Who Am I?

[of all the versions of me]

Remember school? That time when you’d sign your friends’ notebooks at the end of the year, for their birthday, or just to leave them a random note to find later?

"Never change."
"Never change."
"Never change."

When I was a kid, a teenager, all I wanted was to change. To be different. To have a different personality.

I struggled a lot internally with who I was and grew up believing I was beyond fixing. But in reality, what I lacked were the tools.

From a very young age, I was drawn to spirituality and personal development. The first time I went to a Reiki session, something shifted—hearing the feedback, I felt special. For the first time, I felt like there was something inside me that shined, that mattered, that was going to take me somewhere in life.

For years, I read, researched, listened, and tried different therapies—both traditional and alternative—to piece together why I felt so out of place.

My biggest struggles included:

• My insecurity/self-worth

• My relationship with anger (not just suppressing it, but truly letting it go and moving on)

• Being "cold" or not affectionate enough

• My communication (or, let’s be honest, my lack of it)

• My impatience

Ever since I was little, I remember my parents asking me to change, telling me I needed to improve these things, questioning why I was like that… If only they had known I was just a mirror.

The thing is, no one really knew how hard I was trying—how many internal conversations I had every time I wanted to apologize for something I did, or after an argument, or whenever I got upset. I desperately wanted to be different and would beat myself up for not being able to change.

So what was wrong? What was happening?
I later came to the realization that I simply didn’t have the right tools (or no tools at all actually).

In the world of spiritual healing and self-development, you often hear:

"We are broken."

This never quite sat right with me. It always felt a little too marketing-friendly—because if you're broken, then you have to fix yourself. And if you're broken, you're not okay, you're not at your full potential, you're wrong somehow. Honestly, in 2025, I think this concept is way past its expiration date.

After years of focusing on "fixing myself," I finally saw the beauty in the personality that was shaped in my childhood and stayed with me through my teenage years and into my early twenties.

I will never stop being one way or another, better or worse, angry or loving.

Because I am not those things.

I am not my anger.
I am not my impatience.
I am not my emotional hardness.
I am not unworthy, nor am I inherently virtuous.
I am not my silence, nor my outbursts.
I am not too sensitive.
I am not a coward.
I am not stupid.

I am not selfish.
I am not less or more.

For so long, I identified with all these things. I believed they defined me, and it made me deeply unhappy. It kept me from seeing anything for myself—my future felt blurry. Where could I possibly go, being this way?

[I embrace my younger self for the way she felt]

It wasn’t until I realized that who I really am is a person who came into this world to experience all of these emotions—and CHOOSE how I want to respond to them today—that I understood:

I was never broken.
I was never defective.
And if I’m not broken and I’m not defective… then there’s nothing to fix!

I just needed knowledge. I needed to practice responding instead of reacting on autopilot, the way I always had. And there’s a huge difference between saying, "I am angry, I am anger," and saying, "I feel angry, I am experiencing anger."

See? One approach is about changing who you are, and the other is about learning to process emotions. Not suppress them. Not fight them. Just feel them, process them, and let them go.

And this isn’t something we’re taught as kids—it’s something most of us only realize as adults.

And how powerful is it to know that we are capable of these changes? That we hold that power within ourselves, beyond past or future circumstances? That is true empowerment. That is taking responsibility for ourselves. And it is one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves.

Once I had this realization, I was able to relax—to stop feeling so out of place and to understand that every single day, I have the power to CHOOSE how I respond to the situations that challenge me.

Because the goal isn’t to stop feeling anger so I can say, "I’m no longer an angry person."
The goal is to change how I respond when anger arises.

Anger doesn’t exist out there. Impatience doesn’t exist out there. All of it, just like their opposites, lives inside me. And they’re there because I’m human, and I came here to experience all of it—to learn how to manage it, to understand my humanity, and to grow from my greatest challenges.

Bad news though, to learn how to manage something, you actually need to experience it.

So if you want to get better at handling anxiety, guess what? Life will throw situations at you that trigger anxiety, so you can practice choosing a different response. There’s no shortcut. That’s just how it works.

This is my new daily practice.

I started questioning all the beliefs I had about who I thought I was, and I began asking myself: “How would the version of me I want to become respond to this situation?”

I highly recommend you try this exercise btw...

If I want to become the version of Victoria who no longer reacts to anger by shutting down and going cold, then TODAY, when I find myself in a situation that triggers that response, I need to CHOOSE to react differently.

And just to be clear—this isn’t about letting people walk all over you.

I can still get angry—because I’m human.
I can still be impatient tomorrow—because I’m human.

But I don’t have to stay in those emotions. I don’t have to identify with them.
I can use what I’ve learned to process them and let them go later.

So, if you feel bad about who you are, if you feel like there’s so much you need to change, I want you to know this:

You are valuable.
You are worthy.

Let go of that resistance of being the way you are right now, and so much pressure will be released. That’s the first step to true change, acceptance.

If you keep trying to change but feel like you keep failing, it’s not because you’re beyond repair, you just need the right tools that fit you.