Loud Mouth Brown Girl

In the story of Persephone, she keeps looking back and ends up becoming a Goddess of Hell who can’t escape the trauma of being in Hell, and thus is forever regulated to trying to leave but never being able to.

That’s probably because – and this is just a guess – no one ever asked her what keeps her going back.

For me, it’s the child I was. It’s the innocent little girl who had a gun placed between her legs by a grown ass man who knew better, but did it because he could.

For me it’s for the teenage girl who never got to experience the “Lorelei Gilmore” kind of love she wanted.

There are truths that happened in the dark to the child I was, that need to come to the light. There are punishments for the guilty that need to be laid out. Justice must be sought at all costs.

Because if I don’t speak up, they’ll keep doing it and I will be complicit in allowing the worst kind of evil that can happen to a child to happen, and I refuse to die with that blood on my hands.

I deserve to be happy. I deserve to be free of the Hell I was raised in, and the only way to do that, to move forward, to maybe have a chance at having a family one day, at falling in true love, is dealing with my shit, so I don’t redo the cycle I grew up with.

I need to take responsibility for my health. I need to acknowledge what was done to me, so I can let it go and move forward. I don’t know if that means forgiving my abusers, but I do know it means letting go.

It means releasing myself from guilt, shame, and anxiety. It means me living on a beach somewhere, or in the woods somewhere, knowing I am safe for the rest of my life because my abusers can’t hurt me anymore.

I deserve that. We all do. So yes I keep returning to my “Origin story,” because my “why are you doing this,” is what keeps me grounded, and allows me to keep going.

Yeah it may sound selfish because at the end of the day building Loud Mouth Brown Girl means being open about my mental health issues, and yes it means that I need to focus on “my-self”- but it also means teaching.

“Hey, look what I learned, try this” can actually change a person’s life. I didn’t know that when I started sharing my story, until my friend Skylar told me “You have no idea what part of your story is going to save someone’s life.” And that shook the fuck out of me.

My story? Could save someone’s life? Turns out my story DID save someone’s life, and without getting into it, knowing that, is what is saving my life. That’s a cycle I’d like to see continue.

The more Survivors that come forward and talk about their experiences the better, the more that women of all colors share their experiences the better. I think that every single story on this planet, is worth telling, but I also think there aren’t enough story tellers to go around.

That’s why so much of LMBG is about trying to inspire you to tell your own story, in your words, in your actions, in your authentically weird and beautiful way.

Largely so people can’t say stupid shit like “Why didn’t you come forward?” anymore, but also because I think that this planet is a beautifully interwoven tapestry of stories just waiting to be told.

I didn’t know that trying to transform the way folks look at Mental Health was going to be such a big part of my journey when I started at the church so many years ago.

I didn’t know mental health, would be such a huge part of my journey, but now that it is, I can’t fathom a world where I let myself check out again, just so that I can let my abusers get away with what they did to me.

The only person being protected for all those decades, were people who were abusing a little girl, her brother, and every friend she’d ever known.

So, in all honesty, am I a rat friends, or are some adults just too disgusting to function?

Sending all my love