Y’all Want Me To Feel Guilty

It doesn’t matter what color your skin is, your abuser is always going to find reasons why you’re telling on them is more important than their actions as an abuser.

That’s just a fact. True abusers don’t want to acknowledge their actions, they don’t want to admit that they could have done better and made better choices. They don’t want to admit the fact that the result of their behavior lands squarely on their shoulders.

This is a lesson that I’ve learned recently. I know there are people out there angry enough to want to kill me, and I know damned well that it’s not my fault.

There is a part of me that genuinely believes that I deserved what I got, that I did something or said something that warranted more than twenty years of sexual abuse at the hands of white men who agree.

Now that I am older and free of men who are connected to gang life, I am seriously questioning everything about myself at this point in time. I question absolutely everything about the decisions I made when I was less than mentally healthy.

I question everything I did, because I didn’t do those things conciously, I did them in an effort to survive and to ensure that they never happend again. I had to ask for help from people that in a million years I never would have suspected might have cared….I got lucky when they agreed to help me share my story. It could have easily been a flat out “no.”

Y’all want me to feel guilty, as if I should be ashamed of going to the cops, but I am not. I deserve justice, I deserve to know that what happened to me is never going to happen again to any young woman at the hands of my abusers.

I deserve to go to sleep without being terrified in the middle of the night by every single sound I hear, without nightmares every night of what could/might/would/should happen.

I feel like I am expected to apologize to my rapists for going crazy and reporting the abuse while waiting to be admitted to a fucking mental hospital, but the thing is, I probably would have just been fine if y’all hadn’t raped me? So…fuck you and your death threats?!

That’s really how I feel about it. I know that there is a big thing about coming out and loyalty and all that shit, but I feel like if people wanted my loyalty maybe they shouldn’t have raped me…beaten me…tortured me. Maybe they should have treated me better.

If they wanted my respect, than they shouldn’t have shown me the worst versions of themselves expecting that I would forgive them because I’m a good person. I ain’t that good a person.

I’m still human. I make mistakes too…but I never raped anyone. I never drugged anyone, I’ve never even considered the idea, because I’m not a fucking rapist.

I remember trying to kiss someone who didn’t want me to kiss them, but that being said, I also took no for an answer….I was very rarely afforded that opportunity.

I’m not going to apologize for coming out and sharing my story when it was a choice between doing that or killing myself and in the very early days of last year and the year before, that was genuinely a possibility.

I chose the path that would lead me to extricating myself from gang life, because I want to survive long enough to make LMBG matter and mean something and that was never going to happen when I was surrounded by white guys pretending to be gangsters.

I’m done with that life and I am done apologizing to people who don’t deserve it. I am who I’ve always been, a fucking survivor, if you have a problem with that, come at me. You won’t be the first, you won’t be the last but you damned sure wouldn’t be the worst.

Nothing is as bad as being passed around from one guy to the next, nothing is as bad as having a man wrap his hands around your throat and try to choke the life out of you because he thought you reported him on fucking Facebook while he’s raping you.

Nothing is as bad as knowing that everyone you care about knows what happened to you and said nothing until it was too late. I’ve been through too much to ever go backwards now, so the answer is no….I’m done with my past, the question is why aren’t you?

Sending all my love,

Devon J Hall

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