What The Fuck Was I Thinking?
What On Earth Made Me Think I Was The Right Fucking Choice?
Seven years ago, I had a panic attack on an airplane, after which I was arrested, and almost charged with whatever bullshit they were trying to charge me with, and called a Loud Mouth Brown Bitch.
This is precisely how I decided to start the very first Black-owned, Mental Health Brand, in the world.
What you need to know, is that to get here I survived decades of childhood sexual abuse, trafficking, and trauma by some very powerful men. Many of whom I’ve already named, so we don’t need to rehash that.
What we are here to discuss, is why in the unholy fuck “I” thought, I could do this.
First off yes I’m Black, I am Jamaican, Irish, Scottish, English, and Romani. I am very proud that these nations had to put their shit aside so that I could exist. I believed when I was a child, that I was here for a purpose.
When I was five I had a dream that convinced me to become a writer, so I spent my entire life either being raped or with my head in the clouds trying to find Jesus Christ.
Largely because so many of my abusers used religion and fiction to infantilize me into not saying anything for decades. I was too small and too little to stand up for myself. But when I had a panic attack on the plane, it was because I knew in that moment that when I got home I’d have to deal with it all and I got scared.
Instead of being helpful and understanding the cops treated me like I was a problem, an inconvenience, something to be thrown and tossed around, handcuffed and sworn at.
I couldn’t breathe, literally. Just like George Floyd, but before him, I wanted my mother, I wanted my family, I just wanted to know that when I got home I’d be safe…because in that moment that they were handcuffing me, every single memory of every single threat came back like a tsunami and I couldn’t control myself.
Panic attacks are like that. You can’t ever tell when one’s coming until it’s around the corner, and it could be in that moment, or it could come in weeks, but you know in your heart they don’t fully go away…until you learn to control them. Which isn’t easy.
It was the beginning of the pandemic, and I was at Walmart with my mom stocking up like everyone else in the fucking city. And there he was. My rapist, with his mother.
I don’t know why but seeing him even in his mask and gear, and seeing him with his mother especially, made him small in my mind, smaller than I’d made him out to be, that was for certain.
I remember feeling like I couldn’t breathe, but I’d also just smoked a fucking massive joint before going to Walmart because I knew — like I always know before going to the fucking mall — that I would need something to stabilize me in front of all the folks joining me that day.
And it worked. For the first time in my life, I was able to control my panic attack, now that being said it would be the only time for the next seven years, but at least at that precise moment, I didn’t freak out and embarrassed myself over a small, pathetic, sorry excuse for a human, who spent his child life making mine a living Hell.
I am safe today. But it came with a lot of begging for help and praying to the universe to lighten my load. It came with the understanding that yes, I do actually get every fucking thing I want, especially when I ask for it, so be fucking careful what you ask for, dumbass. (Me not you,) Because the universe will give you precisely what you ask for.
Then it’ll spend the rest of the time making your life miserable, so you can prove you really want it. This is why so many folks give up on their dreams, they see challenges as impossibilities, and I understand that, because I did the same for soo, sooo fucking long.
The universe — I have learned — is a living breathing entity. Some call the world outside this planet, the world of God’s and Goddesses. Only a few special humans have been chosen to fly to the heavens, but when it comes to our dreams why can’t we all be astronauts?
I mean Elon Musk might be a knuckle dragging troll of the highest order, but at the very least he is making it easier for us humans to travel the universe, and in our heart of hearts, that’s what every single one of us wants.
To dream big and to see the universe, to be the best versions of ourselves, maybe not all the time, but during the times when we’re called to the most, is something that every one of us struggles with.
We focus so much of our energies working to help other people barely survive. I think that’s one of the reasons I left the church. When they fired my mom seven and a half years ago, I really thought “Why am I here?” and I didn’t have an answer anymore.
I needed to be free, and my mom not being there anymore, not needing to help her twenty-four seven, that helped. It gave me an excuse to do something for myself for a change, and that meant really letting myself go.
I don’t just mean physically, I mean mentally. I let myself smoke weed and I let the psychosis in so that I could get the trauma out.
Once I started focusing on what was going on inside my head, I realized that I was getting very quickly scared of what I was learning. Not because of what was done to me, but because it was done to me.
Yes, in a very twisted and fucked up sick way I was “chosen,” by men who decided I was “disposable,” who believed truly that no one would care about what was done to me.
Let me put it this way, what was done to me was so traumatic and extensive that the cops are still investigating. I don’t know what they’ve found if anything, but I know that for me as a survivor, I did what I had to do to survive.
I told my story, not just because I was afraid for what would happen to my life if I didn’t but because I was legitimately drowning in trauma and I had nowhere to put it.
Loud Mouth Brown Girl dot com became my saving grace. It allowed me to discuss growing into my Blackness, and into my womanhood, and into my non-binary-ness, without shame, or guilt, because everyone who comes to my site is growing into something.
Not all of us are certain what we’re becoming, but we’re all becoming something, whether we want to or not. The decision that we have to make in the act of becoming, is deciding which direction we’re willing to go.
I could easily give up on LMBG because it hasn’t made any money yet, or because people don’t see me as an artist, or because people think I’m crazy or lying, I could easily throw my hands up and walk away like so many creators before me.
But I have no interest in doing that. I want to build a collective of Black women from around the world who want to support each other, regardless of what kinds of traumas we’ve been through, but because we genuinely and truly want to support and teach each other.
I’ve tried being in groups before and that hasn’t worked, but what has worked is finding individual people I vibe with in ways that teach me how to be a more cohesive version of myself.
Which is difficult when I am a giant mix of lots of different parts made up of trauma and beauty in not-so-equal measures. I have hatred in my heart for every man who has ever put his hands on me without my consent, and there are a lot of them. I want nothing but horrible things for all of them.
Not because they ruined our childhoods — and by our I mean all of the boys and girls who were involved — but because they are horrid people who don’t deserve to be free largely because the harm they cause is truly dangerous.
I am a perfect example of what happens when you throw chaos into the life of a person who just wants to experience what the world has to offer when you tell them they aren’t good enough or that they aren’t going to amount to anything.
Bitch I’ve written four books in eight years. I told the cops what happened, I came clean, I helped others, I did my part, and now it’s time to move on to the next phase.
I’m not sure what that looks like or where the fuck we’re going with Loud Mouth Brown Girl, but what I do know is that wherever I get, that’s exactly where I’ll need to be.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall, The Original Loud Mouth Brown Girl
