On Hate – A Review

A quick precursor to all of this is: Yes. I was a hateful kid. Yes. I was hateful as a teenager. And yes, I was hateful in college.

I looked for things to hate and it was easy. I debated, argued, mocked, and ridiculed so much. So. Much. And it got me nowhere. The dust would settle and I’d be mad and I’d have more hate in me.

Hate took over so many aspects of my life. I studied rhetoric and philosophy just to hate more academically. I wrote, endlessly, about hate. About characters who hated. About things I hated. About what it felt like to be hated.

I created evil, out of thin air, all to give me something to hate.

And all the while, I grew more and more jaded. More and more upset. And then I realized the thing I hated the most was me.

I remember saying that, crying on the tile floor of my first girlfriend’s room. “I hate me.”

She told me she was scared.

A lot of moments continuously replay in my mind. It’s like a tape deck filled with anxiety. This. This moment. It’s there, constantly.

I hated me.

That’s what all the rage and all the frustration in the world brought me to. That’s what all the studying and all the furiously typing on Facebook and YouTube got me. That’s what all the emo philosophy and the debasing humor brought me to.

And I still feel tinges of that inside of me. Of that loathing.

Of the need to dislike me.

But, I don’t feel that on the outside anymore. I don’t fuel myself with discontent for other’s or their beliefs. I don’t find my entire existence summed up by my opposition to something, especially not something unfathomably opinion based.

I haven’t forgiven myself fully for years of hate. I know I will eventually. But it’s been a long slow process. Wounds take time to heal, after all.

But before they can even start to close, you need sutures, and band-aids, and support. There’s a lot you have to do for yourself, but at the same time maybe we all need to lean on each other. We need to look for people in dark places and show them what’s better, and we need to tell people when we think we’re in that dark place.

We need to get better about talking about hate and disposing it. We need to be able to discuss mental health and spiraling depression and crippling anxiety and self-loathing without any depreciation of humanity.

And that’s not easy. I’m asking for a new zeitgeist. A new normal. But I think we might be getting there.

Part of it is just admitting it. There is hate out there. We saw it. Its why survivors had to leave with their hands over their heads this weekend. Its why families are in mourning. And there has to be a better way. So sure. I admit that it’s here. I admit that hate is real. And that it’s hurting people on a bigger scale than it should.

But I believe it’s wrong to say there’s a lot of hate. Because I don’t think there is. I think there’s a vocal minority. And maybe there’s small pockets in everyone. But there is way too much good in the world to suggest it’s a losing battle.

And, I’m going to be inflammatory, and if that’s in bad taste for you, then I’m sorry.

But this is a battle. Heck, it might even be a war. A war in which there are over 7 billion battles going on everyday on the inside. A war with mass misreporting and misunderstandings. A war where there’s distaste on both sides. A war where winning is concededly easier for our opponents.

But it’s a war that’s worth fighting. And there’s only so many of those.

We all want to do our bests. For me, it starts here. It starts with acknowledging that this is problematic, but knowing that there’s ways to help, to fight. And then it just comes down to doing it.

Thanks for reading. Keep your head up and give it your all.

-Connor