When I started this blog, nearly nine years ago, I was a very different person, at a very different point in their life.

That person, the me of the past, was angry (for the first time in a long time after years of swallowing and repressing their anger).

That anger, which once ruled my life, felt foreign and forbidden—something past me didn’t know how to deal with at first.

I’d almost forgotten what real anger and rage felt like.

For years, I had swallowed all my fury and outrage, like hot coals, tuning out the burn as it seared and scarred me on the way down, and now (after learning I was and always had been Autistic at the age of 29) that anger (that I thought I’d mostly defeated) was back, and part of me was reasonably apprehensive about it.

Digesting anger (repressing it) was just another pain, and I had gotten good at holding in, ignoring, and disconnecting from my pain over the years. It’s what I’d been trained by society to do.

The me of the past thought the “ability” to ignore pain and become disconnected with their body and emotions was a super power, a key defining trait of their personhood (but the me of today has learned that this “skill” was very likely a trauma response).

It was reasonable to be apprehensive when the rage returned, because that uncontrolled rage had caused many problems in my life (when I tried to bottle it up and control it).

Past me thought they were “an angry person” living in shame of the secret rage beast inside of them, phobic of their rage, pushing it away… bottling it up, without paying any mind to venting the pressure created by the bottling process.

Past me lived the life of a shaken soda bottle, one that had become so pressurized that a single drop could easily cause it to explode. That me was ashamed of their emotions and ashamed (and afraid) of their explosions.

Past me didn’t realize that bottling things up was creating problems, that the stored energy inside a person could only be held for so long (or that people are only able to contain so much before they eventually overflow or burst like a dam wide open, as the flood of all the emotions and feelings they’d tried to hold in begin flowing in unintentional directions).

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