On taking back control of your emotional world
If you’re reading this right now still in the thick of it — still feeling that surge every time she walks into the room, still replaying what he said under his breath in the meeting, still carrying someone home with you in your chest long after you’ve left the office — this is for you.
You don’t need to have figured it out yet. You just need to stay with me for a moment.
THE PEOPLE WHO LIVED RENT-FREE IN MY HEAD
There was a time in my life when a handful of people at work had an almost frightening amount of power over me. And the disturbing part? They weren’t even trying.
It didn’t take a confrontation. It didn’t even take a conversation.
Sometimes it was just a look. A tone. A comment tossed in my direction in passing — the kind that’s easy for everyone else to forget and impossible for you to unhear.
And just like that, something in me would ignite.
Anger. Resentment. A wave of emotion so strong it almost felt violent — and so unfair, because I was the one drowning in it while they’d already moved on with their day.
I would replay their words in my head for hours. I’d vent about them to anyone who’d listen. I’d carry them home, into my evenings, into my sleep.
The truth is, they didn’t just trigger me.
They occupied me.
They took my attention. My energy. My focus. Even when they were nowhere near me, they were still there — living rent-free in the most expensive real estate in the world: my mind.
And the most exhausting part?
It kept happening. Every. Single. Time.
Like they had access to something inside me that I had no idea how to shut down.
THE BURNOUT THAT BROKE ME OPEN
I didn’t have a breakthrough. I had a burnout.
I remember the specific kind of exhaustion — not just tired, but hollowed out. The kind that hits you in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday when you realize you’ve spent the last forty minutes mentally arguing with someone who isn’t even in the room.
My body felt it before my mind did. The tension in my shoulders that never fully left. The way I’d clock into work already braced for impact. The constant low-level hum of resentment running in the background of everything — while I was trying to be present with my family, while I was trying to think clearly, while I was trying to just breathe.
That’s when something sharp and simple crossed my mind:
“This is costing me too much.”
Not just emotionally. But mentally, physically, and in terms of who I was showing up as — as a woman, a colleague, a daughter, a sister, a friend.
That’s when a phrase, I’d once heard resurfaced — not as a quote, but as a challenge:
“The only corner of the universe you can change is yours.”
For the first time, I didn’t roll my eyes at it. I felt the weight of it as a responsibility.
THE SHIFT I WASN’T READY FOR
Until that moment, my story had been clean and logical:
They trigger me. Their behaviour is the cause. My reaction is the consequence.
That felt true. It felt justified. And honestly — it was, in many ways.
But I started sitting with a different question:
What if the problem wasn’t only what they were doing… but how my system had learned to respond?
What if, somewhere along the way — through difficult relationships, through years of being talked over, through learning to stay small in rooms that felt unsafe — I had allowed certain words, certain tones, certain attitudes to become automatic entry points into my emotional world?
What if they didn’t actually have power over me?
What if they just had access?
THE PASSWORD METAPHOR
That’s when the metaphor arrived, and it’s never left me.
It felt like I had, without realizing it, shared the password to my emotional system.
Not on purpose. Not consciously. But through years of repetition and unexamined patterns, certain behaviours had become keys. And every time those keys appeared — that tone of voice, that dismissive wave, that particular smirk — my system unlocked the same reaction. Instantly. Predictably. As if there were no other option.
The more it happened, the more it reinforced itself. They didn’t even have to try anymore. My response was automatic — like muscle memory, but for pain.
They weren’t running my system. I was. Which meant I was also the one who could update it.
That realization was deeply uncomfortable. Because it meant I couldn’t keep waiting for them to change. It meant the work was mine.
But it was also, quietly, the most freeing thought I’d ever had.
WHAT REVOKING ACCESS ACTUALLY LOOKED LIKE
Let me be clear about what this is not:
It is not pretending you’re not hurt. It is not accepting behaviour that doesn’t sit right with you. It is not performing serenity or becoming an emotionless shell of yourself.
As women, we are already told far too often to tone it down, calm down, stop being so sensitive. This is the opposite of that.
What revoking access actually meant for me was something much more precise:
I stopped giving automatic access.
At first, nothing magical happened. I still felt the surge. I still felt the familiar heat of anger rising in my chest. The triggers still worked.
But something small was different.
There was a pause. A tiny sliver of space between what happened and how I responded. And inside that pause — which at first lasted half a second and eventually stretched into something I could actually work with — there was a choice.
That pause became my practice.
REWRITING THE CODE
Instead of reacting immediately, I started getting curious. Why this reaction? Why this intensity? Why this particular person, and not that one?
Slowly, I began to understand that my reactions weren’t really about the present moment. They were echoes — tied to older patterns, to meanings I’d assigned long ago, to stories my nervous system had learned to repeat because they once kept me safe.
The woman who dismissed me in the meeting wasn’t just her. She was every person who had ever made me feel like my voice didn’t count.
The colleague who took credit for my work wasn’t just annoying. He was proof of every story I’d been told about having to work twice as hard just to be seen half as much.
Understanding that didn’t erase the anger. But it changed its address. It stopped living in the present and started being something I could examine, process, and — eventually — release.
The intensity softened. The duration shortened. Some triggers stopped working altogether.
Like old passwords that no longer unlocked anything.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF STRENGTH
We are conditioned to believe that strength looks like control — control over what other people do, control over outcomes, control over how we’re perceived.
But the strength I found was quieter than that. And honestly, harder-won.
It’s the ability to hold your ground internally, even when the external world is being unreasonable. It’s knowing your emotions are completely valid, without letting them be weaponized against you — by others, or by yourself. It’s the difference between reacting from a wound and responding from a place of choice.
I didn’t become calmer because they changed.
I became calmer because I stopped handing them the keys.
BEFORE YOU CLOSE THIS
I want to ask you something. And I want you to resist the urge to answer quickly.
Think of one specific person who can ruin your day without even trying. Now ask yourself: when did you give them that password?
Not to blame yourself. Not to excuse them. But to locate the access point — because that’s where your power actually lives.
And more importantly:
Are you still running on an old password?
One that made sense once, maybe even kept you safe, but no longer reflects who you are and who you’re becoming?
Healing isn’t about becoming someone who never feels anger, pain, or frustration.
It’s about becoming someone who is no longer easily overridden by them.
Not numb. Not detached. Not “fine.”
Just… less hackable.
— Written for every woman who is tired of being the one who feels it most.
Salima
Just me thinking out loud over here