I am powerless, aren't I?

My best friend says that of all ethnicities, I probably shouldn't marry an Italian or a Latino, because there is no room in my person for machismo. I can get pretty fired up when men try to assert their implied power over me.

A while back, I got into a power struggle with an older (not by too much-ten years tops) Latin man. He felt ostracized by me and the group I was working with, and responded by impinging on my personal space, staring us down, expressionless. This made me feel so physically anxious that I demanded that he leave; he didn't, so I did. The other men in the group tried to get me to calm down, but I saw it as harassment and I wasn't going to back down and let him believe that what he was doing was okay. There was another woman in the group who felt similarly, not to as great an extent, but similarly.

Then, even though I'd left, I couldn't let it go. Suddenly, I was incredibly concerned about this person's ability to work with other people in a pastoral or therapeutic context; I kept ranting about it. It was like a switch got kicked on, and I had no control over my emotions.

Sometimes I react like that in situations where others are less affected by the same circumstances. Maybe it's a post-trauma response, but that's certainly not something I want to touch without the presence of a professional. When reactions are out of proportion to reality, there's usually something deeper going on. But when I'm in the moment, I don't feel like I'm overreacting. I feel like I'm reacting appropriately, that the situation warrants an extreme response.

This isn't the end of the road for me. I am not an emotionally whole person. I am stable, but not perfect. Sometimes I think that I need to be perfect to be lovable, that somehow even though everyone else is flawed, I need to be less flawed. I really believe that, even after all the work I've done. I still think I have to be better than you just to be okay. This totally sucks.