You Will Lose Faith In Humanity And Hate Yourself For It, But Don’t Do That

When you are cold with the shock of the behaviour of another human being and all your faith is lost, you don’t start hating other people for it, only yourself.

All engagements and interactions with people have the ability to disappoint. We’re all flawed. We do it to each other, we do it to ourselves. And when we know we do it we try to mend it. But sometimes, this just doesn’t happen. Sometimes people just don’t try. They only disappoint. And it’s when you think you know someone so well and for a long time and you love them still, so much, that the pain of their behaviour stops your hurricane of hope dead in it’s tracks. Hope just dies.

You don’t know what to do with that. Because regardless of the fickle things, and the physical failures between two people, you still believe. You have faith in the fact that no matter what, no matter what has happened and what is still to come, you will always be sure of the fact that you know this person. You know they’re good. There is love and respect and compassion somewhere in there. And you hold on to that with everything you are because it’s meaningful, and you’re too afraid not to – in spite of every action you or they have ever taken, you hold on. In the aftermath of heartbreak when every memory is questionable and every word tainted – that is all you have.

But it’s not so for everyone and more than that, there is something in people that makes them want to prove to you that shouldn’t hang on. And that it needs to be destroyed. It’s almost as though because they don’t possess that, or their change of heart has come so suddenly and thrown them into such a desperate hole of existential crises, that they need to destroy the only thing you have at all costs. They will prove to you that they are horrible people who will stoop to levels unknown for reasons that cannot be vindicated. Not to you. Not with anything – not that they try – because they’re too busy pissing on your soul. As if the first time they hurt you wasn’t brutal enough, they will continue with brutality like a badge of honour. All of this just to ignite a flame of hate in your heart for them. And the worst part is – it does not work. Because if you are anything like me – they only thing you end up doing, the only they ever end up achieving is making you hate yourself.

You will drag yourself to the edge of hopeless platform upon platform to explore why it’s not possible? Thoughts running endlessly from here to there. Why can’t you just be me mean, aggressive? And I don’t mean in just a vocal, outburst “you have hurt my feelings”, kind of way. No. I mean in a cruel, “I am going to act on this” kind of way. So that you can prove, physically, how you feel. How they have made you feel. Even if it just some act of revenge, some score to settle. That’s almost what they expect of you. And you will fail. The answers will escape you. Until all you can do is resent yourself and your inability to act on this one thing, which seems reasonable. Which comes so easy to them. When that is all that is left to do. It’s that rare contradiction of a shot in the dark, with somehow everything to lose. 

And your mind becomes a burdened and bruised artefact of something that use to have the shine of faith. It is relentless and disgusted and sore. It hurts, the mind, more than the heart on occasions like this. And that is all you will find. It will not breath anything other than utter self deprecation. The odd moment will find it confused by whether to hate yourself or whether to hate the person who hated you enough to drive you to hating yourself. It will make less sense than that sentence. No matter how much you want it to. This will seem relentless. And just as relentless, is the decision you constantly make in these moments to settle on the fact that you should hate yourself, because the other option is not conceivable to you. And then it starts again.

But, through some persevered mind-reading by those who love you regardless of your current state of embarrassing self indulgence – because you cannot get the words out properly – You will turn find the “off” button. And you will wait. But afterwards, somehow, you will be okay with you again. You won’t want to fix and resolve anything, because all the resolve is in yourself. You won’t need to argue and beat yourself up about the fact that you can’t fathom being malicious, even though you should. You won’t see this as a failure anymore and legitimise the need for punishing yourself for this. You will stop running from the fact that all of this okay. You won’t want the answers that don’t exist anymore. The emotional landslide you found yourself in settles into some sort of makeshift sandcastle, where you’ve strategically placed a room for your current state of mind, it’s not perfect yet but it’s there and you’re working on it with every decision you make moving forward. 

In it, in some reclaimed chair made of the hope you thought you’d lost, you will sit content in the fact that you were kind. You are kind. And that is an okay thing to be. There is no building tall enough or worthy enough for you to throw yourself off of just because you are kind. Just because someone used all the power they had, and searched for every rusty tool they could find to make you not want to be kind and poison your soul with self-resentment for not being able to. More than that, you will be okay with the fact that that’s a decision they made and you don’t need to try so hard to figure out. Not within yourself. Not with them. And when it’s not with them, you take their power to exercise the ugliness away. And it’s hard, because to an extent a certain kind of dream officially dies. In as much as you have torn yourself from the torture of their actions and their words, you have also cut off your ability, or incessant need to want to mend and love and fix with them. But no ones mind can be changed. Not even your own. This process has at least taught you that, if nothing else.

Some things, some people can’t be explained but they certainly can be stopped. And you don’t have to hate them for it. And you definitely don’t have to hate yourself for it either.