Loud Mouth Brown Girl

There once was a story about a girl who in the cold shivering night, showed up at a castle looking for a place to live. The mother of the prince was very excited because perhaps this would become his future wife, thus turning the prince into a King.

But first a test.

The best of everything but the food was made to be too spicey. The girl found it delicious without complaint.

The best clothes but the fabric was itchy. The girl did not complain.

The most beautiful bedroom, but the beds were piled twenty mattresses high, and at the very bottom of the mattress pile, a tiny little pea. Surely this would prove whether this girl was a princess, or a fraud, right?

Well sure enough the next morning the girl woke and the mother asked how her sleep was. “It was fine, except for one tiny spot in my back. Like something was under the mattress.”

Ahah! Only a real princess would notice such a thing…or so the story goes.

ANYWAYS MY POINT IS, My living situation is great, except for a small select group of neighbors, who are going out of their way to make everyone’s lives miserable. Included but not limited to calling the police for no reason, and then crying out loud about being a victim of literally no one, but being afraid that you might be…in short, weaponizing the police to make themselves look like the victim.

It’s very frustrating and makes living here very uncomfortable. Still, I can’t talk about it because I am trying this thing where I don’t mine my life issues, for social media anymore, and yet because these people are having a genuine effect on my real mental health issues, I’m writing about it.

I’m working hard at ignoring them in the halls. I don’t mind having the door slammed in my face if it means I don’t have to talk to them, as I am coming and going from the building, but what I do mind is the constant gossiping and backstabbing, lies, manipulations, and then the crying victim when caught.

I have seen now, what it looks like when you meet people who have mental health issues, that are under-diagnosed, un-medicated, un-dealt with, and traumatizing to the people around you.

I was like that. And I’m one of the lucky few who got help. The people I am dealing with for whatever reason are not getting the help they need, and therefor are making life miserable for the rest of us. I used to be like that too.

So I feel like it’s the universe’s way of putting up a mirror to me to say “you could be this person,” but I never called the cops just because I was angry. I did it because my life was genuinely in danger, or so I thought.

I needed help and I looked everywhere for it, even my former abusers at one point, I did everything I could to escape a life where my mental health issues were bigger than me as a person.

I asked, begged, pleaded, for help, and finally had to move to an entire new city to get it.

Now I’m in a place where I can judge others or try to help them. I tried to help them and they rebuffed my friendship, so I move accordingly. Watching from the outside as people you used to care about tear themselves and everything around them apart is really difficult.

But you can’t force people to get the help they need, and you can’t be the help they need if all they do is set you on fire to keep them warm.

At a certain point you gotta set your boundaries and declare that you’re fine with the pea, not because it means you get to marry a King, but because in the scheme of all the goodness that’s been happening to me, a few rotten peas are not going to destroy my happiness.

Sending all my love,

Devon J Hall, The Loud Mouth Brown Girl