The same scar can make you cruel or careful. Scars don’t choose; people do.

Being hurt does not hand you a personality. Two people can come out of the same bad year and one gets sharp with everybody, while the other makes sure nobody near them ever feels what they felt. The event was identical, and what separated them was a hundred small moments afterwards that nobody was watching.

The choosing shows up in a specific second: the one where you could say the cutting thing because it was said to you first, and it would even be fair. Notice that second when it arrives. You do not have to win it every time for the direction to hold.