Fixing Your Internalised Hate May Be a Lesson on Learning How To Let Go

Most of what I hate about myself is a collection of ideas that I’ve taken on growing up

So I got rejected… Several months later and it still hurts. I’m freshly 28 and this is not my first rejection… It’s actually my second…But I like to think of this as the first. The true first doesn’t count. This one does. It was the first time I told my friend how I felt about her and her reply was.

“ Sorry James, I don’t and have never seen you that way.”

It’s sickening how many emotions 11 words carry along with them. Months later and I still feel empty, guilty, embarrassed, opportunistic, “simpy”, unworthy and a certified douche to name a few for what I did in late 2020.

I’d like to consider myself a brave person but that lacks enough evidence to back it up given the crossroads I’ve approached in my life and the decisions I made when I got there. It's only a few isolated events like this one when I professed my feelings to someone and her response was showing me her hand like drake in hotline bling.

Being a 6'2" 28-year-old man is not exactly ideal when it comes to being humbled by a rejection(Thanks society). That’s not really how men are taught to handle things. In society, it sometimes feels like ideas of being a man and being humbled seem to contrast each other. That’s probably why being a man who gets humbled (by a rejection for example) opens up a tonne of insecurities that the man has to deal with at the same time as he’s dealing with the failed proposal he made.

Some men break when they get here… Their insecurities morph into dark desires that can vary from stalking all the way to murder. Unbeknownst to these men, such desires are bottomless pits of course and so they keep on re-living their fantasies hoping to reach the initial satisfaction they were seeking until the behavior forms an identity of its own in them.

Those of us who choose NOT to fuel those desires find ourselves on the other part of dealing with negative self-talk and anger. Oh no… we don’t deal with these insecurities the same way either. Some get involved in constructive work while others find solace in self-pity and other destructive tendencies.

Constructive or not, we all however do so to escape these experiences or bury them in the deep recesses of our minds. It’s all a blanket of depression maybe and how each of us deals with it.

I chose to take on my insecurities. This time I am not burying them. Not this time. I mean that task was much harder and miserable in 2016 so much so that I was suicidal. I made a promise to myself and the powers above that if I ever went through a rejection ever again, I would sit with my insecurities and find ways of dealing with them and so far I have found one that I want to share with you here. — Letting go.

My Experiences With Rejection

Rejection is among those negative experiences that hurt differently. It not only hurts but brings along several other insecurities and in most cases shapes us into entirely new identities.

We experience rejection in different areas of our lives in both our work and relationships. But not all rejections are created equal. In my life, for example, it takes me a few hours to overcome and move on past work-related rejections but relationship-related rejections are on another level. These are the ones that I find hard to deal with.

Work-related rejections mostly feel me with anger or frustration which quickly subsides when I make the necessary adjustments. But in relationships, even after the anger subsides, I am always left with other unpleasant emotions of guilt and unworthiness.

These emotions over time cultivated internalized hate toward myself and my identity. I remember in 2016 when I was new to this kind of rejection in relationships, the other person called me a manipulative devil which was not an idea I had ever grown up to think about myself.

I like going out of my way to help people especially those I care about whether they are strangers or not. I also don’t believe in the “scratch my back and I will scratch yours” mentality. I believe that anyone I recognize that needs help should get my help unconditionally. In my world, this is “divine law”. So when my actions in 2016 were called manipulative and diabolical, I had to question them and myself.

The problem is that if you set out to find evidence that proves something, your mind often ignores information that is contrary to your objective and you will always find evidence to prove your point. So you can imagine that when I started questioning my “selfless deeds” I found evidence that they were manipulative and diabolical.

So I had to drop them. I had been volunteering with the red cross club in my school to donate blood and platelets to people I have never seen, I had been spending some of my evenings walking with some money giving it to the homeless people on the streets, I had been going out of my way to make sure people were comfortable around me and so on. This all stopped. But no it did not just stop and nothing happened afterward.

When it stopped, that void was filled with self-hate and guilt. It was filled with all anger and resentment because from my new point of view, all those things I did to help people were not genuine.

These have all however been a result of dealing with my rejection. A poor job indeed and nothing that I would recommend to anyone but this is how I dealt with it in the past.

An improved approach to addressing rejection and self-hate

Interpreting the “good” I did in the past through the perspective of my rejected and self-hating personality is what I was doing in the past and it was not helpful. Not to me, nor any other person.

What I should have used however was learning to handle my rejection through letting go. But oftentimes, when people say they are letting go, it means burying these emotions and pretending like they don’t exist. This is also not very helpful because they are bound to surface eventually.

An alternative and probably more effective form of letting go have a lot to do with topics like forgiveness. Not the religious type. Forgiveness at a human level... But how does that look like? Let's look at the topics involved in letting go.

Forgiveness

In this context, it simply means taking on useful lessons on a given event without bearing ill feelings about it or the people involved. My rejection of 2016 felt awful because I could not forgive myself...Meaning I could not find useful lessons to pick from the experience on how to be a better friend.

When many people forgive, they always make statements like I forgive and forget… They then follow up those statements with “but I will never trust that person in my life ever again”. This is clearly far from forgiving and forgetting. Other people will not hate the person but will hate themselves instead. Again this is not forgiving and forgetting.

I tend to look at people as simple messengers. I for example once had a chance of meeting a top Indian official somewhere in Tamil Nadu. When he extended his hand to offer me a handshake, he did it so confidently that his confidence rubbed on me too. For a moment, I felt like I was an important person in India too. This experience or this person in particular just awoke the confidence that was within me. I already had the confidence laying dormant and my meeting with him just brought it up.

It would therefore be stupid to think that he has the confidence I need to feel good about myself. This is however very common in relationships where people attach their happiness to the person in the relationship with them and when that person leaves or does something disappointing, you will then either hate them or hate yourself.

The same happens when we meet people that eventually become our friends. A friend that makes you feel horrible about yourself simply awakens the feelings that already exist in you. The reason may be because he or she feels the same about themselves or it's just your spidey senses telling you to steer clear of said individual.

Whichever the case, it has nothing to do with the other individual but rather has everything to do with your growth. With this mindset, you’ll quickly realize that hating someone who made you feel terrible denies you of the useful lesson you need to learn to grow.

The forgiveness that I’m talking about would be to fully appreciate the moments you had in a past relationship so that you can prevent hate from contaminating the useful memories, lessons, and experiences from that relationship. To put it simply, forgiveness has everything to do with appreciation.

Feeling the pain

The second aspect of letting go is about feeling the pain. Everything from anger to internalized self-hate falls in this category. Anyone at the end of a memorable experience will naturally be sad to walk away. When it comes to relationships, it is even harder because we all have no idea how to let a relationship go without having negative feelings around it.

Many people don’t know how to deal with that pain and sense of loss so we will keep suppressing it through eating, sex, porn, drugs, shopping, and so on. The coolest and effective way I’ve seen people feeling the pain is Smash therapy…the western culture of breaking sh*t.

Smash therapy is just one way of feeling the pain but clearly not the only way. Anything that does not give your emotions an outlet only suppresses them. Smashing things helps you let the anger out on those things whereas binge eating offers you a distraction that keeps you from addressing the emotion.

You must allow the emotions to move out… Seek help, Cry if you must, shout if you want, or seek out alternative forms to let those emotions out as long as that is not hurting the other person. Revenge is sweet but also exponentially multiplies the initial problem.

Letting go through feeling the pain and forgiveness may therefore help you to begin moving past bitter memories and the self-hate you have and that way, you can be able to pass on more good to other people in the world.