What does Hate mean for you?
What is hate exactly?
As the sun shines longer and the air becomes warmer, i have more space for love. The gray area between hate and love runs less opaque and most nuissances cross the threshold into compassion. As I inch into spring, i feel my heart decompressing. However, as the clouds part and grey turns to light, it becomes clearer than ever that whatever contempt lingers has been well and truly distilled to pure hatred. Irredeemable, you can say.
Winter breeds resentment. The cold dampness from perpetual rain sticks to your soul no matter how often you sauna. Darkness falls regardless of how many floor lamps and candles are lit. My scale of hate and love turns grey to reflect my surroundings, and what i normally would have compassion and empathy for, falls down the spectrum on a slippery grey sliding scale. I can never truly discern what i love and what i hate.
It’s not until i have an abundance of love that i can see what visceral hatred represents for myself.
I do not believe hatred is a passing emotion. Do i have moments of intense disappointment and anger? Absolutely. However, when i reflect on those instances, I later hold a softer perspective, a newfound understanding or perhaps even forgiveness toward them. I rarely undeniably hate anyone who has wronged me, because the dust always settles, emotions pass, and circumstances justify. As time passes, so does the intensity of the hurt caused or inflicted.
Before I proceed, I’d like to make clear two things clear: first, i believe one can hold genuine, lasting hatred towards people, places, and organizations — simply put, anything that constitutes a Proper Noun (as a friend and reader pointed out due to my lack of proper capitalization of such thing). Secondly, i discern hatred from contempt. As i was writing this, i began to hit the definition roadblock, where i couldn’t quite satisfyingly categorize people and experiences into hatred, indifference, contempt, dislike, and the various other terms used to convey an aspect of hatred. I have many people on the rolodex that i think are awful people, overall pathetic, and have committed hateful acts towards me, but when I ask myself if it’s hatred, the feeling does not hold. They do not fit. They are not worth the attention, the energy, or the force that hatred seeks. I thought about men who have physically hurt me, political figures who have impacted my loved ones, and former managers that gave me life-altering anxiety, but ultimately what i feel for them is not hatred, it’s contempt. And contempt can be felt at a distance without the intimate collapse that hatred seems to require. Contempt does not require the grief of hatred.
So here’s my definition of hate: hate is when you feel so strongly about something, only for it to prove you wrong in every possible way, and always for the worse. Hate is what grows when resentment has had too much time to settle in, when you expected something greater because you believed it was greater, and now you are left sitting with the vast distance between what it was and what it should have been. Hate, is the final destination when there is nothing redeemable, nothing unexpected, and nothing reassuring left that you could possibly squeeze out. When you no longer have hope that it will change in any meaningful way, and have officially begun to expect the worst for all future developments. It is becoming familiar with disappointment and betrayal all the while grieving what you thought it was.
In the context of my life, i can confidently state no individual has won my hatred.
Hate requires a fall from a height that’s high enough to cause devastating impact. And even then, if an individual climbed its way back up a storey or two, i wouldn’t go so far as to feel hatred — perhaps dislike, annoyance, a lasting perturbation. Long story short, it takes alot for me to hate a person, and i frankly have too much compassion and forgiveness towards human beings to wring them dry of all empathy.
As rare as true hatred is in my life, it’s capacity to consume me is undeniable. An evaluation according to my definition of hatred presents an almost perfect final conclusion — i do in fact hate one Proper Noun: my city.
I hate my city because I once loved it with all of my heart. I loved not accidentally, not conveniently, but deliberately. Through initial disappointment and despair, I learned to love Vancouver. I trained myself into that love. I gave it patience, generosity, effort and so. much. grace. I searched for its beauty, defended it in conversation, made excuses for its failures, and tried to believe that if I just watched the light reflecting dancing off the water from the right angle, if i just dipped my feet into the crystal clear lakes, if I just visited tofino one last time, it would finally love me back in some viable form.
I hated Vancouver once before, long ago, and I took that hatred as a personal shortcoming. I thought the failure was mine, that I was too cynical, too closed off, too unwilling to meet it where it was. So I worked against myself. I actively, earnestly tried to love this city.
But it’s not working and it has not worked for a while.
What conveys my exploration of hatred so perfectly here, is that I cannot escape my city. I do not get distance from it. I do not get the relief of absence, the clarity of departure, the bittersweetness of missing it from somewhere else. And because I cannot leave it, I cannot let the wound seal properly. It’s become a site of endless disillusionment and resentment that swallows me whole. I can’t escape the rain, i can’t escape the apocalyptic view outside of my window, i can’t escape the disdain plastered on everyone’s faces. I am left with the exhausting grief of being disappointed by something that surrounds me completely, something I cannot put down, walk away from, or even mourn properly because it is still here, pressing itself into every part of my life.
I write often about my relationship with my city for good reason — i’m grieving a relationship that not only shaped me, but broke me down. Sound familiar? Turns out my most toxic relationship is not with ex boyfriends, but with the very place that promised me happiness. My parents came here because they did their due diligence and thought it a promising place to raise children. They weren’t wrong, but you never know who you’re getting into a relationship with until much later.
I don’t know if i’ve changed or if this was doomed from the beginning, but when something doesnt make you happy, you beat it until you make sure you extract every last bit of potential from it before moving on.
At least that’s how i work.