TheGioBlog

When I was younger, I was always a child, a pre-teen, and even a teenager who never really knew how to stand up for herself.
There were many situations where other people had to step in and mediate things for me.

Until one day, like any other, I started being seen as someone difficult to deal with. Temperamental.
And I feel it too. All this immense anger inside me.

This anger is a double-edged sword. It consumes me and hurts me deeply, but at the same time, there is a side of it that no one talks about.

It protects me.

It was my anger that taught me not to accept just anything. That made me set boundaries when I realized people were walking all over me. That made me raise my voice when I had already been silent for too long.

It was the anger, the resentment of having heard, for so long, things I never deserved to hear.
Attacks. Bad jokes. Embarrassing comments.

None of that reaches me anymore. Not in my world.

I started taking that anger and using it as self-defense.
There are people in this life who only realize the damage they cause with their words when they hear something back that they never expected.

And for a long time, I was that person who swallowed everything. Who pretended it didn’t hurt. Who accepted things just to avoid conflict.

Until I realized that silence was hurting me too.

So I started responding. Not always in the best way, not in the calmest way, but in the only way I could at that moment.

And that is when I understood something hard to admit. Not every reaction comes from strength. Sometimes it comes from exhaustion.

Exhaustion from being the target.
Exhaustion from being seen as too much just for feeling.
Exhaustion from having to explain the obvious.

But there is a very thin line between defending yourself and losing yourself.

Because when I give back the same intensity, as fair as it may seem, I also place myself in the same position that once hurt me.
And that does not always protect me. Sometimes it just prolongs what I wanted to end.

Today I still feel the anger. It still comes strong, fast, almost automatic.

But I am learning to pause between feeling and reacting. To understand if that moment is about a boundary being crossed, or an old wound asking to be heard.

Not everything needs a response. But some things require a stance.

And maybe my challenge is not to stop being intense, but to learn when my intensity builds something for me and when it only destroys.

When should I let things go for something bigger, and when should I not?

Did this anger come from all the pain I endured in silence? From everything I kept inside?

Where did this new version of me come from?

Or are we all, at some point, meant to become this version of ourselves?