the need to constantly hate something
nurturing what keeps me appaling to maintain my kindness alive
11th of October 2023 my diary entry opens with:
therapist says it’s normal. of course it’s normal so I go home with the task of having to remember what exactly awakens these emotions so that we can trace them back to memories good enough to pierce through with EMDR. the normalcy and his discussion frustrate me, I sit in his office and I can no longer focus on any of the things he’s saying-reactive layers of the traumatised memory system and lalalalala I’ve heard it all, give me something to hold on to, please.
I’ve always had some kind of pull to the word hate. It has a bland sonority, it doesn’t look nor sound the way it should, at least not in English. In Romanian, we have ură (oo-ruh) and the way it’s pronounced is so heavy and dense, just the letter r is rolled in a way that pushes the meaning forward.
Although I was and still keep within myself a very angsty, punk-tactic teen, this allegiance to the word, despite its careless phonetics, has been with me for a long while. Even as early as four I knew that, at least in my mind, I can declare I hate chicken soup and I hate the way bone broth smells. I knew these little things won’t take away from my sweetness, I knew that when someone would encounter me they would be overwhelmed by the youth I exuded as a little girl and not by the quips about how mama can never convince me to finish the bowl of soup in front of me.
But the child-like sweetness fades away with time, the "i hate this soup” is no longer cute because it no longer comes out of the mouth of a little kid, it turns into associations with bitterness, ungratefulness-
“you’ve turned dark, you used to be so cheery as a kid”
Is something I heard from my grandma when I was a teen. I wanted to fight back as soon as the last word escaped her, to let her know that I’ve always been honest, critical, blunt but those are never attributes you would give a four-year-old dressed head to toe in pink. That it was unfair to make me into this scared and ashamed creature that has darkened itself away from the world when in reality I was figuring the world out for myself, digging through to see what I love and what I deeply dislike. I took me a few years of school and a good amount of conversing with superstitious elders and kids alike to realize that hate was not a word to use often.
“it’s too radical”
“you can’t just hate something, that’s too powerful of a feeling for you to have”
The wonders of language are such that we have a spectrum for our emotions.
I don’t really like oranges that much.
I really hate how you use that tone as if you’ve seen it all, you’re 19 still, sit down!
There’s an ongoing funny bit among my loved ones where the collective agreement is that I tend to be quite the hater. I am much better at verbalizing my negative emotions, for the positive ones I need to sit down and write about them. I criticize, point out, insult, and obliterate almost anything that displeases me and I usually just blame it on:
“gut instinct, bitch.”
It’s something I like to speculate about as being influenced by the way my mom and dad speak; how there is something so satisfying in the way she retaliates to something so authentically every. single. time. even if she’s wrong and how he never forgives any detail, never trusts anything at face value- a military man at its finest and an angry woman who remained unforgiving for the rest of her life. I half-heartedly and inevitably picked up all these little bites of their personas, although my therapist would have definitely gravitated towards other appellatives for this particular process….
Truth is, I am unbothered by being hateful, actually, I tend to be very self-excusing with this particular trait, usually adding emphasis that my judgment is somehow educated and the alleged ugliness of it all can be shielded by how intellectual I get with my justifications.
I also take pride in it, it makes me cut-throat in front of the things that don’t serve me. Being able to spot what I hate immediately makes it so much more real and so much easier to navigate around it.
I always thought that hate should be more digestible as a word. We’re so quick to shy away from it which makes us afraid of it. We’ve conditioned ourselves to be terrified of this word, as if our emotions cannot afford the luxury of being called by name. hate isn’t abysmal, there is no shame in acknowledging powerful feelings.
And, in the end, hate is still tame, there are other words that really should have the reputation unjustly placed on hate.
There is one word, that I see as worthy of the fear we have for hate, one that actually sounds like what it is meant to be-loathe.
11th of September 2023 my diary entry reads:
i stepped in the seminar hall riddled with fantasies of crushed kneecaps and absurd beatings hoping they would temper me somehow, because if i have something that hurts, i have something to take care of, with which i can fill my time therefore something that fulfills me.
As I grew up I developed this logic that as long as I hate something I can keep myself busy, functional, alive somehow. This logic never spilled onto the world outside of myself but rather I understood that loathing myself is the way to go through life unbothered by anything else in my path. I knew that nothing could touch me because I have the strongest feelings towards myself. Before any critique came my way I already did enough damage to never be affected by another. It was so easy.
I could never feel in control of everything around me and I loathed myself for that. I could not fully decipher the intentions that have transformed me into the person I am now and I loathed myself for that. I could not classify myself as one thing, a decent writer, a colorful speaker, a woman, a chipped mind and I loathed myself for that.
They say that hateful people are deeply insecure, that the hate they have for the world is purely intrinsical and solely gets projected outwards. I sometimes like to think the process is inverted. I am honest with my hate towards the world and it’s almost like a punishment that bites back. How could I?
In the endless jokes and jabs of “Do you love me? Really? What makes you love me?” that I make my partner endure, an answer that never fails to surprise me always surfaces:
“of course I love you, you’re one of the kindest people I have ever met”
My friends always slip in some kind of praise:
“you mean so much to me” and “you’re so strong”
When these compliments are thrown my way, they rarely make sense to me. They feel too foreign, as if the person in front of me (or behind the other screen) is illusioned into thinking they’re speaking to someone else, not me. Me? defined by kindness? But I thought the world bites back at you, when you grow up angry and hateful.
I’ve been juggling these words lately, loathe and hate and kind and strong, what do they have to do with each other? How can I appear in all of them? And I have reached a semi-ripen answer. I think my loathing preserves my kindness, I think that when I am not ruthless to anyone else but myself (literal verse from one of my poems, get into it bitch) I always end up reminding myself that there is more pride than loathing, that the things I loathe most about myself, eventually end up being the ones I take pride in. When my partner and friends call me kind before jokingly adding hater at the end they’re not being sarcastic, I think subconsciously they know that my hyper-observative hateful manner of being is also what breeds awareness and therefore goodness.
I have never been ashamed about hating, many times it felt almost baseless. Why was I never ashamed? I think I also knew earlier than I thought…