Stay Lifted Sis

So yesterday I had to see my Psych Nurse and my Psychiatrist, and after the meetings were both over I took a moment to say thank you. Of all the people in my life who have helped me get to this point, they are the two most important.

They have sat with me while I cried, they have offered me support when I thought I was alone, and while it took what felt like FOREVER to find them, I am rightly here where I am meant to be, BECAUSE of these two women.

Every inch of my body has been marked by the bullies who abused me. By their words, by their touch, by their belief that they could turn me into a twisted less worthy version of themselves because they wanted to believe that they were the perfect version of themselves, and thus they could do whatever they want.

I think back into the days of old to the women who were supposed to be my friends, to the men who said they loved me, and I realized recently that I’ve never been in love, but I have felt love. In equal measure, and sometimes not always, the only real boyfriend I’ve ever had, was both there for me, while simultaniously helping to add to the chaos of my life.

We lost a child, although we were not on the same side of the spectrum when it happened. We were both very broken people trying to hold onto each other while simultaniously pulling each other down.

I still think of him often and I don’t think about the bad times – although I’ll never go back to him, I will be forever grateful that he was a part of my life, that he told me beautiful lies instead of ugly truths, and that when I DID discover the ugly truths, he was already gone. If he’d been there when I fully discovered the truth of who I was, who I was meant to be, and who I could have been, I’d have killed him.

Misery loves company, and that’s why so many people who are miserable stick together. I didn’t know that I was miserable, because I didn’t know what that meant. I’d been miserable so long that I lost my happy self, I lost the pieces of me that reminded me there was majick in the world, and for the most part yes, they were stolen by people who WANTED me to forget that there is majick in the world.

MY forgetting, meant that they could take advantage of me, that they could lift themselves out of the darkness by stepping on my head, and when I would say “no,” or “stop that,” then it was my fault because I should have known better.

Now I’m the one that’s sitting here writing this and this morning as I was trying to design a new logo for the podcast I realized something: Stay Lifted Sis, although reminded to me by a Budsista, was actually FIRST said to me by my childhood best friend Kate Barnes, who has a new and very married name.

Kate has gotten married, she’s got two beautiful amazing children, and she’s working on building her own business, and even though we’re not in the same place geographically or socioeconomically, we are in our very own ways the women we pretty much thought we’d be.

She wanted to travel the world and be a mom, she was always more practical than myself, and for a really long time during this healing journey I thought I had to PROVE that what I am doing with Loud Mouth Brown Girl matters.

To who?

Who am I trying to prove myself to? I am THE Loud Mouth Brown Girl. NO ONE on this planet, in this dimension, in this timeline, no one in the universe can be ME, better than ME.

So who the fuck am I trying to prove shit to? And who the fuck am I trying to prove it to?

Plenty of people are watching me from the outside pretending that they aren’t, and they’ve been doing it a long time because we are conditioned to believe that we have the RIGHT to judge others.

Stay Lifted Sis reminds me that I deserve to celebrate my survival, it tells me that I was right all along, that even though I FORGOT to remember that I am phenomenal, that I am beautiful, powerful and strong.

I am starting to remember now, I am starting to remember that I forgot to remember who I was because I knew if I remembered I wouldn’t make it out of the last phase of my life alive. MORE secrets about who raped me and when they raped me has come out, at least to myself and while most of it is stuff I’ll probably never share, it’s still important for me to have those memories.

There are a few that I refuse to look at, I know mostly who was there or at the very least what they did, and that’s enough for me. I can move on without knowing every nitty gritty detail, whether people like it or not.

Every once in awhile I have to go “back into my brain,” to dig out old memories and then the parts of me that are left over kind of “forget” that they are only here for awhile, that they are not the conscious parts of my brain.

They are the parts of my brains that are SUPPOSED to be protecting my body while I do some research on what the fuck is wrong with me, and then it’s a huge battle to find myself again, and when I do there is always a moment of “aw Christ, I did it again.”

This is another kind of trauma response, believing that I need to swim in trauma in order to heal, but sometimes I realize that it’s okay to let go of the balloons filled with shit that have been holding me back.

It’s like climbing out of a mud bath and going to shower, but never being able to fully remove all that mud from your body, and it’s exhausting.

Sometimes I have to stab and kick at the invisible drama that is trying to wrap around me, but there times I can just ignore it. There is a part of me that realizes that I am haunting myself, and yes we absolutely all do this, and we have to remind ourselves that the one that is HERE is in control, but that doesn’t mean that their decisions are always honest and pure.

I think there will probably always be parts of me that are going to fight for control over MY life, but it’s a battle that I am willing t take on, because the 1 thing that I AM trying to prove, is that I am who I say I am, to MYSELF.

I’ve done things that absolutely SHOULD not be possible, and I will spend the rest of my life trying t understand and explain how I survived, but I am NOT going to apologize for the fact that I survived.

The moment you DECIDE that you no longer need their influence in your life they cease to matter, if only because at the very least, they have literally nothing else to do in their lives but destroy you. That’s their mission, because if it wasn’t, they would have to focus on all the shit that makes you miserable.

They will tell you that you’re their friend to your face, and behind your back they will be sharpening the knives so that someone ELSE Can stab you in the back so THEY can claim they were innocent.

The more you try to ignore them, the more that you build security walls and find ways to circumvent their abuse and the trauma it’s caused the more that you realize that you’re on the right path because that’s when they up their game and try even HARDER to destroy you.

The thing that YOU have to focus on is that you WILL get through it. The trauma fucking sucks, it’s like being in a never ending Horror House on Halloween while you know for a fact that the ACTUAL Serial Killers of The Purge are coming for you at the same time.

Yeah it feels exactly like that, but I’m still here, and the one person that I know would understand what it is that I am going through only because he’s been there with me when it’s been this bad before, isn’t here to help me through it. At least not physically.

But the REMINDERS of the lessons that he taught me will stick with me forever, the moments that we had, good, bad, and absolutely evil, will remind me forever that I have survived far worse than him, far worse than he could have possibly imagined what he could have become.

So if I can live through all that, AND STILL be here to tell the tale MY way, the Devon J Hall way then baby I am not stopping now. I’ve come too far to give up, I got miles to go, and miles to see. You with me?

Sending all my love,

Devon J Hall