Fuck You For Making Me Afraid

I have deliberately pushed myself to write, and chosen not to draw, dance, or sing. It’s not that I don’t like these other things, it’s that when I was five years old I decided I was going to be a writer, and I am trying to make that dream happen, and it’s really fucking hard.

I’m not where I want to be, but I am where I thought I would be at this part, and the problem isn’t that the work sucks or that the struggle is hard, it’s not even that I dislike finding new opportunities. That’s the stuff that thrills me because the work that I put into writing an essay means that eventually, someone is going to read the words “I” wrote, and no matter what, they will be changed forever.

Maybe I’m not meant to win awards, but that’s okay because the awards are just confirmation of what “I” already know to be true.

I am really smart, I have always been really smart. I could see things that I couldn’t explain when I was a child, I remember my birth, I’ve seen my future, in a million different ways and I know the one that “I” want.

I’m working really hard to build Loud Mouth Brown Girl into something that matters to people around the globe, and it’s fucking insane because this is just a blog right? But what if it weren’t? What if it were a full-service mental health company? What if I was able to hire other writers? What if I was able to build a foundation around this blog that helped more than just me express myself? What if THIS blog could set the foundation for how we talk about mental health?

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Now some may think that this has nothing to do with anything, except that the shooting of 6 innocent people happened less than a quarter-mile from my house. So shootings, in particular, are a trigger for me. But this one in Buffalo was different. This wasn’t drugs.

This wasn’t “mental health issues,” this was a white man’s deliberate act of violence. An act he planned, plotted and executed because he decided that Black people, don’t deserve to live because we’re taking space away from white people.

I as you all know, have some experience with that. White supremacy has stripped me of everything that I thought I was, and absolutely of everything that I could have been while destroying the lives of people I care about in equally horrific and awful ways.

This week, I found sanity again, and honestly, it fucking terrified me. I saw this vision, of a world that didn’t have shootings, or violence, where people just got along, loved each other, and traded information and education freely. Food, housing, clothing, and medical services were all handed out like candy and the world was a perfect utopia of happiness.

The reason that I crashed is because of the Buffalo shooting.

I got scared, and I mentally ran away, because honestly…he didn’t do it because he was sick and had a bad day, he did it because they were Black.

I’m Black.

When we were kids, it was gangsters – or rather cops pretending to be gangsters who liked to rape children. When we were older it was the secret of what happened to us. It was that that kept us from talking, from sharing our stories, and then we became gangsters, and then I got raped, again and again, and again because the men in charge said it was okay. My whole life has been about being controlled by white men and I’m tired of it.

Everything that I’ve done on this website has been about speaking out against child rape and pedophilia, and since I started doing that I’ve had death threats, I’ve had threats of being kicked in the head, I’ve been threatened with all manner of horrid and awful things. People cross the street when they see me coming, and I expected it, I knew that people would hate me for speaking out, I’m not afraid of death.

What I’m afraid of is not saying all the things that I want to say before I go. Growing up in Calgary I was told that the cops and the soldiers were the good guys, but in reality, it was the Priests, the teachers, and the cops who let me down.

When I told them what happened to me they said I was crazy. When I said there were men out there pretending to be Hell’s Angels because there are so many so who is really going to know or care? They said I was nuts and put me in a fucking hospital. Repeatedly.

And right about now in an office somewhere a cop is looking down at big fat file and saying “Jesus fucking Christ, she was right.”

So knowing who I am, and what I know, how the fuck can you expect me to look at the people of Buffalo who were traumatized, and not think “Fuck, it could be me next?” Especially when I am deliberately choosing to fight against a system built on white supremacy, and designed to destroy the lives of the world’s most innocent?

More than one reporter has been killed in this world, many on purpose because they had the courage to speak out. So we’re doomed if we go to the store to go to the grocery store, and we’re doomed if we talk about what happened to us, and we’re doomed if we stay silent, and you honestly want to know why I’ve lost my mind? Because I’ve had enough.

I’m not just tired, I am literally losing my grip on reality.

In the lat ten years we have faced:

• Trump
• American Soldiers returning home after 25 years in Afghanistan and Iraq, only to see both places completely revert to the way they were before the Soldiers got there.
• A pandemic
• 1 MILLION People DEAD in America, from Covid19 and Omicron
• War in Ukraine
• More pandemic
• More Trump
• Elon Musk and his…whatever the fuck he’s up to which is probably very bad
• More Trump
• Oh and the death of hundreds of Black folk at the hands of police and white folk
• More than 10 THOUSAND Indigenous children have been found buried around North America at the base of the residential schools that were their living Hell
• No answers to the Missing and Murdered Women of BC
• on and on and on

And you expect me, someone who has been gang-raped and raped by individuals more times than I can count, to stay sane after screaming for 39 years about child rape, torture, and trauma, in Canada, which is one of the MANY countries that like to pretend grown as men in cop uniforms aren’t abusing children and turning them into gangsters to feed the birth to drugs to prison to death pipeline?

Yeah, sure. It sounds like a conspiracy doesn’t it? Like a horrendous film where Gerard Butler, Channing Tatum, and Liam Neeson sign up to save the day, except it’s not, it’s my reality and it’s terrible. But for a short while, I was able to dig into the writing and building of this website and forget all the awful things in the world.

And then the shooting happened. A Security guard, Aaron Salter Jr., 55, with his last dying breath fought back. And then another, at a church, Dr. John Cheng, 52 saved countless lives by tackling the shooter who was angry about something or other, and he killed the Doctor. Hero.

To say that I have been overstimulated by violence, by abuse, by all of the negativity is an understatement. It is exhausting to live in a world that is constantly trying to destroy everything you love, but when you’re screaming for help and no one is noticing that’s even worse.

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We are not okay. We as a society are struggling, and while part of me wants to say “fight back, scream, yell, and don’t give in,” another part of me just wants to roll with it, and see what happens, because honestly? I can’t remember where I fit anymore.

Six or seven weeks ago I watched a Ukrainian couple get married, I was watching on CNN while they promised to love each other. Three days later, he was shot and killed. Wanna know what my first thought was? It wasn’t “oh that’s so sad,” it was “well I guess if you know you’re going to die, marriage seems like a good idea.”

Because I am so broken by abuse, I didn’t see a world where I got married, and just as I started to think “maybe the world is giving us a break,” a whole bunch of people were killed, for no reason other than the color of our skin. Hope? What the fuck does that even mean?

Fuck you for making us afraid.

P.S. CNN Just announced a Monkey Pox epidemic, so…welcome to the fucking apocalypse.

Sending all my love,

Devon J Hall