This means that I just have to finish the free Serving It Right course, and take the thirty dollar test, which is a lot more heavy than I expected, but super important, and then I can start applying for jobs at dispensaries.
This is really super cool, because I don’t talk about this a lot, but I have waited many, many, many years, for Doctor Sulak to exist, so that I could take his course, and while I want to say that I didn’t know that’s what I was waiting for, I’m pretty sure I knew exactly what I was waiting for.
More than one person on this planet knows full well that they are waiting for something, or someone, to show up, before they can make the changes in their own life, needed to be truly happy. In the movies it’s always always a hot man or woman who throws you off your game and falls in love with you just to show you that life can get better.
In my case it’s Doctor Dustin Sulak. Finding cannabis when I did wasn’t an accident, I was too busy living life to sit around and be stoned all the time, and in MY case, that’s precisely what would have happened. I would have done exactly that instead of learning about who it is that I want to be.
Cannabis like a lot of things for me, was always a goal in the future, because it’s always been something that’s been around my life, whether it was my parents friends, or neighbors, friends of my own, or people I saw just walking down the street, cannabis has always been there, waiting.
Now it’s a part of my daily life, and I am still awestruck by the fact that I survived so much, for so long, without it.
I try hard not to try too many people to encourage cannabis, because I don’t want to confuse you, it can’t solve every problem on earth, nothing can, but it does have a wide range of capabilities that are literally nothing short of majickal.
I am pretty convinced that if Cannabis is an earthly plant, it’s only because the seeds come from a place that we have not yet seen. The way that whatever chemical makeup of cannabis binds with our bodies, minds, and souls, IS not human. In 38 years I have never felt anything that makes me feel more connected to the universe around me that cannabis does.
Movies will tell you that a hot rich guy with a big dick will do that for you, but I’m pretty sure that’s so you’ll buy brownies instead of weed.
“Your Ancestors Called it Magic, but You Call it Science. I Come From a Land Where They Are One and the Same.” Thor
When I hear the stories of my sister Cannabis Educators, when they talk about the experiences they are having, and even the miracles they are or have witnessed in their own bodies, I find myself nodding and thinking my head is going to fall directly off my head.
Since it never does, since I am more productive, and more content, with the fact that my life is a chaotic mess, than I ever have been before. Years ago a former friend asked me “why are you here?” many of my friends back then knew that I was volunteering at a church, and they couldn’t understand why it was that I wanted to be around a bunch of people who did smoke cannabis.
It was because they were fun, and colorful, they were beautiful in their openly weird and traumatized souls kind of way. Everyone I used to know was so different. We had punks, and goths, and skaters, and models, we had future teachers, and doctors in our group, but each of us couldn’t see past “this moment,” at least once in those days.
We all had days when shit just sucked, when life was terrible and awful, and for the most part when we were together, we laughed until tears came out of our eyes, and even though I was mostly cannabis free, I drank a lot with those people and I regret not very much.
A few violent escapades that I could probably do without on my ledger, but otherwise I’m pretty okay with what happened, mostly. It makes me laugh every single time people ask how I can sit and smoke weed now, when I was so adverse to it before.
It wasn’t because I wasn’t ready, it’s because in all honesty, I truly believe that I was just trying to find some control over my life, and saying no whenever I was able to, was about containing as much control as I was allowed over my life.
When I finally decided to start using cannabis as a medication, it was a choice. I struggled with it for a lot of reasons, mostly because I was afraid of what people would think of me, and then I realized that I had just been arrested for having a panic attack on an airplane, and I no longer gave a shit.
Yesterday someone posted this on Twitter, the tweet in the middle of these two, was my response that ended up being a thread.
I genuinely and literally screamed when I saw those words. I screamed because people don’t see being a survivor as “work.” Being treated as a sex doll by men who will beat and rape you for hours on end, just so they can pretend they felt something, or worse, that YOU felt something for them, is work.
It takes the kind of emotional toll that no one who is not you, can possibly understand.
Being expected to deal with the fall out of PTSD in every single one of it’s twisted, fucked up, and tatteredly evil ways, is work.
Being expected to do all that, AND tell our stories, while being vulnerable, while being happy, while making sure that we tell our stories in ways that don’t make YOU want to kill yourself, is work. It’s the kind of work that literally no one on this planet wants to do, which is why so few people talk about their stories.
So when we do, we deserve to be compensated, right? When a teacher stands in front of a class, and takes all the information they have gathered through their experience, they get paid, and as Doctor Jessica Taylor said yesterday, why the hell should the needs of survivors matter less?
I say this because in this tweet thread I said that I could have been an astronaut if I hadn’t been a sex slave, I could have been one of the first Black women of our generation, to travel through space, and instead I spent my life with my body being used as a sex doll, and my brain like used like a personal journal for all the abusers of my life.
I am tired y’all. This certification means that when I get up on a stage and talk about what I’ve learned, my story doesn’t have to start and end with “I survived being a child sex slave, and no one knew for thirty plus years.”
My story can now shift, it can change, and there are new doors open to me, because after five years of experimenting with cannabis, I am now able to say that I am a Certified Educator. I can now afford to step out on all the limbs I was afraid to step out on when I was younger, BECAUSE I have had these least few years to explore my own true power.
That all being said, not every survivor is so lucky. Not every survivor has the ability to hear the voice that says “you can change it you know,” because they are too inundated with the memories of all the bad stuff, as my own inner Little calls it.
I’m never going to be able to hide that I had a mental health breakdown that forced me to do things I wouldn’t have done if I could have continued to hold back the rush of emotion that comes with how much I had to survive, just so that I could live in a house that has a wild bird AND a small mouse in it. (God love cats, don’t at ALL miss my damned dogs who couldn’t bring god awful wildlife into my fucking house.)
My life is weird, and complicated, and majickal, and strange, and one day many a movie will be based on various pieces of experiences that I have had, but until then, I finally get to re-arrange the letters of my titles, so that instead of just being “A victim, a survivor, a blah blah blah,” I can finally say I am an Educator.
To someone like me that means the world, it means more than any romance that I could write, or any supernatural thriller, I spent years trying to be a writer, just because it was something to do to occupy my brain so I didn’t think about what happened.
And eventually I BECAME a writer, who spends all her time talking about all the things that happened to her, so that she can finally start building the life SHE wants, which is precisely what I thought I’d become.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 