Yup! If you are working on your shit, going to counseling, changing your behavior, and learning from those around you, I absolutely soulute you. Soulute you, because from one scarred soul to another, I see the work you’re putting into the world, and it’s inspiring me to keep going.
Right now as I write this, there is a world that is living in peace and a world that is living in constant fear of being in Death’s feeding ground.
I live in the side of the world that is at peace. For years I used to intellectually soak up the dystopian favorites that we all love with pleasure and wonder often in equal measure.
I used to wonder what the world was like outside of the frame of these stories, and now I know. We are.
Those of us talking about sexual abuse, trauma, PTSD, CPTSD, and all the ailments that come with mental health issues, prepare the next generation to do better than those that came before us.
Each generation is learning how to tweak the ways in which we acknowledge mental health, but because so much is happening so fast, all around us, it’s hard to keep up with the latest statistics and education on mental health.
More and more genuine people who are struggling with mental health issues, every day, normal and average people who work as teachers, doctors, lawyers, students, taxi drivers, plumbers, and librarians, are telling us that they are struggling with their mental health, and they are looking for solutions by any means necessary.
Mental health is no longer considered a death sentence the way that it once was, and it’s certainly not treated with the same kind of grueling, and sometimes often evil punishments of the past.
We know better now because patients are having their day in court, because patients are leading us into the future of medicine by sharing their journey’s any way they possibly can.
Through Tik Tok, Twitter (X), Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Tumblr, Mastodon, and so many other platforms young people are coming out and honestly speaking on their mental health issues and letting us know that the way they feel, isn’t the way they should have to feel.
It’s fucking important to see you sharing your stories. It’s inspiring to know that I am not alone, it’s honest to tell the world that you’re doing it for others, but really, at our core, we’re doing it so that we can keep a record of our shit, so people can stop gaslighting us into believing we didn’t speak up when we know we did.
It’s because we know that if we don’t tell our stories, no one else will, and that’s the scariest thought I can imagine. I’m grateful to women like Dr. Ashley Perkins for speaking out on mental health the way she does because she bridges a gap between women’s mental health and white women’s mental health in a way that someone like myself cannot.
Having my sister in mental health fight the good fight with me on behalf of a different segment of the community is what intersectionality is all about, and together we are showing it’s possible to have equity in a community and diversity at the same time.
The world that we’re fighting for is entirely possible. I truly believe that as I write this, this world is going through a systematic shift that will change the flow of information and the way that we perceive the information we are given.
Knowing that, I am starting to realize how important it is to continue pushing the idea that when we’re writing stories about the world, we must also look at how the stories “we” are writing, affect us, as individuals, long before we think about how our words might affect our audience.
I’ve read some of my work and wept in joy that “I” was the person to write “those” words, at that moment in time. I’ve also looked at my work and been disgusted with my take on a certain situation or experience.
I’m growing as I learn and learning as I grow, with an audience of people watching me to see me make any number of mistakes and all I can think is…”I hope I don’t fuck up.”
I have no idea what “Loud Mouth Brown Girl” is going to become in 2024, but the more that I think about it the more that I really want to make all of 2024 about focusing on one’s mental health, after trauma.
Everyone talks about the “trauma” part of what happened to you, but very few people know the answers when it comes to the question “what do I do with this?” I started a blog, mainly because I’d already been doing it for 20 years and writing was all I’d known since I was thirteen years old.
I’m tired of sitting back and watching “Industry insiders” get paid to talk about mental health issues as they pertain to women of color when women of color are never offered those positions. And so I want to fight for my place in them, but I also know that I have no interest in being of interest, to those in the main stream media. That’s not my audience.
My audience is women like myself who are considered radical, women who went through exponential amounts of change to get where they are now, and women who had to fight, scream, lie, scratch, and do whatever was necessary to survive.
Those are my women and I am surrounded by them every fucking day of my life. I don’t know why or how I got to this place but I am glad I am here.
I am only here though, because of those of you in the mental health community who showed me how to get here, who showed me that “healthy” was a possible destination for folks who deal with mental health issues.
That doesn’t mean that life is perfect, or that things are going to be great forever all the time, it means that at this time in place, I am surrounded by folks who are working on their shit, while simultaneously taking time to teach me how to work on my shit.
I am as they say, fucking blessed.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 