Loud Mouth Brown Girl

Speak out I mean, you weren’t allowed – or at least I wasn’t – allowed to speak out about what was being done to me. Because after awhile it kept happening, but folks stopped believing that it kept happening.

I will never forget being thirteen years old, I had just left the hospital, and my mom was watching an episode of Oprah with Queen Latifah. This was the first time I told my mom that anything had happened to me before. “That happened to me,” I said when Queen was talking about being sexually assaulted by many different offenders.

I didn’t explain, but I also didn’t get the empathy I needed, and if I am being honest, back then I didn’t know what I needed.

I know now that what I needed was to be told “It wasn’t your fault,” I needed to be told “God doesn’t hate you,” and “God wouldn’t want this for you.” But no one said any of that, because no one knew I needed to be told that.

No one knew about the brainwashing, the abuse, the conditioning, and I never fully explained to my mom what was going on, what had been done to me, I don’t know how much – to this day -she knows or doesn’t know. I only know that what I’ve told her is 100% true.

To this day I still get dirty looks from people who’ve read the blog and know that I spoke out about gang, cult, and abuse, rape.

To this day I still get people who would rather protect pedophiles, than children, telling me that I am a rat.

And I still have folks asking why I didn’t reach out for help, my only answer to that question is who was I supposed to go to?

The teachers who thought I was too stupid to function? The Doctors who either knew because they were involved, or didn’t know but knew that I’d been raped and chose not to say anything?

Who the fuck was I, a little girl, brainwashed, drugged up, and confused by big grown-ass men, supposed to turn to? There was no one back then.

I remember once when I’d been kidnapped from a local park, I escaped and found myself at a stranger’s house and I begged him to call the police. He did and they didn’t even investigate, they said I made it up.

The men who kidnapped me were 100% involved in the rapes that were being done to me, and there was nothing I could say when the cops asked if I knew them because the truth was I didn’t know them, I just knew they were involved in something much bigger and scarier than picking up random girls on the streets, and on fear of death, I couldn’t say anything.

Now’s the part where you want to say “Oh my Goddess, you must have been so afraid,” yes, I was, I was fucking terrified, and not one person tried to soothe me or make me feel better about what was happening because again, no one knew.

For the better part of thirty-five years, I kept the secrets like the Dead do, mostly because I didn’t know about the secrets I was carrying back then. And when it finally came out, it only came out because I had gone too crazy and yapped my brain off to a cop named Brian, who listened with kind ears and after more than thirty years said to me “It wasn’t your fault.”

I didn’t mean or want to tell my story when I started eight years ago. I had to, because if I didn’t, I would have died. By my hands or by theirs, but one way or another, I wouldn’t be alive today if I hadn’t tell my story.

If I had one piece of advice for anyone going through what I’ve been through it’s this: Baby tell your story. Tell your story so that if anything DOES happen people know where to look. Tell your story so they can’t say you didn’t try, tell your story to free yourself from the chains that are holding you back from being the happiest version of you.

Whatever way you can, however, you have to, tell your fucking story baby, because someone in the world needs to know you survived, so they can too.

Stories about who we are, allow us to be vulnerable. They give us the opportunity to craft a world around who we are as individuals, they allow us to bond and bind with others based on shared or similar experiences, or the learning of things you’ve never learned before.

We have power, and we harness that power, specifically, by sharing ourselves with the world.

Something to think about.

Sending all my love,

Devon J Hall, The Original Loud Mouth Brown Girl

Stay Lifted Sis is looking for Black, Brown, Indigenous, Disabled, LBGTQ2S+NB folx, who want to share their story, and have a story to share.

Regardless of where you are on the humanities spectrum, we want to talk to you about your experience. Share your story today.

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