As you all know I told everyone to leave me alone about two years because I wanted my time to heal. Now that I have this time I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationships of my past. There are a few people that meant the world to me, and others that I can’t stand the thought of seeing ever again.
There are more still, who will never get a public mention from me, largely because they treated me like crap, and because I treated them like crap. We weren’t friends, we were people who were desperate to pretend that we weren’t lonely, and I can move on from those relationships without shame, guilt or fear.
I am in the early stages of building my business, and thanks to Covid it’s going incredibly slowly, but every sale brings a skip to my heart and reminds me that one day those six dollar sales are going to be six thousand dollar sales.
I know that it’s going to take years, and a lot of hard work and even a little luck, but I will absolutely get there one day, and when I do, God willing I am going to have supporters, friends, allies, and fans that support what I am doing without questioning me about why I am doing whatever it is that I am doing.
They’ll support me because they will see my vision and believe in me, and I won’t have to second guess whether or not the people around me care about me.
That’s because I’ve learned a lot about fake friendships and relationships – and when I say this, I admit that there have been plenty of times in my life when I pretended to be something I wasn’t in order to feel liked and appreciated.
I remember how many lies I told in order to feel like I belonged, and I remember having a hard time keeping those lies straight, which is why I never told two people the same story. I always had a story though.
These days I am focused on being authentic, and being my real true self. She’s strong and powerful yes, but she’s also messy and chaotic.
When I look at the life that I want to cultivate from myself out of the seed given to me by the universe, I see someone who has learned a lot, and has decided to do her own thing rather than trying to be a part of the crowd.
I am cautiously comfortable with my BudSistas’ but I have found that I have been able to talk to them about some of the things in my past, in an honest way, that I haven’t been able to do before with other people.
That’s largely because I genuinely want these women to know who I am and what I am about. I genuinely want to stand at the top of my Empire next to Natalie Cox, Anya Nicole, Khadisha Thornhill and the other amazing women that are coming together each week to remind women like me, that our voices matter.
It is important to me that I be honest with the fact that the reason that I am lonely right now is because I knew and rightfully so, that I needed time to adjust to this new person that started to exist on the same day that I finally started telling the truth.
It’s not easy to admit that you’re not perfect when people are constantly telling you that you are strong and worthy, especially when you don’t feel strong and worthy.
It’s not easy to say that there are things that you can do better, and it’s even harder to make the actual effort to change the things that drive people crazy about you. In an effort to do that, I am focused on being honest with the fact that I used to be a brat.
Working through the process on my own is a bit like fumbling in the dark for the light switch, but slowly but surely I think that I am finding the way.
Sure, it’s lonely at the top if you treat everyone like crap, but given my experience I say this confidently, if you treat people the way you want to be treated, they will still probably treat you like crap.
However, you’ll find one or two, maybe three or four people, who will stand by you and trust in you, and have faith in you, even when you don’t have faith in yourself.
It takes time and it takes work and it takes a lot of honesty, but I know that it’s possible because I have seen other people do it.
In our misery and pain we often “collect” people who are also living in misery and pain, and we find ourselves surrounded, thinking that these people who are here with us in our pain are our family. The truth is they are people who are in pain too, and as they say, misery loves company.
I’d say healing requires privacy and isolation. It requires taking time to really look at your life and see the that there are things that you can control, and even if you can’t fix everything, you can do your best to mitigate some of the damage.
You don’t need a pill to make you happy. You need people that are willing to tell you no, when all you really want to hear is yes. You need people willing to be the individual in the crowd. You need people who are willing to stand beside you when you are right, and challenge you when you are wrong.
You need to know that at the end of the day your true friends will still love you, even if you’re wrong, because they know that you’ll do everything in your power to correct your mistakes.
THAT is friendship, anything short of that is a pile of shit disguised as steak. Don’t eat the shit, it tastes terrible.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 