Rationalising hatred and dissecting it away from internalised hatred/self-hatred.

I had a short chat with my sister and mother, and as my mother finished braiding my hair, the conversation fell like a stone into my pond of self-hatred, creating ripples. Rationalising hatred and dissecting it away from internalised hatred/self-hatred: that is today’s autopsy. Because not all hatred is self-hatred. Not all fire begins at home inside my body. I decided that I need to write this at last. Out loud, in words, in this secret corner of the internet. Before I fold into myself and assume every sharp thing in me is a reflection yet again. What is the source of this hatehood? How did it become so diversely populated and vibrant within me? It feels less like an emotion and more like a settlement. A small, overworked, crowded, opinionated, armed, militant republic. There are districts to it. There is the hatred that is reactionary, born from betrayal, from watching the same patterns parade themselves under new names. This one wears logic like a pressed shirt. It says: You learned, adapted, and protected yourself. Now, it calls itself a boundary. There is the hatred that is inherited, of course, sediment passed down quietly. Things I was taught to fear before I understood them. Things I absorbed because everyone around me held them as truth. This hatred doesn’t even feel like mine. It feels rented. Or, more like, generational ownership. Then there is the quietest one. The dangerous one. The one that mirrors me. Internalised hatred is intimate. It knows my vocabulary. It knows exactly which insecurities have soft underbellies. It does not shout but builds a narrative that says: Of course, they hate you. Of course, you are disgusting. Of course, they don't want you. Of course, you should leave. Of course, they are better off without you. Of course, they left. Of course, you failed. Of course, you are too much, or not enough, depending on the day. This one disguises itself as realism. And I have been confusing these factions. I have been calling all of it “self-hatred” because it feels morally cleaner to blame myself. If it is all internal, I can fix it. If I am the villain, at least the story is contained. If it is external but just around me right now, I can just leave. But what if some of this hatred is not rot, but resistance like calcified grief? What if some of it is simply anger that was never allowed to graduate into articulation? Unprocessed pain giving birth to hatred while the world around me injures repeatedly and casually like it is a storm that doesn't know it's drowning me, like it is a careless child pulling wings off a fly, like it is a butcher’s knife that has forgotten it is sharp, like it is a machine that crushes, designed to ignore the scream, like it is a cold rain falling on an open wound, like it is a gambler throwing away someone else's life. And somewhere along the line, I decided it was nobler to turn the blade inward than to admit I was wounded outwardly. There is a difference between hating yourself and hating what harmed you. There is a difference between accountability and self-erasure. The problem is that hatred, once housed, does not respect its original blueprint. It spreads. It cross-breeds. It colonises neutral territory. Soon, I cannot tell if I am defending myself or dismantling myself. So I sit with it now. Trying so hard not to romanticise it and blindly justifying cruelty for the sake of surviving artistically. But just to understand its architecture. Where did it begin? Was it born the first time I was dismissed? The first time I was made a spectacle? The first time I learned that softness was a liability? The first time realisation slapped my melanin-heavy cheeks that my mother might prefer my sister more? The first time I finally clocked in that my father hates me for being a daughter, a girl, a woman, a not-son, a not-boy, a not-man. The first time I noticed it wasn’t even cruelty. It was arithmetic. The way affection was portioned. The way my sister’s mistakes were called phases and mine were called character. The way I was corrected in public and praised only in private, because praise was expensive but shame was free. The way my body was discussed was like a project. The way my “tone” mattered more than what I was saying. The way I learned to pre-apologise before speaking, like a tax for existing. The way my father’s silence could feel like a verdict... Or was it quieter... accumulated through a thousand micro-negations? The daily abrasion of being misunderstood, unseen, or inconvenient? Hatred is rarely dramatic in origin. Sometimes it began loudly. More often, it began quietly. It is mundane and thus grows in repetition. And perhaps the most unsettling realisation: Hatred makes me feel powerful inwardly. Moves around inside my body drastically. There is certainty in it. Clarity, which sharpens edges and removes doubt. For a brief moment, it makes the world binary: villain and victim, right and wrong, me and them, me and her, me and him. But it also shrinks the room. Internalised hatred implodes; it hollows me out from within. External hatred explodes; it scorches everything around me. Both leave debris-like residue on my skin like shadow cast, acid-etched scars on my skin, like volcanic soot's dried crust of rust and stains. So today is not about absolving myself. And it is not about condemning myself either. And, definitely, it is not about exorcising it. That would be naive. Today’s exercise is classification. Which hatred is the boundary? Which hatred is protection? Is it my rage toward an abuser, or the "mutinous" hatred used to break free from a co-dependent, stifling relationship? Like a corrupted form of love, fighting to preserve what remains of a wounded attachment? Which is projection? Like struggling with my own repressed anger while accusing others of being "unreasonably hostile"? Like feeling insecure about my status while despising others as "pretentious"? Like allowing the ego to feel superior while avoiding self-awareness? Which is inherited prejudice masquerading as instinct? Like thriving on rigid categorisation? Generational racism, sectarian hatreds, or xenophobia that exists before any personal experience with "the other"? Which is grief wearing armour that never got to mourn? Which is ego bruised and retaliating? Which hatred is the echo of a parent’s disappointment that I accidentally memorised as truth? Which hatred is trauma trying to prevent repetition? Which hatred am I avoiding by staying armoured? Which is the echo of someone else’s contempt that I accidentally memorised? If I can name them, perhaps I can negotiate with them. Perhaps hatred is not a monster but an archive. And it expects me to be an archivist today. And, as we know, archivists do not burn records blindly; they catalogue them. A record of every boundary crossed, every expectation unmet, every version of myself that felt cornered. This one: born of betrayal. This one: born of comparison. This one: born of neglect. This one: borrowed. This one: protective. This one: poisonous. And maybe, just maybe, the goal is not eradication, not to become hatred-free. That feels like a fantasy sold by people who have never been cornered. Maybe the goal is sovereignty to let justified anger mature into boundary, to let grief become mourning instead of mildew, to return inherited prejudice to sender without ceremony, and to hold myself accountable without performing self-execution. Or, maybe it is discernment to let justified anger metabolise into boundary, to let grief dissolve into mourning instead of corrosion, to return inherited hatred to sender, and to finally... finally... stop confusing my own reflection with the shadow cast by others. The republic inside me is loud like a troubled state, all opinionated and armed with memory. But I am learning and realising something quietly radical that I am not its loudest citizen. I am not the militia. I am the one holding the pen. I am the people's legislature, for better or for worse. I decide what gets airtime in my skull. I decide which memory becomes doctrine and which one is allowed to soften. I decide which hatred gets a badge and which one gets disarmed. I can’t stop every riot. But I can stop calling it governance. And perhaps the most merciful thing I can do... not just for others, but for myself, is to stop assuming every sharp edge in me is proof of my monstrosity. Some of it is scar tissue. Some of it is boundary. Some of it is learned cruelty. Some of it is survival. Some of it is the quiet, desperate refusal to be broken again. It is the armour I have built when I had no one else to build it for me. I look in the mirror and see the jagged edges of a past that refused to stay in the past, but I also see the strength that held me together when I were falling apart. Not all fire begins at home. And not all of it needs to keep burning. But this hatred definitely was born out of the home around me that will be extinguished when the home around me is brought down. But tonight, I am not exorcising hatred. I am interviewing for it. And for the first time, it is answering without shouting.

And here is the uncomfortable truth: Some of the hatred inside me has been useful. That is what no one wants to admit. Hatred has been my emergency generator. When love failed, when softness backfired, when politeness was weaponised against me, hatred kept the lights on and cradled me [footnote]. It said: Enough. It said: Remember this. It said: Do not go back there. There is a kind of hatred that is simply clarity after illusion dissolves. The first time I understood that I was not the preferred child, something calcified. Not dramatically. Not in a cinematic thunderstorm. Just quietly. A small reclassification of myself in my own home. I moved from protagonist to peripheral. From adoration to adequate. From daughter to responsibility. And if a father learns to resent the existence of a daughter because she is not a son, the daughter learns to resent her own softness because it feels like evidence. I began to auditorise my own existence: Too loud. Too dark. Too ambitious. Too emotional. Too female. Too present. Too burdensome. Too unnecessary. Too unworthy. And then one day, I woke up fluent in a language no one remembers teaching me: self-contempt. They look at me as if I am foreign, I am secluded, I am away, I am exclusionary. But I need to be precise here. Was that self-hatred born in me? Or was it carefully, precisely, and intentionally installed? Because there is a difference between my body generating a toxin and inhaling one repeatedly until my lungs mistake it for air. Right? Some of my hatred is simply muscle memory. The body remembers dismissal before the mind can rationalise it. The body remembers being compared. The body remembers being corrected for existing. The body remembers the subtle hierarchy of affection. The body remembers the moment my stomach dropped, and I smiled anyway. The body remembers how I learnt to laugh at my own humiliation before anyone else could. Hatred grows in those silences, unlike in screaming matches, but like in the thousand small recalibrations. The time you are interrupted and decide not to finish your sentence. The time you are told you are “overreacting.” The time your anger is reframed as hysteria. The time you realise your sister’s defiance is called strength, and yours is called attitude. The time her anger was called confidence, and mine was called disrespect. The time she could slam doors, and I had to close mine gently, like I was always auditioning for forgiveness. Micro-negations. Daily erosion. The architecture of resentment is built brick by brick, not by explosion. So when I feel hatred rise in me now, I am trying my level best not to panic. Because not all of it is corrosion. Some of it is signal. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I pass miserably. I teach myself. Hatred toward an abuser is not a pathology. It is the immune system responding to the abuse. It is necessary. Hatred toward a suffocating dynamic is not cruelty. It is oxygen deprivation fighting back. It is necessary. Hatred toward injustice is not moral failure. It is recognition. It is necessary. But internalised hatred is different. It does not protect in an ideal manner. It protects like a patriarch. Like restriction in safety's clothing. It watches me attempt joy and whispers, You don’t deserve that. It watches me succeed and says, They will realise you are a fraud. It watches me rest and mutters, Lazy. It watches me cry and sighs, Pathetic. It watches me eat and calls it indulgence. It watches me want and calls it neediness. It watches me set a boundary and calls it selfishness. This hatred does not face outward. It faces inward like a firing squad. And the insidious part? It feels disciplined, responsible, mature, like it disguises itself as accountability. So, it can secretly dismantle me. Accountability builds me by pointing out the mistake and telling me to fix it. This is not building. This is self-destruction, telling me my whole existence is a mistake. Those are not the same sentences. And I have been collapsing them into one. There is also a projection. You know, the trickster faction in my little militant republic. The one that dresses up insecurity as superiority, calls others arrogant when I feel invisible, labels others “hostile” when I am suppressing rage, and despises pretension because I am terrified of being ordinary. Projection is lazy hatred. It relocates discomfort instead of metabolising it. Inherited hatred is lazier still. It arrives pre-packaged with no research required or personal injury necessary. Just a set of instructions passed down like heirloom cutlery: polish this, use this, never question this. Fear this situation. Distrust that kind of woman. Respect that kind of man. Do not cross that boundary. Stay in your lane. You aren't capable. Some of these instructions are soaked in the history of colonial residue, colourism, sectarian bitterness, and generational shame. Some are born of survival. Some are born of ignorance. All of them demand interrogation. Because if I do not examine them, I will enforce them. And I refuse to become the custodian of someone else’s unprocessed fear. The most destabilising realisation, though, is this: Hatred feels powerful. It sharpens my posture, makes me decisive, simplifies the moral universe into clean lines, and for a moment, it feels like control. But it is control, like a clenched fist is control, like digging nails into palm, like is tension mistaken for strength. When I stay in hatred too long, the room shrinks, my imagination shrinks, my empathy shrinks. My world becomes smaller until it can fit inside one clenched jaw. Even tenderness starts to look suspicious. Even kindness feels like a strategy. My world becomes a series of enemies and threats. 

~ Oizys.