I take deep offense to the term “Being woke,” because for a lot of decades in my life, I was hypnotized with mind altering drugs, and raped by grown white men, pretending to be something they weren’t to scare me into silence.
For more than thirty years, it worked. Until they did it again, and I decided enough was fucking enough.
I hate my body, but not because she isn’t beautiful and lovable, but because she was used as a weapon against me, to cause me harm, for no reason other than I happened to be born Brown to a white woman, who traded in a white man, for a Black one.
Her racist ex-boyfriend did this, and the worst part is she doesn’t even really know, and I don’t know how to have that conversation, again, with her. So I don’t. For decades, that man stalked, abused, and harassed me, using his own children to do so, and every boy or man he could find.
And I told no one, because I was too afraid of what would be said about me. Here’s what they said;
- She’s crazy
- She’s Re****ed
- She’s a fucking liar
- She’s psychotic
- She made it up
- It never happened
- She wanted it from all of us
- It was her idea.
All of these lines are lies designed to protect my abusers, but unlike Giselle Pelicot, the police who heard my story, took my journals, locked them in a closet for over six years, and then gave them back because “There’s nothing we can do. The limitations on holding evidence are up.”
Great, but I still have to deal with the mind-numbing fear that although I am safe “here,” I might not be tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after, purely because of how many men were involved, it could be any man.
Are you fucking kidding me? And after everything I’ve told you over the last eight years, you still want to pressure me into dating someone? Gisele Pelicot was raped by over one hundred men.
So was I.
That means if I don’t end up with a rapist who raped me, there’s still a high probable chance, I’ll end up dating someone who knows or knew someone, who raped me. And I say this because many of the people in my community, know who my rapists are, and know I am the girl that they raped “That night.”
I don’t know how to navigate a world where I am not being raped all the time. I’m learning and have been for the last three years. Still, it’s a fucking process, and it means that even masturbating is structurally damaging to my brain, because I’ve been conditioned by my abusers to believe that orgasms are a bad thing.
I’ve been trained by my abusers that orgasms, for me at least, I don’t know about other survivors, are because I wanted what they were doing to me. That’s never been true.
I’ve never orgasmed with a man, let alone an abuser, but I have made myself masturbate after abuse to claim my body and remind myself that I belong to me, not to some creepy tattoo artist who is convinced I belong to him because I’m some kind of “Sacrifice.”
Religious abusers are the worst I think because they don’t just mess with your body, they fuck with your mind.
Every abuser everywhere has some twisted argument for why they behave the way they do, and every single one of them has that one person they’d kill for, but it’s never the person they are abusing.
I think so many of us are so used to being gaslit that when we’re out of it, when we’re no longer being gaslit, we can’t go through it again. I remember a neighbour trying to gaslight me – literally, into believing something that had never actually happened.
And as I was watching her do it, I knew she was crafting a world in which she truly believed this event or experience happened, when I know full well, it hadn’t.
It was so scary, because at first I didn’t know how to handle it, but it was also therapeutic, because it helped me to realize that this had been happening to me my whole life and in past years I’d just gone along with it, because I didn’t believe in fighting for what I now know, I deserved.
I’m not saying that I am never again going to be suseptable to abuse, but what I am saying is now that I am “Woke”, I know now how to recognize the signs of abuse before they happen, and I know now how to protect myself from that which I don’t want.
I’m not looking for anything in particular other than a home and a safe space that can never be taken from me, and I’m not sure how I am going to find that, but I know that I am going to find that.
Peice by piece I am building my life back together after being in a situation where I had no control, where I had all the fear in the world and yet I acted like a superhero hiding in cognito because it was just easier than facing my reality.
Now that I am awake from all the drugs and hypnotization from those men, I know that if I saw them on the street, I wouldn’t just walk willingly into their arms, I know I’d go kicking and screaming,
I know that I am a fighter. Whether I want to be or not is fucking irrelevant, I don’t have a choice but to be a fighter, because if I don’t fight for my life, for the life I want to cultivate, no one else is going to do it for me. Everyone in my life is wonderful, I have the most amazing support system in the world, but I also have a lot of struggles, and not every person I love can be there all the time.
But I know that if I did call out, if I did reach out, they would be there if they could, and for now, that’s enough.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall, The Original Loud Mouth Brown Girl
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 