I Have to Hate You First

I've sat here tonight and desperately tried to think of a blog topic, or some kind of funny anecdote from years passed to write on, and I can't do it because I'm thinking about how frustrated I've become with my reality, and the circumstances I've allowed myself to become a slave to, and most of all, I think of how much I've come to hate myself. But in the moment, I hate myself for what I've let my life become. I hate the people around me because I feel their judgment, and I patiently wait for them to walk away from me so that I can hate them even more for not waiting for me to not feel like this. They've made me doubt myself and question who I am as a person. At times, some of them have made me feel unattractive and lazy and ugly and worthless. And from day to day, I find myself resenting them more and more because it only contributes to the hate I feel inside for myself. And I'm sure that "hate" probably doesn't seem like the right word because it's awfully strong, but I was once told that you can't hate something that you don't care about--you can't hate something you're not willing to fight for.
And that doesn't make any sense, right? Surely, that's the most ridiculous logic that you've ever heard in your life, and if I hadn't spent the past two weeks contemplating this topic, I'd think I was crazy, too. But life, as of late, has been difficult. I work two jobs and go to school, and at the end of the day, it feels awfully thankless. I hear from someone that they're disappointed in something I've done, and if it didn't happen in some context at work, I feel it when I get home. There's this quietness that envelops you, and you just don't feel wanted. And at night, you look in the mirror, and you feel like you're becoming all of the things you don't want to--you've become bitter and angry and you've lost a part of yourself and all you want are the people that know you best. You want the people from home and the life that you've left behind to join the adult world.

This is a real outfit, that he thought was okay,
and wore out in public... like, for real.

If you haven't stopped reading after those two very self-deprecating paragraphs, you should get a gold star because I'm getting to a point, I swear. The point of all that being: this isn't the first time that I've hated myself or the people around me. Actually, some of the people that I love most in my life are people, at one point, that I have hated and/or hated me. They're the same people that I want now, and it didn't really hit me until I wrote on my last roommate's Facebook tonight about how much I missed him. Scotty John always had a terrible sense of fashion. See picture to the right. But regardless of that, we chose to be roommates. We had all of these plans and ideas for what my senior year would look like, but in the end, we didn't get to spend a lot of time together, and about half the time we did get to spend together, we were arguing: about who was going to do the dishes, or about him throwing out my feta cheese because it had "molded," or about the girl he was seeing, or about how I was trying to come in between him and the girl he was seeing. At times, the fighting became volatile with him going as far to curse at me via permanent marker on our refrigerator (which I subsequently spent about an hour and a half scrubbing off with alcohol), or it could be as quietly uncomfortable as a total freeze out on my end of the deal. By the end of the year, the small arguments had amassed to the point that I doubted we would even be friends after that. Two days before my graduation, he moved out, and we never really spoke much over the next couple months.
But when I went back for my first visit home in October, he was literally the first person I saw when I got back to campus. I had cleared busting into his public relations class via Facebook... actually, he was the one who gave me the idea, and then after class, we went and had breakfast together in the college cafe. And even though we never really addressed what had happened the year before or gone into any magical kind of explanation, we both kind of knew that there were wrongs on both sides of the fence and ultimately things that we didn't know about each other. At the end of the day, we were both going through big years in our lives: one of us dealing with one of the craziest relationships known to man, and the other one dealing with what it meant to be leaving home and everything he had known for his whole life. We were both in this transitory place that neither of us quite knew how to deal with, and oftentimes, it led to us standing in our kitchen with both of us holding our hands up looking at the other person and saying What do you want? And a lot of times, we didn't have the answers. But when someone is supposed to be in your life and you don't always have the answers... you don't always know what you should say to them, but you keep on going because you know in your heart that person is having to put up with as much shit from you as you are from them. You put up with one another because you care, and you believe in the good that could come of it.
And the frustration and the hating and the arguments... it made us real. The fact that we hated each other showed that we cared enough about each other in the first place to feel something for one another. I've never resented a single person in my life for hating me or being angry. I've only ever truly resented the people who walked away without a fight because that showed me they never cared about me in the first place. People are allowed to feel, and the tears and anger didn't make us less of men--it made us two guys who were trying to figure out our lives and just happened to have to figure out one another in the process.
Scotty is not the only one... the list goes on and on, and most of the people on that list are people that I have come to care about to varying extents, but when I look back on those people, we may have had a  time in the past that we couldn't stand one another, but we've never made each other feel like less of a person, and we've never gone out of our way to belittle one another. The arguments always varied and came from different places, but the reason I miss those people so much is because they almost always have encouraged me to be the person that I inherently am. And I suppose that's where the distinction comes in. One of the most important things you can ever know about a person is that you can't put them in a box--you can't apply your logic to their lives, and if you ever go into a relationship with another person with the hopes of changing them, you should know your attempts will be fruitless. We are all our own complicated, weird selves, and changing someone to fit the mold you'd hope they'd be... well, that's just selfish. In all of the hating, it's important to remember that there are people who are just going around blindly hurting others, and in a way, you have to be able to spot them pretty quickly after they spot you. You have to find the people who are going to challenge you and be able to distinguish them from the people who are just around to provide critique and look down at you.
And it's difficult because you have to sit down and literally take the time to think: who is it in this new experience who has my back, who's here to help me grow, and who is here to tear me down? It's a tricky triangle to place people into, especially when you're tired and frustrated with yourself.
So I try to remember that there are times when even the people I've come to care most about were people that pushed me to my greatest limits. And at this point in my life, I also try to remember that we're just a bunch of children who are trying hopelessly to identify what it means to be an adult. We want to go home. We don't want to have to try anymore because it's hard to remember when rent is due, and it's hard to balance life, and you get tired of assuming everyone else's stress on to you. You forget to make time for yourself and you start turning on the people around you; and when you feel like you've alienated them enough, you start turning on yourself.
I took the entire weekend and tried to collect my thoughts as best as possible, and I tried to ignore those around me because I know that to pull myself out of whatever I'm in right now, I need to take a moment to reflect. It wasn't until those days after Scotty had moved out that I started to consider what I could have done differently along the way to make the situation better, and at that point, it almost felt useless--my best friend and roommate was gone, and at the time, I didn't know when I would get the chance to make it better. But that's what the past is for, isn't it? We get lucky enough to have these people stick around--people we once believed we hated, just so that we can learn from the love we've given one another. You get the opportunity to make the present a little bit better than the past. And for now, I'm living in this moment and learning from the past and realizing that maybe in order to love other people... and to love yourself... you have to do a little hating first.