The Chosen One
Not All of Us Know How to Be Great…We Become Great By Trying to Be Good Enough
My mom always said that asking for help was like letting the Devil through the door. As soon as you start asking for help, people expect you to return the favor, which is fine, but the favor never gets returned enough for your turn to be up, so to speak.
I never wanted to be famous. When I was twelve years old I gave myself one last night of pretending in my house that I was a model and then I was going to focus on my school work and get really, really smart.
I wanted to be a lawyer, I wanted to study the world’s history, I wanted to travel the world, and I knew that books could get me there just as easily as being told “you’re too fat” over and over again until I wanted to kill myself.
So I stopped pretending to model around my house, I stopped focusing on fashion, and I tried to the best of my abilities to focus on my studies. But between being sexually abused at school and sometimes in other places, places I should have been safe, and the bullies I was dealing with, focusing on my studies wasn’t very easy for me.
The more abused I was, the worse that school got for me. I gave up my dreams of traveling the world and figured I could just work at the church until something great came along.
But in that place — as much as I hated every inch of my job — there were pockets of happiness and hope that made the crappy days worth sticking around for.
I didn’t choose to make a name for myself as the girl who cried rape, but I had to, because I knew the people who should have protected me, the system that was designed to protect people like me, failed me.
Deliberately or not because of economic status, race, color, creed, nationality, size, or orientation, the system failed me.
However, that same system that failed me also made up for it — or attempted to do so anyway — by coming together to make sure that I wasn’t completely on the streets while we looked for a place to live.
If the system had listened when I asked for help, none of this would have happened, and I wouldn’t be here...and as much as the journey to get here was completely awful, being here is wonderfully different than any place I’ve been in my life.
While I was houseless a friend remarked that I was “surprisingly calm” with all the let downs we’d been having while trying to find a place.
“Nyx has my back,” I said, referencing the Goddess of the lunar cycle.
He chuckled and gave me an “Okay if you say so,” kind of response, and later I called my friend Nada Chehade, I told her I was out of options and I didn’t know what to do or where we would be sleeping that night.
Do you know what this bitch had the audacity to say to me? “What the fuck else are you going to do but survive this?”
Yeah! That’s right.
Not “I understand,” or “Give up it’s okay to curl up and cry,” no Nada didn’t do any of that, she reminded me that I had been through Hell to get to this place of transition, and I needed to keep going through the transition and have faith.
That same day we found out that we got this apartment.
I rolled my eyes so hard they almost fell out of my head.
That was my first response.
My second response was to let myself cry a little bit.
Now you might ask how any of this makes me one of “The Chosen One(s)”, but the truth is that no one can decide that for you. You have to decide, you. have to choose to believe that your life is worth living and celebrating. YOU have to believe that you deserve to decide to choose yourself.
I did and it feels wonderful. I also chose some amazing friends to come with me on my journey and while I love them all there's just no room to name all the women and men from around the world who have kept me going these six or seven years.
I honestly thought “You have to be special to be famous” but here we are, LMBG Army, 2000+ strong, and still supporting each other all these years later.
From the folks at Not Alone Talk to all the other hashtag conversationalists who support mental health initiatives around the globe by constantly putting a focus on patient-first care, there are millions of us talking about mental health now. We’re not alone anymore.
And I still get to be at the forefront of all the conversations that matter to me, even as I learn to heal all the years of ignored trauma and abuse I’ve experienced.
I made the decision to choose to put myself first. (Read that again and again and again.)
To forgo relationships that aren’t healthy for me, to walk away from people who literally tried to murder me to keep me silent, so that I could build a new life where I am healthy and happy and protected and loved.
Here I am, doing the fucking thing that I never in a million years thought I would be able to do, all because I decided to keep going, just to see where we’d get when we got where we were going.
Thanks for that younger me, you did good.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall, The Loud Mouth Brown Girl
