If someone bullies you
how do you protect yourself
I used to be afraid of rage.
I thought it was uncivilized, something to be managed, suppressed, ashamed of, until a teacher showed me that rage can come from love. That it can be the instinct to protect your home.
Recently, my tax accountant gave me a reason to test that lesson.
She charged me 50% more than we agreed. When I asked why, she exaggerated wildly: “I’ve been working on your case for over a year. We’ve exchanged over three dozen emails. I corrected last year’s return for you, for free.” None of it was true. We exchanged maybe three or four emails. I handled the correction myself, through my company.
I pushed back, calmly and specifically, on what wasn’t true, and steered the conversation back to the price.
The response I got was cruel: “You have no idea how to file taxes.”
And then, when the itemized invoice arrived, the charge had tripled. Tripled.
My first instinct was fear. The specific fear of someone larger than you using their size to punish you. Fear of the mess, of people who are genuinely unkind, who intend to hurt you, and of the unpredictable cruelty they might still reach for.
I felt like my kindness had no armor. Like I wasn’t built for this kind of brutality.
But then I went to dance class.
As my body moved through power, something shifted. Anger rose in me, clean and clarifying. If I were a bad girl, I thought, I’d yell at her. I’d argue back with three bullet points and I wouldn’t apologize for a single one.
I felt rage rising to protect me. To keep me from feeling small. To keep me from being afraid. It was the same impulse as throwing something at a robber who breaks into your house, fear and fury fused into defense.
Later, I was on the phone with a friend, almost yelling: “I have the right to be angry.”
And she just said it back to me, simply: “You have the right to be angry.”
Something released when I heard that. When I let it land in my body as truth.
The anger didn’t disappear, but it changed shape. It stopped feeling like fire that wanted to tear things apart. It became something solid. A wall. A boundary. Not wild, but immovable.
The image in my mind transformed too. I was no longer the frightened child swinging at a robber in the dark. I was standing in front of my own door, calm and clear, looking at my tax accountant and saying:
No.
This is my home.
You stay away.
You are not allowed in.
She may be trying to break through. But she can’t enter a space I haven’t opened to her. It’s my home. My sanctuary. If I choose not to let her in, she has no means to force her way — no matter how hard she pushes, no matter how cruel she gets.
I don’t have to fight for what’s already mine.
So whenever the fear creeps back, I return to the door. I stand there. And I say it again:
No.
This is my home.
You stay away.
You are not allowed in.
The rage became love. An act of protection. A choice to tend my own house.
My house is my sovereignty. I realized the door was always mine :)
