My mom loves fresh flowers and plants. I on the other hand can’t keep them alive to save my life, so I don’t really care to have them around.
Mostly I forget that they are there, and need to be watered, and since I can’t keep a plant alive.
I keep remembering that line in recovery about spending your first year healing, your second year focusing on keeping a plant alive, and a third year with a pet.
I’m in recovery, as of this moment. I mean I’m not going to quit smoking weed any time soon, but I’m still in the process of recovering and healing from my past life.
I am healing, just like you, and it’s a process. Some days I do swimmingly well, and other days I’m flailing about like a baby bird.
Healing means being patient, and I hate that part. Because unlike when you burn your arm, or break it, or fall and scratch yourself, with mental health issues you can’t always see the progress unless you look back at where you started, and that can be very triggering.
Once I started really listening to my own brain and hearing the stories that it was trying to tell me about a past I’d been trying to ignore, I knew right away I couldn’t handle it.
I started smoking cannabis because I knew I couldn’t handle what was coming, and I was right. But the problem with me being right is that I expected the rest of the world to be able to handle my trauma when I was barely holding on.
I had expectations, feelings, and beliefs that told me there was someone in this world who could understand what it felt like to have been raised in two worlds at once, with no one noticing until it was too late.
On one hand, I had my family, and on the other, I had the cult and gangs, and never once did I feel safe or free to be myself because I had to protect my family by not telling them about the other, but that meant that few people understood why I behaved the way I did or why my brain would “turn off” when I was traumatized.
When I hear the words “Every Child Matters,” I am reminded that I matter too. The little one inside of me who was burned, abused, traumatized, tortured, raped, and dehumanized by men who knew better and chose not to be better still exists.
She’s angry and hateful towards the world and I don’t fucking blame her. I am too.
It’s not “free” in the West, not for people of color, not for women especially. I’ve longed to say this for a very long time, but beyond being tired, I’m done.
I’m done being a victim. I’m done being victimized. I am on the side of the victims now. I am not alone. There are armies of women out there who are tired of being touched, groped, abused, beaten down, and kicked by inferior men who need to beat on what they perceive as weak, to make themselves feel better about their own mediocre lives.
None of the men who abused me are going to amount to anything. If they don’t change their lives they will end up in prison, or dead, or in an institution at some point because that’s what happens to all drug addicts who don’t fight for their own lives. And by “drug addicts” I’m not talking about actual drugs.
Their addiction isn’t drugs, it’s abuse. It’s all they’ve ever known. They were raised to be what they became on purpose, by men who also raped girls like me, for the kick of it. Because they thought our Brown skin made us inferior.
But it is precisely that Brown skin that I wear like armor. It is precisely that Brown skin that got me through 35 years of abuse, trauma, and PTSD.
This Brown skin is what kept me safe when that cop put his toes into my knee and pressed down until I had a bruise.
It was this Brown skin that kept me alive when I confronted my rapists and saw the truth of what they’d done in their eyes.
It was THIS Brown skin that kept me alive through all of it, and this Brown skin that will carry me through the next 40 years.
My Brown skin is special. It reminds me with every scar, with every mark, with every stretch line, that I am stronger than most people give me credit for, and that strength is terrifying to anyone who has to face my wrath.
The worst thing you can do to a victim is teach them what they’re capable of because then all bets are off.
No, I don’t choose to die today, tomorrow, or any day soon. You fuckheads are stuck with me until I’m finished.
I’m going to buy myself flowers because as hard as I have to be with the rest of the world, I deserve to be soft with myself. Don’t you?
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 