering about the world worried every day of my life that one of my rapists might come back and attack me. I am having to relearn things like how to wash a dish and take out the garbage, and I go days without taking a shower, but always ensuring to change my underwear, because I can’t stand the sight of my body naked.
Yet here I am emotionally raw and open on this website. Anyone can be anyone on the internet, I try to be my real emotional self, I try to open myself up here because I can’t do it anywhere else in my life. I try to be as honest as possible, because I am trying to teach myself that I no longer have to lie to protect myself from being raped. Those days are over.
When I was a little girl I had a dream about a woman named Siddha Lee Saint James, that’s how this entire website got it’s start. Through her, my Guardian Angel, a Soldier who traveled from New Orleans to Vancouver to protect me, little old me.
She was there in the shadows every time I was raped, singing me a lullaby, and reminding me that things were going to be okay, she was a visitor to the part of my brain that needed to believe in Majick and destiny.
Now that I am older, Siddha has gone away, back to where she came from, to remain forever in the history books of the story that makes me who I am, but even with her gone, the majick and belief in destiny has remained. I know that I am going to do great things in the future, I know that I have as I have always had a huge amount of potential, and I plan to do my best to utilize that potential for the greater good.
But in the mean time, should you see me in the wild understand if I am skittish, because although I may seem like an extrovert, at the end of the day I am just a single woman trying to find her place in the world.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 