Hate is a Refraction of Love
By Ali Saunders
I felt the emotion of “hate” for the first time when I was seven years old. It was the summer of 2012, and I was sitting with my grandfather in his old house on his old couch, and we were doing what we both loved to do the most, which was watching the Boston Red Sox play. Lala, as I called him, the name he had coined after I couldn't pronounce “grandfather” as a child and went on to babble a sound resembling “lala.” He had worn with the greatest sense of pride. Being with Lala was always very special, and that night was extra special because the Sox were playing the bad guys, the New York Yankees. It was much past my bedtime, but I had begged my mom to let me stay up and watch the game. In the first few innings, my hopes remained high as the score remained close. But as the ladder innings neared, the Yankees began to gain on our beloved Red Sox. As the game went on, my desperation grew, and I began to feel a sharp and unfamiliar pain grow in my chest. The Red Sox were going to lose, I thought.
As I watched the navy and white pinstripes run through the bases, eventually beating my grandfather's beloved Red Sox, my eyes filled up with tears. My sadness quickly turned to anger as I banged on the coffee table and stormed out of the room. This foreign aching feeling overwhelmed me, it scared me, it took me over and consumed me until I eventually screamed with all of my seven-year-old might, “I HATE THE YANKEES I HATE THE YANKEES I HATE THOSE STUPID YANKEES.” It took me a while to settle down before going to bed, as I was so filled with this new, aching, and painful emotion. God, I just hated the Yankees so much, I thought. And I thought I did. I really thought I hated those people. What I didn't realize at the time, and what is still hard to wrap my head around now, was that this moment, in suburban Connecticut, that I interpreted as a feeling of hatred, was the first time in my life when my brain and my soul encountered the whole hearted emotion of love.
I have realized now that there was nothing about those people that I hated. In fact, the emotion had nothing to do with them at all. It had to do with what I loved. It was because of the smiling, caring, funny man sitting behind me in the living room. I loved my grandfather so much, to my very core, that I was also able to think that I hated something else with the same amount of dignity. But I didn't, I just loved and cared for something, and love can refract itself sometimes and make you think that you're hateful. But you are not.
When we are young, we don't seem to be filled with so much anger toward people. Children tend to smile and look up at people with rosy cheeks. We are friends with everyone, we view ourselves as creative, we see ourselves as capable, friendly, and funny. As we grow up, we for the first time begin to love things. When I was a little kid, I liked the color green, and frogs, and watching Good Luck Charlie, but I was so young I couldn't have quite loved anything yet. Think back to when you were in kindergarten, many of you probably sitting crisscross applesauce with people that you no longer speak to, and here's my question: Did you hate anyone? I mean, of course, you disliked things. I knew I did not like peanut butter, and I thought boys were annoying and gross, but I never felt like I hated them, and I didn’t. I was too young to hate because I had not yet learned to love. So the emotion of hate was not yet within my capacity.
My point in all of this is to say, to “hate” you have to love first. I challenge you to access moments in your life when you felt this emotion, this overcoming of your chest with heat and fear. Instead of thinking of yourself as negative or as bitter, search for where the passion was. Where did the ache come from? Most importantly, what was it that you loved? As you go forward, when this feeling hits our chest, when we feel stuck, or angry or frustrated, I hope that when we pause and access the emotion more fully, we may find the reason for this emotion is because we are loving in nature, not because we are hateful. When we begin to see ourselves, and eventually others, in this way, as loving, we will not only view this world with much more empathy, but we will also see that life and the actions and emotions of our lives are driven by love.