Loud Mouth Brown Girl

Providing that you’re even given a choice, as so many of us are not, I beg of thee, choose wisely.

Choose not someone who will fight your battles for you, but with you. Choose someone so brilliant that they light you up every time you look at them.

Don’t just choose someone who claims to want to love you; choose the person who wants to do the work it takes to learn HOW to love you. Choose the person who treats you the way that makes your soul think “I deserve this,” but also someone who makes you want to return the energy.

Choose someone who looks at the challenges and says, “I think we can do this,” instead of the person who makes excuses for why it won’t work.

Choose the person who inspires you, teaches you something, and is also willing to learn and be inspired by you.

Find someone who matches your energy instead of someone that dampers your spirits. Find someone who won’t burn out your light, but instead help you learn how to focus your heat.

For the love of Aphrodite, find someone who will let you burn, and who will be able and willing to catch you when you’re done. Find someone who wants to build with you, instead of for you, unless that’s what you’re looking for.

Make a list. You don’t have to stick to it, but make a list, and DO think about the future, decide now what you want, you can always navigate making shifts later, but claim it now. Or at least, make an attempt to claim the idea of what you want for your future.

I’m talking while you’re a teenager, while you’re in college, while you’re in the formative years of your life. I beg of you to decide now, because yes, wandering is absolutely beautiful. And you should do it, but when you’re done wandering, you’re going to need a place to land. Understanding the ideas you want to be surrounded by in the future will help make navigating the world a lot easier.

When you focus on what YOU want, well, no, let me rephrase that; when you have the space and the spoons, there we go, to focus on what you want, so that every journey and experience you have becomes a foundation for that future you’re claiming.

Now, even though I say decide now and I mean it, I also mean to say you gotta let yourself be flexible. I know that I want a house, a landing pad, a place to go and hide from the world.

But I also know I want to find someone I can travel with, and have crazy wild adventures with, someone who won’t say shit like “I can’t” and instead says “Nope, fuck it, I can do this,” when I need them to.

I also, however, encourage you to be strong enough to be what they need and soft enough to navigate mixing their needs and boundaries with yours. I wish someone had told me this when I was younger, because for too many years in my life, I didn’t know I was allowed to want anything, so I wanted everything, but kept it mostly to myself.

I don’t want you to keep your wants to yourself. I want you to shout them to the rooftops, I want the whole wide universe to know you exist, and to stop fucking with you, which is why I am saying all of this.

So many of us go through this world conditioned to believe that to love a God means to behave in a perfect un-offensable way, but no God I’ve ever had the pleasure of connecting to has cared about perfection. They haven’t even tried to care about the attempt at perfection.

What the universe cares about is whether you are going to try. Trying looks different for all of us. Sometimes, it’s easier having a partner; other times, a partner is a dangerous distraction away from the Destiny that we are ultimately searching to achieve.

For me, my continual search for a partner distracted me from a life that I was supposed to want but had no real interest in. Throughout all the trauma, I found skills and talents for helping vulnerable people, and I also discovered that I actually like being of service. Not because I’m “Saving lives,” but because those lives are saving mine.

Every day when I wake up, I feel like I have a purpose, and it’s not because I have a man. It’s because I have had the room over the last nine years to see what life could look like without one, and as it turns out, I’m doing just fine.

When I was a teen, random men I’d never met before would call me “Cary’s girl,” in short, “Hands off,” I never understood why. Then I met a man named Cary, and something inside of me died. Namely, because nearly all his friends contributed to my abuse experiences.

I spent decades afraid of a man I’d never met because other men decided to instill fear inside of me. Now today, at 40-something, people all over the world demand a woman my age, “Settle down, have kids and shut up.”

I’m afraid for some of us, the reality is that if we’re lucky enough to be this age, we’re comfortable, and even excited at the prospect of being alone, because we’ve been through SO God damned much, we don’t have the spoons to fight the world with anyone.

All that stuff I listed above is great, but if you can’t give even half as much as you receive, what are you doing in a relationship?

I never needed anyone to protect me. What I needed was someone to say “enough is enough,” and help me put an end to what was happening. In the end that person was my mom. After a lifetime of near silence.

I am physically, emotionally and spiritually drained. I know now that fear, anxiety, and, if I am being 100% honest, exhaustion, have kept me from seeking out a partner.

However, that may be because the boys in Surrey and North Delta, BC, don’t know how to treat women and girls with the respect they deserve. Therefore, it took me longer to learn what I deserve.

You know, a lot of men are complaining because women aren’t spreading their legs, and talking about how we’re “Too much work,” when in reality the only thing a woman really wants at the end of the day is someone they can be soft with.

I think that in this world, if men in particular want women to “Wake up and pay attention,” then men need to do the same.

Women are not made with cookie cutters; each of us has differently tailored needs and boundaries that YOU have to be WILLING to walk away from if we decide you’re not for us.

I mean, this is for men: imagine if some random man threw you down on your bed and started making out with you, or against a wall, would YOU feel safe and comfortable? Would YOU feel violated and vulnerable?

More than likely, you’d fight back, too, but what worries me is that too many young men don’t see their own red flags, and they don’t have appropriate people in their lives to steer them in the right direction. Or they do, and they just don’t care.

If you’re going to date, have the BEST time getting to know people and meeting new people, and know that for every Prince there are a lot of toads, and often the toads are better behaved.

XOXO

Devon J Hall,

The Original Loud Mouth Brown Girl