If You Don’t Love Yourself…You Absolutely Cannot Expect That Others Will…
Self-Confidence Is A Must — Whether You Like It Or Not
On my personal blog, I wrote about these two gigs I have coming up where I am going to be discussing my trauma, my creative journey, my mental health, and cannabis use. Those are the four topics my two speeches are going to revolve around, and I am fucking terrified.
I am terrified because I am not just talking to random strangers about my experience, I am getting paid to talk about my experience to random strangers.
That means it is now my job to talk to random strangers about my life experiences and traumas.
Who the fuck let that happen? I mean don’t get me wrong, I absolutely want this, and I am utterly proud that I get to put this on my resume, I am just wondering what creature in the universe decided that I would be a good person, to talk to other persons, about my experience. Because that person is nuts.
I have no idea what the fuck I am doing, and that’s the absolute truth. Every day I get up and I think to myself “well let’s see how today goes,” and some days are good, some days are bad, and some days are downright awesome, but it’s still weird that I am getting paid to talk.
About myself?
What the fuck am I going to say?
I am going to say “Hi, I’m Devon and I am the Loud Mouth Brown Girl, who got arrested for having a panic attack on an airplane who is now turning that experience into a global blogging brand.”
I am going to say, “I talk to writers about how to write better, and I learn from other writers about how to improve my writing. I am a very proud BudSista, from Vancouver, British Columbia, and at thirty-three years old I discovered more than twenty years of sexual abuse and trauma memories that I am still working through.”
I am going to say, “I work forty hours a week providing content to the world on a variety of topics that include mental health, cannabis, and cannabis education, trauma, and PTSD.”
I will tell them that I built Loud Mouth Brown Girl from the ground up in the middle of a mental health breakdown and that I lost my mind when I first started to realize just how much this world threw at me.
I am also going to tell them that the mental health breakdown helped me discover parts of myself that I didn’t know I had, or that I didn’t recognize because it had been so long since I had seen them.
I am going to list my experience in a way that is concise, easy to understand, and filled with the deep-seated knowledge that even though I am terrified of presenting myself to the world, I am doing the best that I can to be the best version of myself.
“I wish I could do that,” you might be thinking that right about now, and I know that before you ask because if I were sitting where you were, I’d probably be thinking the same thing. Ten years ago I was thinking the same thing.
“I wish I could be the kind of person who is confident and strong, who shares her experience with the world effortlessly, and looks great while doing it.”
Wanna know a secret? It is absolutely not effortless.
Giving these talks is exhausting — not only is there the anxiety, depression, and fear that I am not good enough that happens before the talk, then there is the fear, anxiety, depression, and PSTD that comes after the talk is over.
“Did I do a good job?”
“Did I sound clear and concise?”
“Were people listening to me or were they focused on what I was wearing or my bad teeth or my hair?”
“What if this opportunity doesn’t translate into other opportunities?”
And on, and on, and on, it goes.
Yet every single day that I have to present myself to the world I am going to do the absolute best that I can because I want the world to see the best version of myself.
People are not born with self-confidence, they learn to fake it until they make it, but the thing is that I am no longer interested in faking it. I want people to know that I am scared all the time, but I do what I have to do because at the end of the day I am a complete and total survivor.
If that means educating myself on creating an invoice and learning to register my business, then that is what I am going to have to do so that I can keep doing the job that I love.
It’ll take years before I ever walk out onto a stage, or sit in front of a computer camera, and feel safe talking about my experience, and even then something could come and knock me off my seat at any moment in time.
All I can do is focus on remembering that I know what I know, in ways other people will never know, and do the best that I can.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
