Fuck! I Think I Am An Adult…

Who The Hell Let That Happen?

Do you see this girl? This girl was thirteen years old. She was at a Backstreet Boy concert, her first real concert when she heard the news about a modeling agency looking for models.

So she went to the competition, and the guy in charge said she was too fat.

She had been learning to pose from her mom and her mom’s best friend, and she did everything she could to look like a real model. She practiced her runway walk at two am in the morning while listening to Snoop Dog, and she danced and pranced to 2Pac, and even Metallica, trying to get her body to move with the rhythm of the music.

She had been molested by a priest, and she once considered trying to blow herself up with a truck. (That’s a whole other story.) She was a messed-up kid who thought she was buying pot from the local dork at school, and what she bought…wasn’t that.

She lived in a storm of chaos that she couldn’t even see. She didn’t know she was at the eye of the storm, because she had never known anything different.

Now this girl, this girl had known peace, once in her life as a child. It was when she was at a camp called Camp KadaKazoo, it was in the woods with the trees and the air that she felt peace, but even there she got bullied and manipulated by the other girls.

To be fair that girl was also a proficient liar, and she liked to talk to herself and make up stories of being related to her favorite WWE superstars, but at her core, she was just a kid, who knew nothing, knew she knew nothing and was perfectly okay with that. Because she was a kid.

This girl was creative and imaginative, and she loved vampires and Edgar Allen Poe. To this day that girl grew into a woman who still calls Poe one of her favorite poets.

Before she turned thirteen she did a ritual to “open up her femininity,” by going to a park at three in the morning and looking for a stick that she could turn into a wand. What she was really looking for was an escape from the nightmares that kept her up at night.

She remembers going into Riverdale Park in Calgary Alberta Canada, at two in the morning, and declaring herself to the universe, letting it know that she wasn’t going to give up, no matter what, she was going to make her dreams come true.

This girl had no dreams of being a writer, she wanted to be an actress and a model. She wanted to sing and dance, and go to the fancy parties, and be around all the famous cool people who just got that she was weird. She had a passion for learning about life, even though what she wanted to learn wasn’t being taught in school, and she cared way too much about what people thought about her.

Now, this bitch…doesn’t give a fuck.

Four years ago this bitch right here, decided she was going to name names, and she was done being the dumpster bin of the universe.

She had been to the parties with the good-looking people who thought they were famous “in the hood”. She had seen behind the red curtain and looked down on the city from up high, and she found piles of ugliness. From the top of the world, all she could see were other rooftops. There were no glittery lights, and there was certainly no magic. There wasn’t even music.

She decided that she was finished taking the shit and eating it with a silver spoon while saying “mmm this is delicious.” No, this bitch tells you when shit tastes like shit.

There are people in this world who hate this woman, who wish her dead, who on a daily basis send out those whole “I wish you were gone” vibes, and she couldn’t care less.

Four years ago this woman decided that she was so tired of taking the crap, that she was going to come out and share her story, and in driblets and droplets she did, little by little the story of her life has come out, and today I am here to tell the tale of it all.

Because of these two humans, in particular, I Devon J Hall exist today. Because of the woman that came before me, and the girl before her, I am alive and well to tell the story of what happened.

And I am afraid every single day. I am afraid because I look at all these other people — white and Black alike — and I think to myself “they can’t possibly understand how hard it all was.”

Sometimes I feel like it must only be like coming home from war. That’s the only explanation I have, it’s the only thing that makes sense. Only a Soldier could understand the kind of PTSD that I have.

Largely because even though that first girl really wanted to die, that second woman really understood why they didn’t. They fought really hard to survive, it was the kind of emotional battle that you can only understand if you’ve seen Being John Malcovich.

Until you dive into someone’s mind you really can’t understand all they’ve had to experience, and in knowing that, today I realize that maybe, just maybe, the people in my circle could understand.

Whether it was war, cancer, or mental health, people understand battles. Period.

The emotional it takes on you is mind-numbing, for lack of a better phrase. Trying to just get from one day to the next can feel often like you’re dragging your cement-covered body up a wet hill covered in mud.

The mental mind fuck that trauma takes on your body, soul, and your mind, is frustrating because that mental mind fuck is telling you that no one else in the world gets it, and thus you are alone. And no one cares that you’re alone and because no one cares clearly you don’t matter. And since you don’t matter you just kill yourself. Right?

Wrong.

I have found that I’ve been writing a lot about suicide lately, and in part, it’s because I’ve lost people to the practice, but also because I just feel it in my heart that this is what I need to say. And that’s not something that I say often.

The reason that so many people ask me how I got where I am today, is because I survived.

I went through this terrible awful storm, and I came out the other side and I am not doing too badly for myself. Sure I am at the bottom of the barrel in the cannabis and literary worlds, but I am finally doing something productive that is making me happy.

I am looking at my life today realizing that I have the power and the inclination, and the confidence, to make decisions today that I never would have made ten years ago.

Namely, I keep choosing to be here, which you know, is kind of stupid, but it’s also kind of great.

It’s kind of stupid because I am literally curled in the corner being punched in the head screaming “give me more bitch, I can take it,” and at the same time I know that I am wearing out my opponent….which is annoyingly, myself.

I am competing with absolutely no one. I fucking refuse. I fucking refuse to put my resume up to someone else's and let anyone else judge me because frankly, my resume is mostly empty.

I know what I am capable of, and I am doing things that are allowing me to educate myself while simultaneously proving that I can do what I can say I can do.

“So you say you can write a book?”

Yes, I fucking can, and really well too. Go read Uncomfortable and tell me you didn’t cry, or have a realization, or learn something you didn’t know before. It might not be edited, but it’s fucking awesome, and I say that having heard from the readers themselves.

“So you say you can create an awesome brand?”

It took me four years to understand what Loud Mouth Brown Girl is about, but yes God damnit, I can create a fucking amazing brand, and yes I had a lot of help along the way, but the heart and soul of that brand is mine. Give me a few more years and a lot more money and see what I create.

“So you know cannabis?”

Yes and no, but I am learning, and I am choosing to educate myself by learning from registered Cannabis Educators working in the grassroots part of the community, so what can you teach me?

That’s my mantra this year. “What can you teach me?” I am fine with the fact that I am at the bottom of the ladder, I am totally fine with the fact that I am still working my way up through this new part of my journey because I am finally doing the one thing that I have always wanted to do.

Learning.

Girls learn at a lesser rate than boys, largely because they are encouraged — even in 2021, to domesticate themselves. I spent my whole life trying to find the perfect guy so I could settle down and get married and live happily ever after.

Except that the happily ever after that I often saw on TV came in the form of the Donna Reed specials on television, or the weird shit that I saw in WWE. These were not stable examples of what “happily ever after” meant. So I went for the Disney version, waiting for some guy to save me. I got over that. Quick.

I saved my damned self. In my most powerfully broken and fucked up moment “I” am the one that decided that my life was going to change, and when I asked for help and the doors were slammed in my face, I kept going on my own.

I told my story, against my will largely, but I told it nonetheless. My mind was shattered by the trauma and I am still fucking here to tell the tale.

Everything that I went through, all that terrible awful stuff wasn’t for nothing. It was so that I could exist uninterrupted for awhile by outside forces legitimately trying to kill me.

I survived.

You are reading this.

That can only mean that you survived too.

This post is dedicated to all the Soldiers in the world. Whatever fight you’re fighting, whatever patches you are wearing, whatever call sign you go by, I actually hear you today as I write this.

Whether you are enlisted and fighting against a foreign enemy, or you are simply just battling your way through mental health, which isn’t that simple at all. I hear you.

It is painful when you look into the darkness and you see how many people are suffering with you, but when you finally decide that you’ve had enough of taking what is given to you, and you decide to go out and get your own, your entire life changes.

It’s difficult as hell. It’s literally like pulling your cement-covered self up a mud-covered hill in the rain, but it’s so fucking worth it.

There is a moment in your life — probably a few of them — where you think “I can do this. I’ve trained for this,” and sometimes we get bogged down by all the voices saying shit like “no you can’t,” but those voices are more afraid of us then we are of them.

The voices of anxiety, depression, misery, sadness, need us to lift them up, to give them power. Without our emotions to feed on they dry up and disappear, becoming irrelevant moments in our past.

Only you can choose the wolf that you’re going to feed.

The past sucks. Your childhood years were quite possibly very terrible. But you’re an adult now, and that’s a whole other game. Now you’re in power. Now you have to make the decisions, and even worse than any of that…you have to trust and have faith in yourself.

The unmitigated horror.

This world is in trouble.

Sending all my love,

Devon J hall