That’s such a great moment, because he’s telling her she has a choice. She can remain where she is and hope her brother can save her, or she can fight back and maybe have a chance at survival.
Surviving the bad shit means that you get to spend time learning to thrive in the muck and the darkness, it means taking everything you’ve learned from the battle and using it to create something new for yourself and if you’re lucky the people around you.
That’s the kind of person that I want to be. I want to be continuously learning and growing. I took a lot of risks when I first started Loud Mouth Brown Girl, I used it to out the men who raped me and my friends when we were children. I used to to secure my own fucking sanity, and when things calmed down I found a niche that I enjoy being a part of.
Now I am one of the millions of Bloggers around the world who talk about mental health and life after trauma and I couldn’t be more proud of myself.
I wasn’t happy with my life last year – I was mostly sitting around getting high not doing anything productive or so it seemed. I was using that time to heal from the realization of the traumas we faced as children.
I was using that time to release all the shit that I had been holding in for more than two decades.
Now that I am free of it, now that I am no longer holding onto it, and now that I have found a way to expel the negativity that I have been holding onto, I have become addicted with sharing my story. I have become addicted to growing and evolving as a professional Content Creator.
I have made decisions about my life that I didn’t think I would ever have the courage to make, and I have found that I quite enjoy this evolutionary journey.
If I had chosen to remain comfortable doing nothing with my life, I would genuinely have lost my damned mind and I would probably still be in the hospital.
Every single day I am trying to find new creative outlets that I can share with my audience, because it’s helping me to get better and stronger. Mentally and emotionally at least. I am still trying to work on the physical part.
I am making better choices for myself this year than I was last year and largely that has to do with being comfortable with not having men in my life. That’s been huge.
I grew up believing that women needed men to be happy, it wasn’t until I took a serious look at my mother’s life that I realized she’d been without a man for more than thirty-five years and she’s actually pretty happy with her life.
That isn’t to say that I want to be single forever, but I have to tell you, not having men in my social or familial circle has done wonders for my mental health.
Cutting people out of my life was hard – actually that’s a lie, it was pretty fucking easy now that I think about it. And while I am forever grateful that they were a part of my life, there are very few of them that I would welcome back with open arms, if any of them.
That’s another risk.
There’s a saying that goes “don’t set your tables up so that at the end of your life you are sitting alone.” It’s a great saying, it means don’t close yourself off to being loved, but the thing is that the people in my past didn’t love me. They didn’t know how to love me.
We teach people how to love us and when we don’t know how to love ourselves, then we don’t know how to teach others how to love us. It’s a toxic cycle that goes round and round until you are willing to take the risk and break the cycle.
You do that by taking a serious look at your life and asking one simple question “how does this serve my best purpose?” My past didn’t serve my best purpose, I was stuck in a holding pattern for years because I had no idea where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do with my life.
Now that I have found my path, the risks and sacrifices don’t seem like risks and sacrifices, they just seem like the next logical step.
I always knew that I was going to have a podcast again one day, I just figured I would go back to calling it Radio Free Voice. I decided to call it Comfortably Uncomfortable Conversations, because I tend to make people uncomfortable with my raw openness.
It seemed more fitting than Radio Free Voice, and honestly, it feels like this time is different. This time I am going to do things my way, the way that I want to do them without caring what other people might think about my experiences or choices.
This time I am going to learn how to edit and market my podcasts in ways that I didn’t know how before. This time I am going to start making it a productive part of LMBG, instead of just a hobby because I need something to fill my time.
Things are going to be different this time because I have changed a lot in the last six years, and with that change has come the desire to continue to grow and evolve. That means refusing to remain comfortable because it’s easy.
I don’t particularly like the sound of my voice, but I listened to every word of today’s podcast, and I am really proud of how I came across. It was informative, it was fun and it was in it’s way very sweet. We talked about her, we talked about me, and it was a lovely conversation with a lovely human.
Taking the risk to upgrade to a paid Zoom account, and Spreaker account, means that I can take this website to the next level and I am pretty excited with what I am building here.
So the question is, are you excited about your life? Because if you’re not you only have two choices. You can sit there and wait for someone to come and pick you up, or you can get off your ass and become an avenger or whatever.
The choice is yours,
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 