Disclaimer
Legal Note: You must be of legal age, or have a medical dispensation to use cannabis in your area. The information here is not intended to replace the advice of a medical professional and is only intended for educational purposes from one patient to others.
End of Disclaimer
Sometimes You have Too Be WEIRD, STRANGE, silly, goofy, funny, and then when you’re done PRETENDING, you can be the real person YOU Know lives inside your body. – Devon J Hall
Yesterday, through a program I am taking called Surrey Shares, I had the opportunity to film myself talking about how Loud Mouth Brown Girl started, and where it came from, and where it is going, and I was nervous as hell, but they said I did it so well in the first take that we didn’t need to do anything extra.
I felt so proud of myself, and so I didn’t bother to write a blog post because I wanted to hold onto it. I wanted to save it for myself for just a little while, because I realized that yesterday was the beginning of big things in my life.
Twenty years from now or hell even five, I might look back and remember that yesterday was one of those moments that I am going to remember because yesterday was a milestone.
Someone paid for me to get to the film location, and throughout the entire ride all I could think is “one day this car is going to be a limousine, one day I am going to have a private driver, one day my ambition is going to take me around the world. ”
This wasn’t what I thought I was going to be doing when I first started this website. I just wanted a place. A place that was mine that was something I could use to tell my story so that if something ever happened, there would be people in the world who knew and who know, what happened to me.
That was my first year goal.
My second year desire was to decide to do something with it, because let’s face it, Loud Mouth Brown Girl is just too cool a name to let go to waste.
My third year decision was to decide that I was going to actually try and do something with this, but I didn’t know what so I was willing to experiment until I could pull away enough rock and coal to see what lay underneath.
And my fourth year motivation was just “let’s do this, we’ll see where we get when we are where we’re supposed to be, wherever that is.”
I distinctly remember keeping these thoughts in the back of my mind, because I knew that one day I was going to find out what Loud Mouth Brown Girl is supposed to be, is going to be, might be, could be, and do you know what I realized? It’s a cannabis leaf.
Cannabis to me at least, represents protection from a world that wants to fill you with lies and convince you to detach from your spiritual self. It is a plant that connects us to the earth in way no plant on this planet does. It represents community, friendship, support, love, and destiny. It has a powerful effect on all those who work with it, consume it and welcome it into their lives, and it is unafraid of destruction.
When I first started smoking I was completely certain that it was the better choice, in compared to drinking, yes I’ve said this before.
I had no idea how many different doors and journeys and options would be open to me after I took that first puff.
Ironically, Cannabis also represents decision, passion, strength, and challenge. All of these words are words that have been rolling around in my head and each of them have made me deeply question every relationship that I have ever had. From casual acquaintances to teachers, to people I thought knew and understood me intimately, I started to realize that I am a totally and completely different human than I was twenty years ago. Well of course right?
Cannabis is thought to have been introduced to Africa by Indian Hindu travelers, which Bantu settlers subsequently introduced to southern Africa when they migrated southward. Smoking pipes uncovered in Ethiopia and carbon-dated to around 1320 CE were found to have traces of cannabis.-Wikipedia
There is so much that the world doesn’t prepare you for when you are a kid whose been dealing with trauma your whole life. In the 90’s we didn’t know what to say, although child abuse and childhood trafficking had been happening for centuries, we didn’t know how to talk about it, because no one ever did.
Loud Mouth Brown Girl became the place that all the stories in my heart have been recorded, or are in the process of being recorded, and none of this would have happened if I had decided to start drinking four years ago, instead of using cannabis.
There are people who will never understand that I am going to be learning who I am for the rest of my life. I am never going to do things the way that other people think that I should, and I am never going to do things the way that other people think that they would do things.
I am not the person that is going to take credit for being someone that I am not, I did that when I was a teenager and the difference between then and now is the level of maturity that I have been forced to acquire.
I don’t know how to take care of myself in a conventional way, I am just now learning to pay bills, how to work on a budget, and that’s because when people were trying to teach me those things, I was so traumatized that I didn’t know how to take the advice they had given me, and apply it to my life.
There are people that are hanging on to the old version of me, trying to hold me back from the path that I want to take, and sometimes I laugh about that, and other times I cry, but I never ever, let it stop me from moving forward, and that’s the fucking part that matters most in this entire post today.
Not a Single Person in YOUR life Needs To Know the How’s, Why’s, When’s or Where’s of YOUR Life Goals and Dreams…But You. You Know What You Want You Know Where YOU are Going. Let Nothing stop You.-Devon J Hall
Some days every muscle in my body hurts, and that’s because the past is holding on with all the strength of Ironman and twice the stubbornness as Black Widow and Wanda Maximoff combined. I do not care.
It can be so confusing when you are dealing with trauma to define what you want, how you want to get it, how you are going to get it, and to actually do the work to get it. It can be so overwhelming, because when you’ve been abused, your abuser(s) has spent time telling you that you don’t deserve to be free and happy, and they will keep saying it until you believe it.
Coming back from that is like climbing Mount Kilimanjaro without any actual climbing gear. Its damned near impossible, it can be done I’m sure, but it’ll be uncomfortable as fuck.
There are people though, and I know this because I have met them, who have come back from much worse situations than I have had to survive and for me to say that is pretty big, because it’s hard to imagine that people in the world can get more evil than the ones that I know, but anything is possible and I know this for certain.
Wherever there is light and positivity, love and creation, there is darkness, just around the corner trying to find a way to destroy all the good things that are in existence. I don’t know why, I don’t understand why people go out of their way to hurt maybe its because they have a universe given job to be the biggest assholes on the planet, maybe they are really demons or aliens or maybe people just suck.
But whatever the reason that there are people out there pretending that I am who I am because they succeeded in someway of destroying my life or my person, I am still where I want to be.
Sure I don’t have kids at 38, and I am not married, but if I am being honest, my biggest life lesson to this point is that just because I want something, doesn’t mean that it’s what I am going to get. I didn’t get those things because when I looked around at the people I was with, there was not one person on my path that I wanted to have a child with.
If that were not true I would have done whatever it took, to build a partnership with the men in my life, but I honestly didn’t do that. Sure I tried to fit in, sure I tried to matter to people, but I wasn’t looking at anyone in my life thinking “I could have kids with him,” in fact whenever people asked it was a hard pass. And yes, I got pregnant and yes I lost a child, and that….there aren’t really words anymore.
That’s a pain I’ll carry with me forever, but I am still in THIS place, where I NEED to be, so that I can make MY dreams come true, and for the first time in my life I recognize and accept that the journey is not the destination.
I honestly don’t know where the “end goal,” is, I know that I want Loud Mouth Brown Girl and whatever comes from this blog, to be seen and heard all over the world. I want people dancing and cheering like they did in Zion.
Super cheesy right? There’s a reason for that God damnit, by the time you reach your late thirties you realize it doesn’t matter if you make a fool of yourself, it doesn’t matter if you fell down and got hurt, it doesn’t matter if people are cruel to you, if they try to destroy your life or take credit for your work. Did you die?
DID YOU DIE?! No? because you’re reading this post, so CLEARLY you are not dead, and so that means you have work to do. ONLY you can figure out what that work is, you have skills and talents that no one else in the entire world has, that no one else in the entire world can utilize the way that you would.
Loud Mouth Brown Girl exists because “I” needed it to exist, so that I could keep fighting, and somewhere out there in this world, in this dimension, is a little girl thanking God that Loud Mouth Brown Girl Dot Com exists. Maybe it’s me and maybe its someone else entirely, but SOMEONE is happy this site is here.
That’s my goal. I didn’t love standing in front of the camera, but I loved that I had the opportunity to stand in front of the camera telling MY story in MY words in MY way, and for the record it was NOT the story that I had rehearsed. You’ll see it when it comes out because I’ll post it, but until then I am really amazingly proud of myself.
I did something that I wasn’t overly interested in doing and it’s going to be a part of something bigger, and now for the rest of time, that video that I made yesterday is going to be on the record. And you know what? I put it all out there. Not the wishy washy “this is how to sell your brand” story, but the REAL story of how Loud Mouth Brown Girl Dot com got started and I couldn’t be more sincere.
I know that I haven’t always been the best version of myself in the past. I wasn’t trying to be, because I didn’t know how to be a good person, I was too busy being whatever everyone else wanted me to be. Victim, slut, whore, friend, babysitter, mother to children that weren’t mine, now I am a Writer, Teacher, Student, Friend, Ally, Supporter, Sister, Sista, Lover of Art and Music, Dance and Media.
I am a part of the world of story-tellers, Bachante, which to me means “connection, community, and forever,” it’s a word that some amazing storytellers taught me not so long ago.
Words have power, and I’ve learned there are several lists of them that many people have used to describe me, but the only ones I am concerned with are the ones that tell me who I used to be, and the ones that tell me who I CAN be. I got here because of Cannabis, because of the cannabis community.
Saint Mary Jane is a real creature that lives in our world and when you ask her for it, she’ll slap you upside the head and remind yo that you were not born to suffer. You were born to Be.
So what the hell are you going to be?
Your turn,
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 