My whole life I’ve done what I was told. By my parents, by men, boys, girls, everyone who pointed at me and said “This is who are you to me,” was right because I never ever, tried to break the mold.
Whatever other people wanted me to be, I was, because I didn’t know how to be anything else. No one taught me to be independent, and when I tried to be my own person I was often violently reminded, that this was not allowed for people like me.
Whether it was church, school, or sometimes home, I was rarely safe.
Now I’m safe all the time and I don’t know how to explain to people how amazing that feels. Everything in my life has changed. I’m living in a whole new place, I am living. I am going on adventures and making new friends, but I haven’t yet found myself comfortable testing the boundaries of my new neighborhood.
If I know where I am going and I have the funds to get there I still find myself wanting to take cabs instead of wanting to walk.
But that being said, I walk a lot more these days than I used to. I am now here walking from the grocery store to the dispensary store, sometimes to the liquor store, but I am walking. I am healing.
This isn’t the place I thought I wanted to be, but it’s so safe and warm here that I am not ready to leave it yet.
Someone recently said that and it made perfect sense to me, it’s not where I planned on being, but it’s where I need to be and it feels good to be here.
I wouldn’t be here though, without a lot of people working hard to find us a place to live, without an entire community of support that provided us with the funds for hotel rooms, and honestly? I’m still traumatized by that.
Being houseless was terrifying, and there was no part of it that was “fun,” it was just an experience I wish I’d not had to go through, I lost so much, my animals, my home, my safety net, and my comfort zone were all ripped away from me because I couldn’t take care of myself.
I never want to get that sick again, but I also never want to get to the place where I ask for help and my requests go ignored by the people with the power to make changes.
So I want to learn to advocate for people like me. This is what I’ve decided. Yes, I want to work in the cannabis industry, but I also want to work with trauma victims who are so traumatized, that they can’t work with other folks.
Because other folks don’t know what I know, I have a lot to learn, but I still have more experience with sexual abuse than the average counselor.
I also know that given my experience, there are only two roads I can take…I can keep going, keep pushing forward, no matter how tired I am, or I can give up. Stop here and put LMBG away, get a regular job, and just be a normal person.
I think we all know the answer to that, don’t we?!
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall,
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 