How many times have you thought about your problems and secretly thought “At least I’m not them,” when you see someone living on the streets or in a tent? I am guilty of this.
No matter what I was going through I was always housed. I was always certain that things were going to turn out okay for me because they always had. I didn’t always know who I wanted to be, or who I was going to be, but I always knew that things were “okay.”
Not great, not wonderful, but okay.
After I got gang-raped you all know what happened. I went crazy, I lost my fucking mind, I wrote some really great books, but I never thought this, would be me.
I honestly thought by now as much as I said it wasn’t what I wanted, that I’d settle down and get married by now. I never thought I’d be a single 40-year-old woman living in a hotel with my disabled mother.
I am shocked. I am not surprised though, when I look at my life and all the things that happened to me, it makes perfect sense that this is where I ended up.
I am not surprised. I am in the cycle of trauma, PTSD, and self-reflection, and while I admit there’s a lot I could have done, I also have to recognize that if I could have done it I would have.
Now I am here and all I can think is “A lot of people have been here before and gotten out, there’s no reason I can’t.” I’ve never told y’all about Nicole, she’s my oldest friend with four kids,
I could play the blame game and blame every person who’s ever been mean to me or kicked me when I’m down but the reality is sometimes shit happens, and there’s no boat.
I don’t have a boat. I’m looking for a place to live from a hotel and I am exhausted, which is to say that I am nowhere near as strong as my mom or you might think I am. She’s amazing. She’s still going to work every day while trying to find us a place to live and she’s kicking ass at staying calm and deliberate.
We’re doing the best that we can, but I didn’t see this coming. No word of a lie, it completely blindsided me and it shouldn’t have. Now that I am here though I honestly feel more aware than I’ve been in the last six years.
I feel like I am stuck. I know what’s happening around me, but I don’t fully know what to do about it, and ADHD is really showing her ugly side right now by forcing my anxiety into a tailspin which is finding me in a place of having to control the fact that all I want to do is kick and scream.
I started this website because I wanted to track my mental health journey, but I honestly didn’t think it would lead me here and I don’t know that I have the coping mechanisms I need to survive this. I am learning on the fly, Dr. Glen Doyle said recently that “we aren’t prepared to deal with the battle storm of emotions when we’ve been traumatized and suddenly go into recovery mode.” Or something to that effect.
Basically what he meant was that we aren’t prepared. Period. No one is. No one can be truly trauma-informed – in my opinion – unless they have lived through trauma, and the resulting “battle storm” to use his word, of trying to understand and cope with all the emotions, that come with being traumatized.
Wow.
Game changer.
I’m learning. I’m learning that no one has this shit all figured out. Life is fucking hard man, and kudos to those of us who aren’t giving up because it really does take everything out of you to get up and face the world every day. It’s scary, and frustrating, and filled with jagged edges that can throw you off the side of a cliff at any moment, but it’s oddly worth it.
Someone else said that continuing to live through the shit storm, is a fuck you to all those people who told you that you’d end up here….well kudos to them too. They were right, but they forgot, lots of people end up here, stuck and abused by poverty, and many more leave it far behind.
I’m one of the many. One day this will just be a blip on the radar story of my life, a moment that I hope will encourage others to seek out help as soon as they need it, instead of waiting until things get too bad to fix like I did.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
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