“You can’t make them love you, but you can make them wish they treated you better.”  –Taylor Swift

My Interpretation: Forgiveness is not about erasing the damage. It is about walking away without shrinking. My anger may start the fire, but my grace makes sure I rise from it.

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The Walking Oxymoron Era – Part 1

People read me wrong.
They always have.

They meet:
the soft voice,
the careful smile,
the good manners I learned in survival,
& they assume they know the whole story.
But they do not.

I am the calm one until I am not.
The soft one until you lie.
The forgiving one until forgiving you means betraying myself.

I have always been misunderstood on the first try — not because I am hiding anything, but because I am layered in ways most people never bother to look for.

People see softness.
They miss the furnace burning beneath it.

I was not raised in gentleness.
I was raised in survival.
Which means I learned anger before I learned safety.

Not the explosive kind.
Not the dramatic kind.
But the sharp inhale when a boundary gets crossed.
The heat in my chest when someone pretends not to understand me.
The sting behind my teeth when someone lies.

Anger is not my flaw.
It is my smoke alarm.
It does not go off to scare anyone – it goes off to save me.

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Forgiveness as a Reflex

Here is my contradiction:
For someone whose first emotion is anger, I forgive faster than anyone I know.

People think this is grace.
Actually, it is fear disguised as grace.

I hate tension.
I hate rooms that crackle.
I hate the silence that thickens when hurt is ignored.

So I patch the cracks before anyone even notices the leak.
It looks noble.
It is not.
It is self-defense.

But here is the line I do not bend on:
Lying.

Lying is the one wound I do not forgive easily.
Not because it proves someone else is untrustworthy –
but because it makes me feel foolish.

When someone lies to me, I do not think,
“How dare you?”
I think,
“How did I not see it?”
“How did I miss the signs?”
“How did I let myself trust you?”

The betrayal is theirs.
The shame is mine.

That is trauma logic –
the logic of a girl who learned to scan for danger before she learned to scan for love.

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Soft Does Not Mean Safe

People call me compassionate, mature, & chill.

Cool.
Sure.

But inside?
there is a girl biting her tongue so hard she tastes iron.
A girl who learned to stay soft –
because softness made her likable, not because it made her safe.

I am contradiction-shaped:
the INFJ who talks like a poet but overthinks like a scientist,
the empath who forgives on autopilot but cannot forget a tone of voice,
the woman who preaches boundaries but still apologizes for having any.

Softness without spine is not love.
It is erasure.

So I built a spine.

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Misunderstood by Design

People think I am complicated.
I am not.

I am consistent – just layered.

I feel deeply.
I protect fiercely.
I speak poetically because it is the only way I know how to translate my inner world.

I am not dramatic – I am expressive.
I am not scattered – I am lyrical.
I am not indecisive – I am reflective.
I am not angry – I am guarded.

My contradictions are not chaos.
They are coherence.

Every piece fits if you look long enough.
Most people do not.

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The Over-Thinking Loop

Sometimes I repeat myself.
Not for drama –
but because repeating it is how I process truth.

I think in circles.
I heal in spirals.

If a sentence comes back again, it is because I am still unwrapping it.
That is not confusion.
That is clarity in progress.

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The Rebuild

Forgiveness is not saintly for me.
It is practical.
It is how I keep my lungs clear enough to keep moving.

Anger is the alarm.
Forgiveness is the fire escape.
Both keep me alive.

I am kind, but not in the simplistic way people assume.
My kindness is rebellion.
My boundaries are mercy.
My silence is not submission – it is recovery.

My rage does not make me dangerous.
It makes me honest.
My softness does not make me weak.
It makes me human.

Maybe that is the oxymoron.
Maybe that is why people get me wrong.
Maybe I am not meant to be simple.

I am meant to be understood slowly.

Xoxo ♡