Don't Look Back In Anger

I’m sorry that this is not a particularly cheery post considering that it is also my first, but this is something that I really need to get off my chest, and I feel like writing about it will help me. I promise that my next blogpost will not be like this.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about hatred, and whether or not people should feel wrong for expressing hateful feelings towards somebody. A few years ago I would tell myself that it is not okay to hate anyone, whether it be that someone has upset a friend or posted something offensive on Facebook. I’m extremely conflicted with my feelings about this, I feel like maybe in some cases it is natural to feel this way towards some people. For example, I fell out with a very good friend of mine about a year ago because he treated me awfully, and due to this I often feel angered if I am reminded of him, or I see him around my college. And yet, other people just do not seem to realise that he is not a nice person. He has many friends, and even some very close friends of mine who know about the situation seem to still take a liking to him. To me this is very upsetting because I feel like a lot of the time, my emotions towards him are not taken seriously, and because of this he is still treated as though he has done nothing wrong. This person who I will not name has never apologised for what he did, and he probably never will. I can’t help but think that he has to suffer some sort of consequence for what he did to me because what he did damaged me emotionally and made people turn against me. I had rumours spread about me that weren't true, and I had people blaming me for things that I did not do, and yet, this boy did not think he had anything to apologise for. I had tried to forgive this individual several times, even after the pain he had caused me before, because I thought it was the good and right thing to do, but he took advantage of these chances and he made the same mistake again. He verbally abused me several times and emotionally manipulated me, and in the end he made it out to be all my fault because he never got his way.

I have tried not to dwell on this issue to much because it’s in the past and I know that he will not be able to do any more damage to me. Even so, I can’t help but think about it sometimes. Does he even care about what he did? Probably not. And it will probably happen to someone else again as it has done before. I see this person nearly every day, and sometimes when I catch a glimpse of him in the corner of my eye, I just feel overcome with anger. I feel like everyone has just been deceived by his friendly, cheerful cloak that he hides behind, and underneath he’s not. He’s just carrying on his life as normal as if I never existed and I was just a tiny little convenience in his life that he has just forgotten about. One day this whole situation will probably just be a distant memory that I myself will forget about. But for now, it’s still kind of a problem, and some days go by and I pray that he will come up to me and say “I’m sorry. You were right.” I want to tell myself that this will never happen and I should just move on but I won’t. Probably not for a while, because I know deep down that he will never say sorry, but I still have a tiny, single scrap of hope that one day he will, and at that moment everything will be alright, and that closure will give me strength to carry on and forget about everything that happened between us. No matter how much I try, I can’t tell myself that this is over, because my satisfactory closure has not yet happened, and I feel like until it will, I can’t truly get over my anger at the moment. One day I will truly recover, even if my perfect closure does not come, but for now I will probably continue to struggle from conflicting feelings. Would I say that I hated this person? I don’t know. Sometimes I find myself saying that I do, but I don’t truly think that I hate him, because in the end, hatred achieves nothing.

Hatred is a confusing emotion, but also fascinating because I think everyone feels it in some way towards someone else. Do I think hatred is a bad thing? Not necessarily. I believe that if taken out of hand it can become destructive, and in extreme circumstances, very dangerous. I certainly do not think hatred is a good thing, but I do think it is a natural thing, and sometimes I think that people should not feel bad for thinking hateful or angry thoughts, as long as they do not become destructive to themselves, or to others.