Loud Mouth Brown Girl

It’s been a major while since I posted one of these, because I really don’t talk about my present life these days. I mostly talk about my past, as many of you already know.

But as many of you also know, over the last few years I’ve been complaining ad nauseum, about the fact that I am consistently, and constantly tired. Whether I take iron or don’t take iron, like salt, I can’t get enough in my body to literally save my life.

So in a few weeks I’ll be undergoing nine hours of iron treatment and honestly? I’m both excited and terrified.

I’ve lost so much of my life due to anemia, and I don’t think we talk about the importance of vitamins for Black people enough.

I don’t know if it’s because it’s taboo in the Black community, or if it’s because we have alternative ways of getting the nutrients we need, but Anemia is actually a huge problem for a lot of people.

Having anemia means I’ve lost teeth, (part of that is medication and also not taking care of myself,) my bones are weaker, and I am physically exhausted, mentally irritable, and often hard to get along with unless you’re a close friend or family member, and even then I have my days when I need to excuse myself, to just sleep.

So I am hoping that these iron treatments do what I need them to do and start giving me the energy I need so that I can finally go back to work. I’ve wanted to go back for awhile now, and I keep saying that but doing nothing about it.

Mainly because I broke my ankle in November, and so I had to heal from that, but once I’m done these iron treatments, it’s absolutely on.

I am excited, but I am also nervous, I don’t know what to expect and noone has really explained to me what these treatments are supposed to do, vs what side effects there might be.

So I’m interested to see what happens, but I just thought, with all the “I’m struggling with my mental health,” posts, I’d give y’all a real life update, because part of the reason I am struggling with my mental health is because my physical health is shit right now.

That’s just another reason I’ve struggled to even think about trying to find a partner, let alone, trying to find someone I want to have kids with.

I’ve been told that my anemia is so bad, that if I tried to have kids without proper treatment, I might die…and then I was denied proper treatment for years because I couldn’t afford the vitamins, which I only just learned, the government sometimes does pay for in extreme cases.

For fuck sakes.

Why don’t they tell you this stuff before it gets bad? Why don’t they say “Yes, you’re sick, but with the click of my wrist and this shiney white form I can fix that for you…” Like seriously, what the actual fuck?

All these years of struggling to eat foods I hate, just to get iron in my body. Begging, borrowing, and sometimes stealing money just to be able to afford the fucking pills. Christ sake.

I am so tired, but more than that I am angry. Anemia shouldn’t be a life altering disease, but untreated it can be, and if I had taken it more seriously, if I had fought to advocate for myself, I might have been gotten the help I needed a lot sooner.

Thankfully I have a doctor who took my mild concerns seriously and said “Devon we need to deal with this, NOW,” because otherwise I’d still be struggling and not fully understanding or acknowledging why.

My organs could shut down and I could end up on dialysis, like that’s the reality of my situation and I think it only fully just hit me now, that I have been deliberately ignoring my physical health, purely because it’s easier than actually acknowledging that my body needs me to show up for myself.

Showing up for yourself – especially after you’ve been traumatized by rape violence, or anything that makes you feel deeply unsafe in the communities you’ve known your whole life.

Showing up for yourself is hard at the best of fucking times, and I think that’s part of why it’s taken me so long to “Make something” of this brand, it’s not that I am not doing the work.

It’s precisely because I am doing the work, that it’s taking so fucking long, to get to a place where it no longer feels like work.

I’ve been sitting here for months, showing my anger, showing my whole ass on Medium, because I feel like I “owe the audience,’ but let’s be real. I’ve been doing this for eight years and in that time I’ve sold a handful of books and tshirts and mugs, because people genuinely prefer my free content.

I could speak on that, but I won’t. What I will say is that I am doing the best that I can, and I appreciate those who show up for me to read my work – paid or otherwise – when you can.

It means the world to me that people genuinely care about who I am as a person and whether or not I am okay.

Turns out it’s not just the lack of care about the world that’s killing me, its’ that my body is genuinely struggling, and since there’s a fix for it, I’m going to do everything I can, to keep going.

Sending all my love,

Devon J Hall, The Original Loud Mouth Brown Girl