Loud Mouth Brown Girl

For seven years while writing this website, the only thing I had in my head is “I gotta get better, I gotta get healthier, I gotta get stronger.”

Mostly what I was really thinking was “I gotta let go of all this shit.”

Now that I am eight years in, I am finally ready to start thinking about the larger community that I want to help build.

I want to see women of all ages, races, creeds, nationalities, sizes, and orientations, to come forward and to have a space to share their stories. I don’t know what that looks like yet, I haven’t fully conceived the idea just yet, but I do know that in fifteen or twenty years I want to be able to look back and say “Yes, I did build a community.”

A community of writers, teachers, authors, creatives, who come from around the world to celebrate being loud in a world that tells you to shut up and quiet down.

Each and every single day more and more of us are finding the power in sharing our stories. There are people all over the planet who want to tell their stories but don’t know how or where to start.

I do know that I want this website to be a bit like Medium, but I also know that I want this site to focus on mental health. On mental health as a spectrum.

There are all kinds of folks that struggle with mental health issues, and there are a variety of reasons that people struggle. From every day anxiety to severe issues that we don’t have words for.

Failure is something that I struggle with, because although I have a big ballsy pair of wings on my back, I haven’t fully learned to fly on my own. Yeah it’s true, that part isn’t my fault, I was too busy trying to survive one rapist after another, to worry about surviving on my own, but now that I am free of that, I am fully clear headed.

I have a direction I want to go and the only thing impeding me, is the fact that I have to wait for other folks to get on board with my overall plan.

The waiting is the worst, because there is so much time to think about “What if,” and the what ifs can kill any good idea.

The problem I have is that what if, doesn’t bother me. I can come up with all kinds of solutions for problems that most folks don’t even see coming, and if I can’t then I can find other folks who can fill the gaps.

One of my greatest strengths is recognizing other people’s strengths, and using them to my advantage while helping them navigate what it means to learn to use your skills.

I’ve always been great at knowing what I want to do, but I haven’t always been great at the execution. For instance, this site had an entirely different purpose when I started. It was supposed to house both my fiction and non-fiction work. But after the death of Ahmad Arbery and George Floyd as well as Breonna Taylor, it seemed more important to focus on the non-fiction world.

There are so many dreams that I want so badly to come true, and I am afraid if I don’t get started now, then I never will. I know that I have time right now to make my dreams come true, and to be honest with you that’s what scares me.

I’m afraid that I’ll set myself up and they will come back. Because everyone knows criminals always return to their victims eventually, one way or another. Whether you want to admit that’s true or not, it is.

I don’t want to be surrounded by darkness my whole life, but the only way to make sure that shadows don’t take me over again, is to keep sharing my story and asking for help when I need it.

I’m not so great at the latter part, but I am working on it. Yesterday I was speaking to someone in the morning and they asked if I was okay, that was it…I started to cry. Almost anything sets me off these days and it can be incredibly frustrating when I think I am getting ahead but my emotions are all over the place.

Everything I have said here is a reason to curl up and hide, but they are also challenges that I am ready and willing to face, because for the first time in my life I know who has my back and I can trust that if I fall down they will be there to remind me that I can pull myself back up.

Sending all my love,

Devon J Hall, The Original Loud Mouth Brown Girl