The Closest Thing To Hate Is Love
Since I was really little my mom has always said that the closest emotion to hate is love. But see I wonder if that goes in the reverse. Is the closest emotion to love hate?
I’ve loved so many things in my life and yet the number of things I’ve really truly hated are far and few. Yet even those that warrant the emotion of hate, well I wouldn’t say that’s right. I wouldn’t say that I hated someone because they hurt me, I wouldn’t even say I was angry.
I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine and at one point in her story she got to the emotion that her situation was causing her to feel. I jumped in offering the word: “upset”. She immediately curled inward and adamantly explained that to her the word upset was angry. I sat in contemplation because to me the word “upset” doesn’t mean mad or angry, it simply means sad or hurt.
In the way that you could have a different definition of the word hate. To me hate means that someone has done something so terrible that they garner the emotional response of hatred, of hostility, of a second chance being taken away. To me hatred is almost an emotion that I’m not just bestowing on them, but I’m actually bestowing on myself. See I’m the one that is thinking about them, that is putting in thought after thought, lines of reasoning as to the “why”.
Why do I hate them?
Or maybe the right question should be…
why can’t I stop thinking about them?
My mom always said hate is close to love, and I think one of the reasons she said that is because I don’t stop thinking about the people that I love. They make my world go around, they make me feel seen, and heard, and loved. It’s kinda like my love for tomatoes. I LOVE tomatoes, specifically cherry tomatoes, and I know a number of people who HATE tomatoes. They do so because, well I’m actually not sure. I’ve never stopped to ask why. Maybe I’ll do so. But that’s besides the point. In the way that tomatoes make me feel happy, a delicate leap on my tongue, a warmth in my belly. I really really hate pickles. To many, pickles are absolutely delightful, but to me, even thinking about them right now, has me absolutely grimacing at the idea of even eating one. But that’s what I mean, the thought of a pickle will send me down a thought-spiral and all of a sudden, all I can do is think about me eating a pickle! It’s why I hate them. But tomatoes, wow, I love tomatoes. Yet to someone else they could have a completely flipped reaction to the things I love and the things I hate. But the key words in the last sentence aren’t “flipped” or “reaction” or even “I love” it’s actually “someone else”. I’m not you, and you aren’t me so how can we be expected to agree on all the same things? I won’t like everything someone else likes, and they won’t like everything that I like. Yet again this isn’t the point I’m trying to make.
So here, let me try and rephrase.
Would you rather someone hated you? Or would you rather someone was indifferent to you? If it was me with these harsh feelings, and I was going to choose hating someone or being indifferent I would obviously pick indifference. Why would I want to spend my days consumed thinking about someone or something when I could be thinking about absolutely anything else? And yet when you hate someone it’s not a really choice. Yet on the flip-side I would much prefer someone hated me than was indifferent. Oh how it hurts when someone you’ve known just doesn’t care about you. It’s almost as if…
if they don’t hate me,
well
did
they
ever
love
me
in the first place?
