Someone who once very much looked like Michelle Obama said that to me, in reference to the words from the great former First Lady of the United States of America. I will never forget it, or where I was – I don’t know what I was wearing, but I remember precisely where I was when this woman said it.
I remember thinking “yeah, we’ll see,” because underneath my calm quiet sleepy behavior, I was quietly seething underneath the surface of everything. I had just started to come out with my story, I had just started talking to people about what had happened to me, and the reminder was meant to give me a sense of understanding. It was her way of saying “yes, I get why you feel the way you do…just don’t lose control,” and I get that, but the more that I think about what I’ve been through, the angrier I get.
Some days I wonder where my place is in the world, and I wonder if I’ll ever come to a place where I can look around myself and say “this is where I belong,” and feel like I mean it. I am not talking about the moments where I am by myself doing exactly what I want to be doing in the moment. I am talking about the moments when I am surrounded by other people.
Our Budsista’s group is planning all kinds of potential event ideas for the days when we’re allowed to be together in person again and as excited about that as I am, I am also terrified of meeting these women in real life.
It has nothing to do with them and everything to do with me, what if in real life I am not the person they have come to know over these last few months? What if I don’t fit in with them the way that I think that I do? What if we meet and we can’t recapture the majick that we’ve found online? But what if it’s better?
There’s that part, and then there’s the anger part. The fact that I as a thirty-seven year old woman have seen the worst the world has to offer, only to realize that I had to go through those things because in the end, if not me who? I am bitter about the fact that I don’t want to wish what happened to me to my worst enemy, I am angry about the fact that I don’t want what happened to me to happen to anyone else.
So if not me, if the universe wasn’t going to choose me, that means that it would have chosen someone else, who? Who deserves to go through what we as victims of the patriarchy go through? We know the answer to that is no one, hence my anger.
Because motherfucker, if no one else should have to go through it all, why should I? That bitterness is something that I’ve been feeling for a very long time and I haven’t been able to convey before.
Last night I had a really uncomfortable dream, and I didn’t like it, so I woke up and said I didn’t want this, and that’s the first time that’s ever happened while I was sleeping before.
Even in my dreams now I can’t find peace from men who think that I should want to want a man to keep the bad stuff away. When I was going through the shit “I” survived that shit, and I did it alone.
Yes towards the end I started drinking on the weekends, but my life didn’t start to unravel until I quit drinking for a couple of years, when the memories started to come back and my brain started to do the work to repair the damage of what was caused through abuse and torture.
All this to say, that sometimes I don’t fucking want to go high. People who are super successful are usually successful because they have the ability to put up with people’s bullshit. I don’t have the energy to do that, I’ll call you on your shit, and I’ll do it in the moment.
I had a former douchebag of a friend who tried to tell me he’d had 2 years sober, and that he was going to help other people get sober, I knew for a fact that wasn’t true, so I called him on that shit, because I worked in recovery and I know how dangerous it is when people who need to trust you, feel like you’re full of shit. He got kicked out of his class, and apparently killed himself. He told me that I was the worst friend in history.
For a lot of years I carried that guilt anymore, because I know that he was entering an industry that was life or death, and I also know that when you can’t trust that your drug and alcohol counselor can’t handle their shit, how the fuck can they help you? Life, or death kiddos.
I didn’t go high when I called him on his shit in front of his classmates and told him that I knew that he hadn’t been sober, largely because people die in the addictions industry, and I have seen way too many people overdose on my watch to let someone who is full of shit into that industry knowing that they might cause harm to those who need him the most.
Do I feel bad he’s dead? Absofuckingloutely, but it proves my point that he was not ready to help others – when you are that far gone that you’re willing to die by stepping in front of a moving train, you are not the kind of person that other people can lean on, it’s not a dig, it’s a fact. You HAVE to be mentally healthy in order to help other people.
I got a lot of people into the recovery programs, but they are the ones that had to do the work, all I did was make a phone call. Throughout my life I have been told that I wasn’t ready to do that kind of work full time and I always got offended by it, but looking back at the last six years of my life, I realize that no matter how much training I might have gotten, I got really fucking lucky. I could have killed someone because I was truly holding on by a thread, and I had absolutely no idea.
I think about the man that took his own life a lot, and I think about my former friend, and I hate how things ended, I wonder a lot if they are the same man but I don’t know the answer to that question, and the honest truth is that I’ll probably never know if they were the same people.
What I do know however, is that sometime’s going high isn’t necessarily the best tactic, but sometimes it is? Life is funny that way, you have to pick and choose your moments, and when it absolutely matters, no matter how much people try to guilt you into doing things their way, you just gotta do what feels right.
ALL OF THIS TO SAY THIS:
House Republican introduces anti-trans legislation that could lead to genital exams for school girls
This here is some kind of pedophilia shit, and I am absolutely positively not going high about it. When JK Rowling decided to try and troll the Transgender community by writing a book about a murderer who was a trans person, I lost my shit, the entire world lost it’s collective shit and rightfully so.
I am sure that Harry Potter is filled with signs that I didn’t see or recognize, but I am not evolved enough to give her a second chance by going back and reading and investigating. She has made it absolutely positively clear that she does not stand with the transgender community and that she will fight tooth and nail for her right to say whatever she wants, however she wants, even if it offends or causes harm to her fans and former fans.
She will sue you, she will defame you, and she will go out of her way to tell the world that she’s right and you’re wrong, and she’s done it before a hundred times.
But this? This is evil on a whole new level. Women and girls already have issues believing that our bodies belong to us because people are constantly policing them. It costs more money to maintain a woman’s body, whether you are cis or trans, not just hormones ladies, we’re talking genetics. Do you know how much money a woman will spend on pads or tampons in her lifetime? Underwear AND bras? Clothes alone cost more money than the average guy’s clothes.
The world is designed to make women feel inferior, regardless of their government assigned gender, and now we’re just going to say to Doctors “go ahead and examine the private and vulnerable parts of these school aged children who don’t fully understand their bodies, because it doesn’t matter how the experience makes them feel“?
I think the fuck not.
I am not Trans, and I try really hard not to speak for the Trans community because it isn’t my place, but as a woman I understand how scary it feels to get an examine in those areas, largely because of my own sexual and abuse trauma history, I can’t imagine how it might feel when you’re told that how you feel about your body LITERALLY doesn’t matter because how YOU feel about YOUR body makes OTHER people uncomfortable.
This is not okay and we absolutely must fight for our trans brothers and sisters the way that we would fight for our cis brothers and sisters.
We absolutely must make sure that not only does this bill not pass, but that it fails by such a huge margin that no one is ever dumb enough to try this shit again. You think that this doesn’t affect us Canadians but millions of transgender youth go through examines by doctors that refuse to recognize their chosen existence every, single, day.
They are humiliated, abused emotionally, physically, sexually, and verbally at some point someone is going to have to say it’s enough.
For what possible reason is there for the GOVERNMENT to decide that Doctors have to examine young girls and boys? (Specifically in this case, girls,) How do they fucking justify this with anything OTHER than the only reason they have being hatred and the desire to humiliate and abuse young girls?
If you’re okay with this you need to stop following me on social media because we cannot be friends. PLEASE tweet about this bill, pass it on to your neighbors, friends, and family, you can find more information about the bill here.
I am so sorry girls, you deserve a better world than this.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 