Freewrite: "Easy to Hate"

"How can I help it? She makes it so easy to hate her!"

This was said about me. Not to my face, but still. Someone I used to love described me as someone who makes it easy to hate them. It stung. For so many reasons. It hurt me deep and hard not only because it came from someone I once loved, but because I know it in many ways to be true. I am easy to hate. But what hurt more than anything is the assumption that I make myself so easily loathsome. As though I take action and invest energy to make it easier on others to hate me. 

Do I?

Perhaps it is my way of trying to please the world. That horrible curse of caring that makes me strive to make others comfortable, even at my own expense. I don't notice it, but subconsciously I try to be "easy". Easy to love, easy to hate, easy to remember... A slut to the needs of others, trying to save others the hard work by contorting herself into whatever form other want her.

Could it be that I make it so easy because I respond? Because I care? Because even knowing that someone out there feels so negatively about me makes me profoundly sad (hi berniesanders)? Loving someone who accepts the love and reciprocates is easier than loving someone who doesn't give a crap. Hate is probably the same - it's easier to hate someone knowing they suffer for it.

However, the hate is not my own. I don't hate people. I can hate behaviors, situations (hi bank account), flavors (licorice must die), experiences (basically memories) or sensations (hi chronic pain). But people are complex systems of emotions, motivations, behaviors and quirks. Can one truly hate the combination and collection that is a person? I know I can't. The person who described me as easy to hate can, apparently, manage to see only the negatives in people and thus be able to hate them as a whole. As painful as her words were, I think it says more about her than about me. If she can flatten a person to a shallow perception of "good" and "bad", ignoring most of who they are, then hate is just easier, I guess.

If it was only her that looked at me this way, I could live with it. But I sometimes feel like so many of us, even the good ones, are out there looking for easy targets for hate like politicians, celebrities, random Steemians and Facebook acquaintances. I am still not quite certain as to why.

(source: Pixabay)

Who do you hate? Why? And if you stop and consider, is it truly that person you hate, or something specific about them (or about you) that makes it easy to plunge into a loathing funk?