I didn’t know at five years old that I was going to be a Content Creator, because I didn’t know what the hell that meant. All I knew, was that I wanted an interesting life.
I’m going to add a trigger warning here:
I am watching “The Good Place”, and we’re streaming the very last episode when Jason decides that he’s going to “go through the door.” The night I was gang-raped the very last time, I went through a door too. I didn’t realize it at the time, but when I left that little white and green, house or whatever color it was, I went through several doors that last day.
“I just had this calm feeling, like my lungs were filled with air for the first time,” I imagine that’s a feeling we only really get to know when we’re first born to earth, so to me it seems like that feeling a second time, would be like a perfect memory. A memory that says “I’m here, I’m ready to do the thing.”
I’ve been working on this book for a year and a month, and the first draft is done. I’m taking “I Can Do This,” a lot more seriously because this book has to matter more, not just to me, but to the people that read it.
This book promises, or rather I promised this book, would help the readers. It’s my third baby, and the power of three is ever with me this time as I watch this framework for a better life, become a tool that people around the world decide they need to have in their lives.
The last book was a proof of life effort. It was the idea that if I didn’t write the book, I’d die before I got the chance to write a book, that inspired Uncomfortable. I’m not ashamed that fear inspired a book, even if it wasn’t as critically respected as I respect it. It never needed to be. It needed to exist, or rather I needed it to exist, just so that I can say that it did exist.
Now that it does, and that I’ve written a second, I am sitting here realizing that I wrote a book. Again. I hope this feeling never gets to go away. I hope that every time I finish the first draft of a book, I’ll have this feeling over and over and over again because it’s the best feeling.
The tears, the screams, the nightmares, the drama, and the effects of trauma were worth it, because I’m the one who gets to write THIS book, and that’s something no one else in the entire world can say.
I don’t feel complete. I haven’t done all the things on my bucket list that seems to just keep growing, but writing a book intentionally, as in on purpose, that is designed to help others, in an effort to say thank you for all the support I’ve received is only like number six on the list.
I have eighty-eight thousand, for hundred and nine things I want to do before I die, and I haven’t even attached a number to all the things, and for the first time in my life, I actually feel inspired by myself.
I don’t often take it well when people thank me for whatever it is I’ve done for them, or with them, especially when they say thank you for surviving, it’s kind of irksome because I shouldn’t have had to.
HOWEVER, I’m also grateful that I did, because I’m the one who got to write this book, who got to build this website, and who got to share it with some of the most amazing people in this dimension, even if I had to shove my names down their throats for them to hear me.
The world is so big, the universe is so wide, and we have no idea what’s out there. I didn’t really think I had a second book in me, but knowing that not only did I but that the second would be so different from the first, is inspiring to me. I know we’re not supposed to say that, but why not?
We’re told often not to compliment ourselves, not to celebrate the challenges that push us to be our best selves, we’re supposed to wait for other people to celebrate us. The thing is, I’ve gone my whole life with very few people deciding I’m worth celebrating, until it means that what they need, what they want, is achieved often at the sacrifice of parts of me.
I’m not doing that anymore, so today I am celebrating because the first draft of “I Can Do This,” because the title of the book says it all. I can heal. I can be strong. I can get through that night, then I can get through anything else the universe throws at me.
But the one thing that I will never do, is stop believing in myself. I will never ever go back to what was again, because I deserve better than that. ALL Brown girls deserve better than the way that we’re treated, and since I’m the one who gets to say that, I’m also proof that it can be done.
You can learn to heal, you can learn to grow and evolve past trauma, and you can keep going, and see untold dreams and fears and challenges and celebrations, if you decide that’s what you want.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 