Loud Mouth Brown Girl

******TRIGGER WARNING****** Before you read any further please note that this essay contains real stories of real abuse that may cause harm to your psyche. Please read with caution.

We are mostly focused on trying to function, trying to focus. Here’s the thing: when you are in the middle of a psychotic episode, you feel completely sane.

Often, for the first time in a long effing time. Often, it’s everyone else that is psychotic, while to your brain, you’re making perfect sense.

The day I realized that the man I was going to for help was also one of the same men who beat me the night I was gang abused at A.H’s house was the day I literally broke my mind.

A few months before this realization, I had gone to B.G. at Adrenaline Tattoo’s for a tattoo on my left hand. I had gone to tell him I’d been abused, but he was acting so weird. The reason I wanted to tell HIM, was because the night I was abused, they used his name.

They shoved a phone in my face with his picture on it, and asked me how I knew him. I laughed, “he’s my tattoo artist, you fucking idiot.” They didn’t believe me, and so they had a man rape me, and say it was BG doing the act.

Now here’s where it gets really fucked up. This particular tattoo artist has assaulted me by groping me and putting his hands down my pants and shirt twice.

The first time, when he inked my shoulder – I didn’t forget. I trusted him when he said he had sobered up and changed, and so I went back after I was raped to tell him there were men out there raping girls, using his name. And he did it again.

So the day I realized who my counsellor was connected to, I lost my shit, and I went to tell B to call 911, to tell him what was happening, because in that particular moment, I genuinely thought I was moments from death.

To my mind, abusers were everywhere, and the only person who knew my details, who had known me for years, that I could go to, was yet another abuser. It makes perfect sense that I lost my ever-loving fucking mind.

But I found it that same day. There was a cop there named Brian, at my request – I gave him as many details as I could and gave him permission to speak to whomever he needed to.

Nothing ever came of it, and the reason is because I had very little coping mechanisms back then, other than cannabis, so on that day I looked like a complete psychopath who had indeed lost their mind and I very much was.

But from the heart of the storm, I felt clear and relaxed for the first time in my life. On that particular day, Karma decided the truth was going to come up whether I wanted it to or not, and when it did I felt free.

For the first time in my life.

What the fuck do you mean I can finally say the words “I was raped” out loud? What the fuck do you mean I’m ALLOWED to say that it was wrong?

The fuck do you mean it’s against the law and that there are cops out there willing to believe me? Brian was, and to date is, the only cop to believe me, but I’ll take it.

I’ll take one out of the many because now I know I’m not alone. There are calculated risks to being willing to lose your mind.

Many people, after a single psychotic episode, don’t come back. Some people love the madness; I mean they cling to it, and they love the rush of it. I am not one of those people.

I loved it for a moment: I remember lying on the bed when they finally came to the waiting room for me. Someone, I don’t know who, said “You’re safe now,” and I remember pausing, just for what felt like the longest half-second of my life.

I R E M E M B E R feeling and K N O W I N G I was safe: And that’s when I let go. I screamed like there was no tomorrow; I screamed so loud I scared them enough that they had to strap me down and drug me out; I screamed until I was choking on my own tears.

I screamed until the darkness didn’t hurt anymore, and then I kept screaming.

When I woke up the next morning, I was different. For one night out of twenty-something years in my whole life, I was safe.

One night.

Just one. For the FIRST Time in my life, when they closed that door, I knew I could rest. I had been in fight or flight for so long that although I was completely unaware of my state, my nervous system was broken.

I went back to B several times – I wanted him to know. Even though he was an assaulter of mine, he hardly qualified as the worst experience I’d had with a man and yes I know how sad that was, but I needed him to know.

Only to find out he’d already been made aware, and decided to call me a victim in that way that really meant “I think you’re lying.”

So I left Vancouver, and honestly didn’t look back. I wrote the books, I told the story, I was wellness checked by cops, nurses, doctors, and deemed insane.

Because it’s soooo much easier to villify the victim then support her. I went to Victim’s Services, and was told by the Surrey Women’s Center team that in order to access their free counselling, I needed to be willing to press charges, and only if charges were approved, would I receive counselling.

I repeated my story several times to no avail. Because I’d reported abuse before, because it had a habit of finding me, they decided it would be easier to push me further over the edge by telling me, “It did not happen.”

So I sucked it up. For nine years, I have taken pills I don’t like taking that DO help calm some of the symptoms of dysfunction, but not enough that I can rush out and get a second job and am suddenly okay again.

For nine years I have repeatedly said “I don’t hear voices, I hear my own thoughts.” For nine years I’ve said “No, I am not paranoid, yes I believe there are people who want me dead, no I don’t think that means the world is out to get me.”

For nine years I’ve told the same story, allegedly looking for “attention,” that has never come, just to ruin the lives of what? Society’s youngest and finest…pedophiles? That’s who we’re protecting?

I am honestly surprised. I truly believed that I lived in a world that values children, because that’s what I was indoctrinated into believing. Waking up to the realization that kids don’t even rank on the list of things white supremacy cares about is soul-crushing.

I grew up surrounded by white supremacy without knowing how to acknowledge what I was seeing or experiencing. I didn’t have the language that I have today because my abuser’s protection depended on my vigilant inability to focus in class or in the world due to trauma.

It wasn’t until I met sex workers who were raped by “Johns” that I realized if what was happening to them was wrong, then what was done to me, was also wrong.

It was Sex Worker Rights Advocates like the amazing Dr. Kate Lister who started Whores of Yore to educate women about sexual habits of the ancestors, while creating a safe space to open dialogue about sexual intimacy across the spectrum of sexuality.

Because of women like Dr. Kate, women like me understand that we’re allowed to enjoy sexual pleasure after sexual assault.

It’s because of women who run BDSM sites, and sites that talk about sexuality and positive stories of exploring sex, that I fully believe my trauma isn’t the source of my power.

Going insane wasn’t a thing that I chose to do; it was, however, a complete and total necessity so that I could let it all go.

If I’d been able to go out into the middle of the desert and light a fucking bonfire like I’ve been dreaming about since I was eight years old, I’d be doing that. However, I had 1 chance to let it all out, and I had to, because if I didn’t, me, myself and I, wouldn’t be here today.

Make no mistake, if Officer Brian, whatever his name was with the green eyes from VPD, hadn’t been there, I would have gone home to Surrey and plotted diabolical things.

Instead, I came home, and I wrote about it, and I changed the path of what would have been a very dark future.

Now, this being all said, at the end of the day, not a single person – woman, man or inbetween – is welcome in my life if I knew you nine years ago, unless I DECIDE I want you here, and there ain’t many of you I want back.

This isn’t me being mean or cruel, this is me knowing that when push came to shove soooo many of you chose to believe the worst in me, so that the cops couldn’t investigate, that at the end of the day many of my rapists who are in prison, are there for drug crimes, not rape crimes.

And there may never be a day when I get to face them in the court of law, but at least for now I can sleep knowing that “I” did what “I” could to leave the space around me better off than when I got here.

I know that coming clean had to happen. I wish to all high Hell it had been anyone BUT me, but at the same time, think about all the Hell you’ve been through…who would you choose to suffer in your place…could you? For real?

No, you couldn’t because what kind of sociopath, wishes evil on children?

Unfortunately, there’s no getting around the fact that given the opportunity, people might choose evil. But that being said, when they finally reach the end of the tunnel of darkness, when they finally find the light, maybe you’ll be their “Officer Brian with the green eyes.”

XOXO

Devon J Hall, The Original Loud Mouth Brown Girl