(Conversing with my past self)
I was shocked when I found an old Youtube account, made by me, with more than a handful of privated videos. Some random, others went a bit deeper. Especially a long rant from 12 years ago during sophomore year of high school, what I had titled ‘mid-mid life crisis’, spiraling through teenage angst about identity, society, the world. It brought me to tears, with nearly no memory of having made it and seeing politics and climate stressing me out more than a decade ago… fast forward to now and I’m studying International Relations.
A choice that once felt random started to make sense. Since I was a wee little one, world systems disturbed me; how do they work? Why aren’t they working better? Questions that now guide investigation instead of a mental spiral.
In this personal reflection, I hope to do myself justice. To get a bit closer to the answers I thought were inexistent.
On Instagram yesterday I posted a response to myself. A small 10 second clip of younger me saying “I hate hate” and then questioning if “society lets us hate stuff”, followed by a confused “I am society, but…”.
This had to be cleared up, first by helping correct myself on what ‘society’ is. Yes, me, you are a part of society— a group of people that live under the same institutions and share language, culture, values, norms. What was bothering me back then I can now identify as ‘unwritten societal norms’. The secret spells that we don’t talk about often enough. These can be as simple as holding the door open for the person behind you, or as touchy as how we are allowed to feel and express hatred.
We, the people of society, are allowed to hate whatever we want. Expression of that is also allowed thanks to the written guide of Freedom of Speech. But! Hate is a sort of aggressive opposition, so by nature… there will be a counterpart or group that disagrees. Levels of disagreement range from silent opposition to heated debate and even violence depending on where you are in the world.
This is why I chose to teach myself about unspoken norms. The Norms still irk me, on an international level they are codified across treaties and charters… but there is no comprehensive document that says “these are the international norms”. So on a personal level and on the political level, what is ‘allowed’ or ‘agreed upon’ in good faith is essentially a hollow vessel, a misty mirror defined by the observer.
In the psychological analysis side, I could get into how hate is based in fear. 15 year old me expressed hate for the incoherence in the world, though I didn’t have the proper vocabulary to address it. What fear is that based in? For the eight year old girl who cried when she learned about climate change: fear of death, my own and humanity’s. Fear of negative feelings. It’s a weird rabbit hole of the mind, almost beyond fear. Here enters empathy; why would I be afraid of world happenings that don’t affect me?
Simply put, my sad little idealist heart prefers that humans get along, act with mutual respect, cooperate, love. This is still true. Perhaps that’s why I chose to dedicate my life to analyzing how we can make this world a little better. Maybe if we can better identify the problems, we can better solve them. Right? (Answer in progress).
So in conclusion, ‘hate’ was really grinding my gears because it implies incoherence, disagreement, hard feelings between humans, polarized groups fighting instead of collaborating. When we see hatred expressed in society, it serves as a thermometer for bigger political and cultural problems. In the longer video the hate swirls around with sadness, bouncing between being sad for the world, then hating hate, which I can see now was the most natural reaction I could have had. Who knows what was happening then that set me off, but the essence of the feeling holds true. If us humans can see hate as a tool for self and world analysis, maybe we could short circuit the fighting and see that the hate is reflecting to us what is incoherent within our minds and in the international system.
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