The Realities of My Mental Health

“I Want To Be Like Devon J Hall When I Grow Up,” No You Don’t.

Some days I just don’t have it all together. Some days I take the weight of the world, and I put it on my shoulders, and whether or not I like doing it is revealing to me.

Largely because I am procrastinating from pushing myself forward. I am afraid of what “forward” actually means. I am afraid of success, absolutely terrified of it.

I have shared a lot with the world, a lot of unkind truths, a lot of shameful truths, a lot of the guilt that I carry on my shoulders, I have inserted into my personal blog.

I don’t really have a lot of people to talk about what I am going through. I don’t have any friends left. I kicked them all to the curb, largely because I realized way too late, a lot of the people I loved in my twenties, were fully out of the closet racists.

Many of them were rapists. I just didn’t know or didn’t want to see, until it happened to me.

Many of them were abusive, I just didn’t want to see, because the darkness was comfortable. I was used to it. I was used to being kicked down and told no, and saying yes when I really wanted to say no.

Except I am not doing that anymore, I’ve moved on from those behaviors that kept me blind to the realities of the world around me, and the light is absolutely terrifying.

The more that I share with the world when it comes to my trauma, the more that I feel myself pulling open old wounds, even when I don’t really want to. I have to because now it’s my job to be open and honest about my mental health.

Yes because I am trying to help others, but mostly because I am trying to help myself, and the only way that I know how to deal with my mental health issues is to talk about them.

If I can’t afford or find cheap therapy, if I can’t find doctors and a support system of people that believe me, then I will write about it.

Because I finally know how to say some of the things that I’ve been holding back for years.

But it feels some days like a bandaid. My mom says that she’s noticed how articulate I’ve become, and she says she recognizes that I have changed, and grown up and that I am someone who can genuinely help other people.

But she also sees what I see, I can’t seem to help myself. She wants me to see a hypnotist.

I don’t want to do that. Everyone says that in order to heal you have to rip open your past and actually start dealing with it, I’ve done that. I have spent the last two years thinking about and dealing with my trauma.

I have considered every angle, and I have dissected every single lie, I have done everything that a therapist would ask me to do, in order to deconstruct what happened to me.

If I go see a therapist now, any kind of therapist, then I am going to just have to reopen wounds that I am trying to close.

The pressure of feeling like I am not doing enough to help myself is exhausting. They say that no man is an island. Well, I am.

I am a motherfucking island. There is no one in my life that I trust, not even my mother, largely because whatever the reasons when I was being abused, I couldn’t tell her what was happening. Partially because I was hypnotized by abuse not to tell, and partially because my mom and I used to butt heads a lot and I didn’t think I could trust her.

I was a child who was being habitually raped, I didn’t trust anyone back then, and those trust issues have been carried with me throughout the last few years.

I am tired of the battle of the races, a battle that has destroyed my life far more often than I’ve cared to admit in the past. Largely because I was afraid to admit that people genuinely hated me because of the color of my skin.

Now I can’t help but see how many of the signs that I missed because I was trained by teachers and other adults in my life to ignore them.

I am a victim and a survivor of the same systemic abuse that has destroyed countless Black lives in America, and to be honest with you, very few people care about that fact.

Because rightfully so, too many people in the world are focused on what they need, what they want, what they hope for. The idea of paying attention to how much the average Black Canadian Woman has experienced is far from their minds because “bad shit doesn’t happen in Canada,” right?

Except for the murdered and missing indigenous women across the country. Except for the Black women who are called psychotic when they go to a doctor to say “I’ve been gang-raped and I need help,” except for the Asian woman who gets accused by her neighbors of being the bringer of the “China virus” to this country.

I am tired, and I would just like the world to give us people of color a break for a little while. I know that we’re “at war” or whatever with Nazis, I know that this entire planet is trying to kill us all in a variety of disturbing and traumatizing ways, but could we just have a break for awhile?

Could y’all just let us breathe? And you know what? This goes out to all women dealing with mental health issues, regardless of their race, color, creed, nationality, or size.

I feel your pain. I live your pain. I fucking get it. I’m tired too.

Sending all my love,

Devon J Hall