The We Do Not Care Challenge Is The Best Social Media Challenge I Have Ever Found For My Mental Health

Trigger Warning

If you’re one of those people who think that I SHOULD care what you think about me, because you have better shoes, hair, more money, a cleaner, bigger house, We Do Not Care. We are moving forward the best way that WE Can move forward without your shame, or your judgement, and we are doing so proudly knowing that we will get EXACTLY where we need to get, when we get there. And there ain’t shit you can do to stop us.

Proceed if you want to see some awesome videos

So there is this great social media trend happening right now called #WeDoNotCare, and I thought before I dug into today’s post I would share some of my favorite videos with y’all.

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I no longer care. I don’t care if you hate my hair, I don’t care if you think I talk too much about trauma, I do not care if you think I should owe you something because you have a penis.

WE DO NOT CARE.

I have spent the last four years building this website so that I can say to the world, and so that I can PROVE to the world, that I deserve to be on disability while I heal, for what?

So that the people in my hometown can call me a whore? So they can say that I lied about being raped? So they can talk and put shit on my name because they’re pissed off that their evil spirits didn’t stop me from becoming the woman I have ALWAYS wanted to become? Naw, I’m done.

I signed up to be on the Be Your Own Kind Podcast today, specifically because of how much I love Renita, the host. She is light, she is love, she is kindness and she is hope.

Today we talked, we laughed, and I haven’t laughed like that with another girlfriend in I don’t even know how long. I make myself laugh ALL the time, but to have someone ELSE make me laugh? It absolutely heals your soul.

My social media experience hasn’t been so great, y’all know I recently left a group because they decided that I am too much about “me”, what they forget is that for more than 30 years MY life was about EVERY body else, and this is the FIRST time I am spending genuine time getting to know myself.

Y’all don’t have to be here for it, it’s okay I wish you well, but I will NOT make myself small again, to make you comfortable. NEVER again.

So when I saw these videos I laughed out loud, and then I cried and whispered “I want that,” I want the ability to not give a fuck again, about what people think about me, because caring about what people think about me, makes me utterly miserable.

I am exhausted, because I am carrying all the weight of other people’s bullshit, other people’s drama, other people’s pain, other people’s responsibilities. Do you know how many kids that were not mine, NOT MINE, used to call me mom?

Oh hell naw. That shit burns, in my soul, ESPECIALLY because I lost a child, ESPECIALLY because my abusers went out of their way to make sure that any child I DID have would be damaged by the broken mental health THEY caused, and you know what? No. I am going to have kids one day and they are going to be raised by a happy, healthy mom, BECAUSE I took this time to focus on my mental health, BECAUSE I cut everyone out of my life, BECAUSE I no longer give a flying fuck about whether or not MY values align with the values of EVERYONE around me, BUT me.

Do your values align with mine?

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Y’all out there on the streets reading my blog, wondering what I am going to say next, saying shit behind my back but NONE of y’all have the guts to knock on my door, look me in my awake, conscious face, and tell me how you feel? Then NOTHING you have to say about me, matters. End of story.

Do you know how many times I know for a fact people have sat there and talked shit about me thinking I wouldn’t hear, and then how many times people come rushing “guess what so and so said,” no love, we do not care.

If they can’t say it to your face, it doesn’t matter, it’s unimportant, because if you really, REALLY thought it mattered, if you REALLY cared, you’d come to me and say “Devon, we need to talk.”

But instead you skulk around in the dark, you hold secret meetings, you go to the club, a place I haven’t been to in YEARS, and y’all still talking trash? I must be taking up A LOT of y’all time, and you’re not even getting paid to talk about me? Y’all wasting your lives, while I’m over here building empires.

About 15 weeks ago I joined a program called Surrey Shares where I met the wonderful, fabulous, Jessika Houston, and we got to talking and I told her “if you’re going to be a part of my journey, you have to know, I’ve been through hell,” and I told her a lot about what I’ve been dealing with.

Last Wednesday I had to record a story in front of an actual camera man for Surrey Shares, and I was going to talk about Survivors Connection and what a shit show that was, I’d been planning this speech for weeks, literally. And when the cameraman said “action,” or whatever, I legit just talked about Loud Mouth Brown Girl.

I talked about my trauma, I talked about my healing, and I talked about the creation of this website as if it was the thing that was keeping me alive, and I realized in this moment, tonight after taking a nap after the interview, that honestly? I don’t give a fuck anymore. I don’t care if I am rich and famous, if that happens, awesome, because I got this moment.

Every day or almost every day on social media I am posting photos and videos of me happy, laughing, smiling, listening to music, and I NEVER used to do that before I met Jessika. I am about to be a certified cannabis coach, and I am trying to figure out what kind of business I am going to start with this new accreditation, or whether or not I am going to go work for someone else, and I have options.

I have NEVER had options before, and BECAUSE I have options I have the confidence to remember that I was born in flame, and I went to Hell, and I came back and now I am on my way to great things and all the people who want to drag me back into the past, who want to remind me of all the dark times, do NOT have my best interest at heart.

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I do not, and I refuse to wait until I am “older” to be happy. 38 years is long enough to wait, I do not need a man, I do not need a woman, what I need is more of MY SELF.

I need more of MY self, of the person that my youngest, most littlest self looked up and saw and thought “yeah, her, she’s the one that I want to be.”

The ONLY person that I am living for on this planet is myself and yeah that may sound selfish but y’all know my story, you know what I went through to get here.

And honestly? I have come to realize that OTHER people’s definitions of the words that I have used in this post do not fucking matter.

It’s September now and I have the cutest Halloween designs in the shop, and the only reason that matters is because for years I secretly hid my adoration of Halloween, because I was afraid of what people would think of me.

In past years as a child, I didn’t always have the greatest costume, and I rarely had anyone to go trick or treating with, and it always felt like a celebration that should be filled with other people, and now that I am older I am realizing I spent a lot of years hating a holiday I loved, because the people that I was surrounded with were so fucking awful. I always used to think that it was that no one ever asked me, but the truth is that I never really asked anyone to go with me either.

I never asked anyone because I was afraid to be silly, I was afraid to let lose, I was afraid that if one single wild, powerful, Black curl of my wavy hair got lose then people would make fun of me, because they LITERALLY always did.

I was ALWAYS the thing that people didn’t understand, well after four years of writing on this blog, if you don’t understand me now you never will and I no longer have time to explain myself to you.

A lot of this blog looks like me explaining myself, but in reality it’s me creating a murder board, so to speak, it’s my way of understanding how a writer would write me if they could. All the things that happened to me make me who I am, and who I am is a creation of a spirit that exists not in spite of them, but because of them.

This scene. That was literally a door open in my mind. IF my rapists, abusers, pedophiles, and the cops that were supposed to help me had wanted to be good and keep my mouth shut then they should have been supporting me instead of LITERALLY trying to rip me a part.

Who the fuck looks at a woman in a mental health issue situation and calls her a bitch? nuh uh asshole, not when your job is to serve and protect the community, not when your job is to SAVE lives.

It occurs to me EVERY single day that that man could have pulled a gun out and shot me, and not a single person was recording. They didn’t know they had to until George Floyd, now white people are the first people to pull out their camera’s. But I would have just been a woman in an airport who got shot by a cop and there would have been no one to ask why or how because every person who saw what happened stood there and did NOTHING.

Not one person except the doctor recognized the signs of a panic attack except the Doctor who knew when it was over, EXACTLY what it was, without me having to fully explain, that’s a problem.

And it’s one that I am legit here to solve, somehow someway, and if that means saying goodbye to the bullshit of my past then thank the Gods, that I can finally be done with all y’alls crap.

I don’t care who fucks who, I don’t care whose baby daddy did what, what I care about are all the women that I left behind in my race to escape the fucking Hellscape that was life in Surrey BC up to this point.

I wonder if they are okay, if they are safe, happy, housed, if they are living a life where they can CHOOSE who they have sex with, because too many of us did NOT get that choice, and TOO many times when we said we weren’t interested we were called rats, whores, sluts, trash, garbage, fuck y’all.

You know what garbage is? It’s the shit that no longer serves your life anymore that you throw out, and I’d rather have a house full of it then be surrounded by people that are going to try and convince me that I’m nuts instead of recognizing that the reason that I am crazy is because y’all are assholes. Holy Fuck I’ve been waiting so long to say that again, I said it three years ago when I started screaming around my house, but now I’m putting it out here for the world to see.

I AM NOT A VICTIM. I refuse to be ever again. The next man that comes for me is not going to make it, because I will NOT let myself die in order to serve the horny disgusting abusive needs of any man EVER again.

I will never look at my life and think “yeah I’m here now this was all worth it,” because it could have been sooo different, but it wasn’t different, and because of that I am who I am and now y’all are stuck with me. And we do not care if you don’t like it.

There are things that I can control in this world and things that I can not, if I spend the next ten years of my life trying to impress you, then honestly I will not have time to do the things that “I” want to do, and since I’ve done a lot, and still have a long way to go before I am done with this life I’d really appreciate it if those who don’t support me would sit down and shut the fuck up.

Take a breath, get a life, quit watching me and go live your own lives, build your own empires, stop being horrible people, stop trashing each other, stop sleeping with your best friends wives and girlfriends, stop trying to cut each other down so YOU can be the big guy. The big guy and I talked, he thinks your assholes too.

Even the “BIG” guy isn’t mean unnecessarily, and you have no right to do less than that, so smarten the fuck up and go live your own life. If we meet again I’ll see you there, but if I keep walking and ignore your promises of love and help that are really just lies that will continue to cut me deeper than any human has ever cut me, I’m done. Peace out, goodbye, so long, see ya later.

For obvious reasons,

Devon J Hall