Loud Mouth Brown Girl

I walked 4-5 kilometers by myself today. I’m pretty impressed. Sure, I used to walk through Vancouver, Surrey, North Delta, and New West, all by myself lots, but that was the before times.

Before I remembered everything and sat down to start writing it all out.

I’ve come a long way, but I resent that I don’t have therapeutic options to help me out of this mental mind fuck that I am going through. I resent that there are not services for women of color – for Black women, raised in Canada, who were abused to the degree I was. I know I am not alone. I’ve met others.

I am not special. I’m vocal, and I am proudly so. I don’t know where this website is going, but I want it to be an integral part of supporting Black women’s mental health, across the country. The fucking planet.

I want Brown girls from all over the world. China, Africa, South Africa, West Africa, England, Paris, America, Canada. I want to give each one day where their mental health is prioritized, and where they feel special. Where they feel like their voice matters.

I want to put on conferences that celebrate Black mental health patients, who are healing from serious trauma and are still finding ways to make their lives count, by living those lives to the fullest.

I want to show little Black and Brown girls everywhere that they can be anything they want, and that no matter what the white or hate-filled world says, they have power inside of them that they haven’t even begun to tap yet.

Recently an Indigenous friend of mine told me she was “Getting back in touch with her femininity after years of trauma,” and I feel that. All of the women around me are finding their own inner power again and it’s glorious to witness.

I am surrounded by feminine power, even though I am coming into my own as a non-binary person who presents as a woman, and finding that for too many years of my life, the male energy I was surrounded by was absolutely evil and toxic.

Being free of that toxicity is fucking terrifying, which I know sounds strange, but for so many years I got comfortable being in the darkness, being abused, it was just another day that happened to me.

It wasn’t something I talked about, at first because I was afraid but then because it was happening so often who would believe me?

Now I’m free to talk about it and I can do so, but I am also confused with myself because I want to explain to doctors, teachers, and healers, that what they think our reality is is very different from our actual reality, but too many of them are so convinced they know everything, they don’t want to hear me.

One day I will host a summit of Black women from around the world, and we’ll bond, and talk about healing, mental health, and trauma. Doctors and healers will come and they will hear first-hand accounts of us learning how to heal together. As one unified community.

We won’t judge each other on skin tone, but on ability, on voice, on touch, on who we are as people. We’ll make connections, friends, and allies, from around the world and it will be time to remember.

In my life over and over again, white men who had power over me made choices that affected me in ways I did not consent to.

I have the power to consent or deny consent now if I want to, and I have decided that my body belongs to me. I know that I am overweight, and I know I have a long way to go and a lot of water to drink, but I am going to get to where I want to go, without the shame and poverty that I grew up with.

During the writing of this post, I took a long ass break, to go and sit by the river with the one Black woman I know who doesn’t judge me for being a mixed-race Black person, who chooses to remain non-binary, regardless of my reasons.

We sat we talked, we sat silently, listened to music, smoked the ganja, laughed, and then went our separate ways and it felt good to just sit in nature and heal.

I want more of that, on a larger scale, for all my Black sisters regardless of how much or how little Black they have inside of them.

I think that the Black community needs to heal, but the truth of it is that we’re so busy taking care of everyone else, we don’t have time to heal.

During election season Black women around the world are out en masse making sure that the votes of their neighbors in their communities are counted, and then when shit goes haywire because more white people vote against their better interest, we are also the ones who get blamed for not doing enough.

Everything that I want for this website is possible. I just need to be patient, which is the hardest part, especially when you have mental health issues. Money is a big issue for me, without working at another job, I don’t have the funds yet to promote the project the way I want to.

I grew up in a world that didn’t want me here. For years I was convinced I had to earn my place on this planet, but the truth is if the world didn’t want me here, it should have stopped me from showing up in the first place.

Shit life is hard, but it’s the life I have, and out of it, I am absolutely bound and determined to make something beautiful.

Sending all my love,

Devon J Hall, The Loud Mouth Brown Girl