At the beginning of 2020, I had plans. I was going to save every penny that I could so that I could put it into my business. Except I wasn’t making any money because I’d also decided that the money that I’d spent in twenty-twenty was going to charity. I bought eight Loud Mouth Brown Girl hoodies with the money I’d had donated, and the money raised from my book. It was all I could afford.
They are going to the Surrey Women’s Center next week, I’ve been busy.
At the beginning of twenty twenty I thought I was going to be fine. I thought that things were going to work out no matter what happened, and I couldn’t stop myself from having faith, as hard as I tried.
That’s because I’d had dreams that Jesus and Santa Maria were here, and there is something about those two that just give me hope. I won’t go into what the dreams were about, because they were personal but they gave me an anchor to hold onto, and I really hadn’t thought about it until this moment, but it’s absolutely true.
My faith in Jesus and the Mother are what got me here today, and for the first time in my life I am not embarrassed by that fact.
I used to be, largely because when it came to religious history, specifically, I was the smartest girl in school. I didn’t know math, I didn’t know science, but I knew the cannon of the Catholic church like the back of my hand.
This was embarrassing because it made other kids thing I was a nerd, or a dork, it was embarrassing because there are a lot of people who live on the outside of Catholicism that look at it the way that I or you might look at any other religious cult, sect, or organization on the planet.
Growth and experience, time to ponder the questions of the universe, and even the dreams that I have had, allowed me the space to realize there is more to life than the catholic way of doing things.
The catholic church, in particular, has done heinous things to survive the last couple of centuries. To itself, and to those outside the church, the idea of Christ has been used as a weapon against anyone and everyone, in the name of it’s true God, power.
I’ve had dreams that I’ve talked to God, and I’ve had dreams that I have talked to the Devil, and the one thing that I can say that I absolutely believe to be true, is that whether or not we like it, 2020, was meant to happen.
I think the world needed a bit of a break from humanity. I think of 2020 as a form of punishment against humans, a culling of the herd, if you will. I know that this is hard to hear, but I just believe that humanity has been so awful to itself, and to this planet for so long, that the planet had enough and said “alright, now it’s my turn to fight back.”
My heart is filled with this idea of chaos right now. We lost so many amazing human beings in 2020, so many millions of people that could have changed the way that we see the world if only they’d but had time. In some cases some of those people did change the world, in big and small ways, profoundly.
There are days when I sit here and I curl up and cry and wonder why the hell I was spared, and that is such a heavy weight on me. Especially because so many times in the past I honestly felt like I deserved to die, and many times when I almost did, or absolutely should have died.
The only conclusion that I can come up with, is that the universe has a purpose for me. I believe that the God’s exist, I believe that there are many, and that they represent the oldest of the old, and the wisest of the wise. I think they are our ancestors, watching over us day and night, nudging us in the directions they need us to go so that the world can keep on spinning.
I do not any longer believe in the idea of “one God,” there are too many stories about too many characters that are so different for their to only be just one. But I think that at the beginning of time, the first living existence came to understand at some point that all things must come to an end. That is just the natural order of things.
In order for something new to exist, something old must cease to exist. This is how I have come to understand death.
This is the only way that I am capable of understanding death, because it is such a complex and varied journey. In 2020, the entire world faced a pandemic for the first time in a hundred years. There are people who survived the last pandemic, still surviving through this one.
If that isn’t a slap to the face from the universe I don’t know what is. I learned, thanks to the Corona virus, that life is precious, it’s more precious then I ever realized before. You could be fine one moment, and gone the next so quickly. I learned this when my aunt Michelle died when I was sixteen, but it really hit home in 2020.
There are so many people that I hope are okay, that I hope are safe, housed, fed, and loved. I don’t check in with them because yes, I need this time to become my butterfly self, as my friend Trish Roberts would say.
Just before 2020, we lost Chester Bennington, who is the first person in the world that I think would have understood me. His music touched me in ways that I didn’t know I needed to be, it opened doors to my emotions or my chakra’s if you will, in ways that no one had ever been able to explain before.
His music just made sense to me. In 2020 millions of people around the world lost their version of Chester Bennington, their mother, their father, sister, cousin, aunt, child…I have absolutely no right to complain about my life. Things are going well for me. I didn’t nearly freeze to death in Texas, I live in Canada, I am still alive, and so far my abusers haven’t come back.
The nightmares are still ever present in my mind – reminders of abuse and trauma – ever aware is my mind of the pain that I experienced all those years ago, but there is a strength in me that I didn’t know that I had, or that maybe I just didn’t know how to identify.
2020 and the Corona virus are the best things that have ever happened to me. People are so much more aware about mental health, people are reaching out and offering me opportunities I only used to dream of having, and my life is starting to fall into place. Things are finally starting to make sense, but also ever present is the reminder that billions of people are suffering.
That doesn’t stop me from being proud of my success or being thrilled with all these new adventures, but it reminds me of where I came from, and that wherever I end up, I must never forget those that lost, so I could win.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 