Loud Mouth Brown Girl

Almost seven years ago I lost my shit, went crazy, and told my story that detailed decades of abuse at the hands of grown men who pretended to be bikers, so I would be too afraid to speak up.

When I did speak up, it was the bikers I was terrified of, who gave me the room, the safe space, and the freedom, to tell my story, without worrying about retribution. Six and a half plus years later, and they have kept me safe. I don’t know how, but I know that they were good men, who let me tell my story. Without shaming me for what was done to me.

I will never forget that.

There are good men in evil places in the world, I will never forget that lesson, but the more that I start to find my true self again, the more I start to wonder, why I am doing this?

Recently I told a friend that I wanted to go back to work. I want to work specifically with people who have been trafficked. With Canadian women who have been victims of sex cults, because I know y’all are out there, but I have a lot of work to do before I can be the person that I want to be.

As I write about my dreams almost daily now, I am starting to really hyperfocus on the rest of the world. I am thinking of the women and girls of Palestine, Bethlehem, Jordan, Sudan, the Congo, and all over the world, who never get to grow old enough to see their dreams even become a potential future, let alone a reality.

It’s so weird being in this place where I have a modicum of control over my life. I can get up every day and choose for myself, what I want to do. I will say I am more tired than I’ve ever been in my life. A large part of the tiredness comes from being houseless I am still catching up – not on sleep – on the feeling of stability and safety.

I don’t sleep very well because most nights I dream what was done to me, and with my new doctor that I am meeting at the end of the month I have to go through it all over again to tell him my story. He doesn’t know the full story, and I don’t know how much to tell him.

I don’t trust him. I’ve learned not to trust doctors because instead of believing me, they put me on drugs and told me “The medication will handle my thoughts,” whatever that means.

I don’t really think that Doctors, in particular, know how memories work, because if they did, they wouldn’t give us medication that doesn’t really do anything but keep the anxiety at bay.

All the meds do is make it so I can mask and pretend I am okay when I am really not.

The truth is that although I am making new friends, and although they are wonderful, I struggle to spend more than a few minutes talking. Once I’ve said, “Hi, hello, how are you?” I really don’t have much to talk about.

I can write all day until the cows come home and I can sound intelligent and smart and all the things, but once I go to open my mouth, it’s verbal diarrhea, and it’s never comfortable for anyone involved.

Anxiety is a beast. It’s absolutely the kind of beast that prevents me from being my full true self. I always feel like I have to limit myself in order to “fit in,” and often times I find that I don’t necessarily want to fit into the circles I’ve been invited to.

So I walk away.

There is no way to explain this behavior of mine, except to say that if I feel uncomfortable around you, if I don’t feel safe with you, if it feels like to much work to be around you, I am not making the effort. I am discovering that I am quite lazy. I won’t do shit more than once.

If I clean the house once a week, you’re lucky, if I clean it twice a week I’m sick or angry about something. See my point? I don’t like repeating myself, and yet repetition has been keeping me safe my whole life.

When I was younger and people would tell me I looked good in something, I felt good about myself because it didn’t happen very often, but it also meant that I was constantly trying to re-achieve those compliments on a daily basis.

More and more I am seeing women get actual justice for what was done to them, and I’m wondering why the men who raped me – for decades – got away with what they did, without anyone saying “Hey, wait a minute…” I have to remember that the cops are doing their job, but six years in I still haven’t heard a word about what I reported.

So I sit here and I wait, and I wonder, will I ever get justice?

There’s a part of me that looks back at that world and thinks “I could go back there and get my own justice,” and all I see at the end of that solution is me ending up in jail and it’s just not worth it.

There’s another part of me that thinks about forgiveness, but the problem with that is that you can’t forgive decades’ worth of trauma overnight. It comes in stages, in waves, sometimes all at once, and other times not at all. Forgiveness isn’t easy, it’s a choice you make, every single day.

You have to choose to stop being angry, and I am just not there yet. My childhood, teen years, and early twenties were stolen from me through abuse, trauma, PTSD, hypnosis, drugs, addiction, and more abuse. Some of the addiction was my fault, I let myself fall into the bottom of one bottle after another. But like everyone, I had reasons.

Now as I look at the world, my anxiety is even higher. I know that I have a responsibility to speak on things that matter to me: Mental health, trauma, and healing, are my major focuses.

But I am looking at Israel with side eyes, horror, and outrage right now, and wondering how a small-time person like me can help. I’ve done all I can think of, and I feel helpless.

This leads me to spiral, “OH DEAR CHRIST IF I CAN’T SAVE THE WORLD HOW WILL I FUNCTION IN IT?” This comes from years in the church. It comes from the fact that for at least a decade and a half, my entire entity was made up of and built, by the church propaganda.

We all knew I didn’t belong there, but I was still doing the good work of the church and talking to people about the power of God, so yeah man, I was fully in. I was 100% in the church, even as I tried to pretend I had one foot out the door, and without that safety net, without the walls of the church to teach me, protect me, guide me, I’m not sure what I am supposed to do next.

Any ideas?

Sending all my love,

Devon J Hall, The Loud Mouth Brown Girl

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