Loud Mouth Brown Girl

I’ve had big parties, little parties and shit parties, but turning 43 was absolutely perfect. I hung out with all my best friends and favorite people, I got a brand new (VERY MUCH NOT PINK LIKE A FLAMINGO) bong, and honestly? I just finally felt like “this is my year.”

Things are really looking up for some of the women in my life, and by some of the women in my life, I mean me too.

A lot of the people in my life are folks who deeply understand the various angles of trauma. Which breaks my heart, but it also means that I’ve chosen to surround myself with people who have spent time sharing their pain with me, and who have spent time listening to some of mine.

We have, as a community, chosen to remain close and to spend time together on our terms, without being afraid of what outsiders think of our relationships.

And interestingly, I don’t have to hide who I am when I am with these people. They don’t mind the twitching, or the occasional panic attack, they don’t mind the info dumps or the weeks on end of solitude it takes for me to “Come down” from spending time with people.

I fully know I am not entirely healthy, but I also know that I have done a ton of work on myself to change the patterns that led to me being even worse in my past.

I was a bully, and downright viscerally mean to people I didn’t trust – the fact that I was usually right wasn’t the point. I hurt a lot of feelings on my way to realizing that I genuinely, with my full entire chest, do not care about people who don’t care about people.

When I was a girl, in my very young and early 90s years, women didn’t announce their age. They didn’t discuss the middle years, only the decades, because the middle years were a reminder that you were getting older.

So instead of “I just turned forty-five,” it was “I just turned forty-something,” as if that second number was something to be afraid of.

I am not afraid of getting older. I am afraid of not getting older, I am afraid of not being able to live the life I want to live, on the terms I want to live them on, without interference from men who would do to my children what was done to me.

If you haven’t heard, I’ve been avoiding the news. CNN announced their investigation into a “Rape Academy” for men from around the world. More than sixty-two million hits (individual accounts) were tracked in Feb. of this year alone.

That’s enough for me to decide that any man who is going to come near me is going to have to go through a rigorous background check because I DON’T trust ANY of you people. Not a single one.

Especially if you’re not already in my inner circle. Because I just can’t with my experience and my inability to say no before it’s too late, I reach the point where I would never put myself into a situation of being with a man on purpose.

He’d have to be sent by the Goddess herself, crafted from clay with the brain of, oh, I don’t know, someone who’s not a complete fool about women.

Men are so concerned all the time with “measuring up,” and when all you think about is “I’m not good enough,” then you end up acting out in ways that are precisely that: not good enough.

Men who believe they are good enough for their partners don’t belittle them or try to “Take them down a peg.” They celebrate and uplift the women they love, and I know this because I have fucking seen it with my own two eyes.

I’ve seen what being in a healthy, happy relationship with someone who loves you and wants FOR you instead of to spite you, looks like. And it’s really quite beautiful.

I’ve seen men humble and heal their inner beast in order to be a better version of themselves, FOR the women who want to love them.

Every day they look at their women and say, “I choose to love you too,” and they aren’t intimidated by the fact that these women have a past, or have survived shit, they’re just happy to be the guy around for the ride.

Which makes me angry because why the fuck weren’t any of you losers that? Why did you have to be the guys who decided you had to lead with your fists instead of your brain, and why the fuck twenty years later have you not grown up yet?

Like so many of you are disgustingly lazy when it comes to being human, and then you’re pissed off at us because we don’t want to pick up the slack and do for you what you can easily do for yourselves.

There are ways to deal with people who have been truly traumatized; adding to their trauma isn’t one of them. I think a lot of people don’t understand that when you’ve used hard drugs – when you’ve been so poor that you had to use toilet paper or hey, tent scraps for period pads – you become a different TYPE of person.

Survivors have hard shells because we’ve literally slogged through Hell to be the shining, kinda twisted, dark-humoured beauties before you, and when you add to our load instead of helping us balance it out, you just become one more thing we resent in our lives.

People who have been through severe trauma need soft lives. And maybe we have to earn them, maybe we have to work to get those soft lives, but once we have them, we become people who CHOOSE who we let in.

As my very good BFF said recently, “I chose you, but I can live just fine without you too.” I think more people need to understand that. Your presence in anyone’s life is no longer guaranteed. People aren’t holding onto toxic relationships just because it’s the socially acceptable thing to do.

Women in particular are telling society to get fucked, and flat out reminding the world that we bring life into this world and at any time we choose, we can stop doing that.

And society is fighting back with everything it has. Sixty million hits? How many men who have obsessive-compulsive disorder are challenging their OCD into something so toxic and dangerous? Apparently, sixty million hits worth of them.

It is exhausting to think as an advocate for survivors that you’re getting somewhere, that there is hope at the end of the tunnel, only to realize that nope. No, you aren’t even close.

No woman, no person, wants to be with someone who sees them as perfect. The whole point of partnering up is to be with someone whose weird matches your weird, so you don’t have to stop being weird.

But when you start expecting your partner to mommy or daddy your issues for you, instead of dealing with what’s going on in your head, well, who would want to be around that?

Happy, healthy individuals work on themselves. Sure, we’re conditioned to believe “It’s all God’s plan,” but 2000-year-old thinking doesn’t apply to 2026 needs and tendencies.

I fully believe that my future partner will have their own faith. Or at the very least, won’t mock or otherwise be afraid of mine.

Too many male-presenting people on this planet feel entitled to have whatever they want. If men could take what they wanted, and not face consequences…oh wait, they already do!

It is absolutely beyond unfathomable that men seem to think we should want them purely because they exist, and so help me Christ, the first person to say “Not all men,” to the words “Sixty-million hits,” will have me sending their information to the FBI. Or the Canadian equivalent.

Women are tired, and girls are scared, and rightfully so. Girls and boys should grow up in a world where they are taught to be safe, where they are taught to be protected, and instead, they are taught their lives matter little more than the dying leaves falling from trees.

Yesterday I had an experience with a man who gave me the ick. I made a joke, and he became deeply insecure right away, and it reminded me that men are not taught to deal with their emotions as boys, the way girls are, before we become women.

Girls, in particular, are given some of the tools and weapons against the hormonal shifts they face; meanwhile, boys are merely told to suck it up and deal with it, while being conditioned to believe that talk therapy doesn’t work.

It’s not fair. Girls need to be soft and gentle. We want to have tender hearts and sweet voices, but when we’re pushed to the limit, we become hard and uncontrollable. Then we’re told we’re unruly and that we need to “Calm down,” yet the reasons we’re activated are never addressed. In fact, they are deliberately swept under the carpet and ignored, so that the focus is on our behaviour, not the reasons for it.

It is exhausting being a girl, and I am not saying this just because I love to complain; I’m saying it because the system is stacked against us. If we are raped and murdered, our abuser and killer can go for decades without being caught, but if we kill them, if we do anything to defend or avenge what was done to us, we can face lifelong jail terms.

Women and girls are not safe in Canada, and that’s a complete fact. The number of Murdered, And Missing Indigenous Women – not to mention the Black and Brown women who are murdered and go uncounted, is proof that women and girls are not safe here.

There are some days I get up and think, “Thank God I’m single,” but there is a part of me that resents the fact that I don’t have someone to lean on. Especially because the reason I don’t is because of something that is completely out of my control.

I didn’t choose to be abused. I didn’t choose trauma, I chose majick and wonder, and in return was gifted with the darkest parts of the world.

I am now free to choose a partner, and all I can think is “What if he secretly hates you?” And I fully believe that because I am a strong-willed, powerful, unafraid Black person, I completely embrace the idea that I will not ever find anyone comfortable letting me be myself.

That being said, I have friends in wonderful relationships, but like anything, those relationships take work; it takes choosing the same person every single day, and based on CNN’s latest report, no. No, I am not yet ready to do that.

XOXO

Devon J Hall, The Original Loud Mouth Brown Girl