Loud Mouth Brown Girl

So my mom has a concussion. She was hit in the head several months ago by a woman who came into her workplace and started harassing folks.

Mom turned her back and the woman smacked her in the head.

The most interesting thing about this situation is that it’s helped me to understand my mom a lot better than I used to.

I have mental health issues, but there isn’t really a “rehabilitation” process for people with mental health issues.

There isn’t one set of rules or suggestions that we can use to help us feel better, to feel stronger, because so many things can go wrong, and so many things can go right.

We have to kind of push and pull, tug and shove, to find what works, and what doesn’t.

Through watching my mom go through the healing process with her Occupational Therapists, I’ve started to realize is that when I started this website, I started working with small goals to help me achieve little moments of happiness.

But over the years setting little goals became overwhelming because I’ve had so much real-life stuff going on. Now that I have settled into my new apartment, and now that I have space to look around, I am starting to remember that I need to start setting little goals again.

When it comes to Mental Health rehabilitation, we need to take things one step at a time.

“What can you do for the next five minutes?”

In two or three days the question changes,

“What can you do for the next ten minutes?”

The problem is that we’re so focused on what we’re supposed to do, that we forget to take time to do them properly. “How will folks feel about me if I don’t do this?” is a constant barrier for some people.

It stops people in their tracks and prevents them from being able to move forward.

One of the things that my mom’s OT suggested is having a timer. Set the timer for five or ten minutes, and try and see how long that lasts for you.

Taking notes during a phone call or conversation might help you to remember things you tend to forget.

These are small tips that I think I might utilize for myself because I might not be able to clean every single day for thirty minutes. Still, I can clean every day for ten minutes, and given the size of our apartment a ten-minute clean is a massive improvement when it needs to be.

I like my life right now and I want to keep liking my life, but I also know that keeping this life means having difficult conversations with my doctors about what I’ve been through and why I am the way that I am.

I think the reason I struggle so hard with my doctor, is that he in particular doesn’t believe me about being raped. And because he doesn’t believe me, it makes it difficult for me to be interested in being vulnerable with him.

I struggle a lot with the fact that I was raped, and now I have to constantly prove myself to people whose job it is to help me get passed the fact that I was raped and abused for so long.

I don’t think it matters how or why I was raped as a child, I think the important thing is the fact that it happened. Now my question to the doctors is “how do I move forward, so I can live a productive life?”

My genuine fear is his response will be to tell me to “Stop pretending,” because I am convinced he thinks I made it all up.

If someone has a broken leg, we don’t tell them to get over it, or to pretend the pain doesn’t exist. We acknowledge the pain, the trauma, and we do the best we can to heal the wound so it doesn’t hurt anymore.

The same approach must be taken with victims of domestic, cult, gang, and sexual assault. We must acknowledge that what they went through was real, whether you believe it or not, it was and is real for us.

It’s our reality, and because of that fact, the only way to move forward is to stop pretending it didn’t happen just because pretending makes you as a doctor or a patient care giver, more comfortable.

I have a friend who professed to me recently that she loves to tell people how to do their job, and the funny thing is that I’ve never been like that.

I’ve never been the kind of person whose been confident enough to say “I know more than you,” but I also know that if I am ever to get better, then I have be surrounded by people who not only believe me, but are actually genuinely interested in seeing me win, succeed, and move forward after what I’ve been through.

We can do this, right?

Sending all my love,

Devon J Hall, The Loud Mouth Brown Girl