How Love became Judgment

sweeties i want to tell u about a version of me that i’m naut proud of but i understand completely!! i was may be 16, 17 & i had started reading everything. about injustice & systems & all thee ways world is designed to hurt specific people & i was correct about all of it. world is genuinely terrible in very specific ways & once u see it u can’t unsee it & that seeing felt like the most alive i had ever been. & then slowly, sooo slowly i did naut notice it happening, something changed. caring started curdling. i would sit in a room with my family & feel a contempt soo thick i could barely speak! naut because they were cruel to me, because they didn’t know things i knew, because my mom was just talking about something ordinary & i was sitting there thinking u do naut understand how bad things r, because a friend made a joke that wasn’t even that bad & i felt this wave of something i can only describe as despair about who they were.

i thought that feeling was clarity. i thought i had finally seen through something. it took me a long time to understand that what it actually was, was loneliness dressed as enlightenment. i had walked so far from the mess of actually loving people that i was standing outside all human warmth & calling it consciousness.

here is what i think happens. it starts with something genuine. u feel something real. & that first feeling is clean, it is about love, it is “i care about these people enough to be angry on their behalf”. but somewhere in the reading & the accumulating weight of knowing, it shifts. thee love for theee suffering becomes hatred for everyone who is naut suffering correctly. people around u stop being people & start being symbols of everything wrong!! & u stop asking what they would need to understand & start asking why they don’t already.

sweeties i am not saying this to be gentle about genuine cruelty. some things deserve rage. some people deserve to be named for specific things they have specifically done. that is different & that matters!!

what i am talking about is thee ambient kind. specific kind that coats everything. when u resent ur mother for naut knowing enough theory. when u can naut have an ordinary conversation without feeling like u r betraying something by enjoying it. when cause that began as love has slowly become a reason to find everyone around u insufficient. i think of all the people i know who went through this. who started with thee most genuine hearts & came out theee other side unable to sit with anyone who didn’t already agree with everything. & i do naut judge them, i was them. i understand exactly how it happens because it happened to me step by step & each step felt like progress.

but sweeties here is what i believe now that loving the world as a concept is so much easier than loving a human being as a reality. a concept never disappoints u. a concept never says wrong thing at dinner. a concept never holds a belief that contradicts urs or laughs at something u don’t find funny or fails to understand something u have explained three times. a real person does all of those things constantly, & loving them anyway, in their full limitation, is sooo much harder than any ideology.

i am still figuring this out. i’mn’t on the other side of it. i still feel the contempt sometimes & catch myself & have to come back. but i think coming back is the whole practice. coming back to the specific person in front of u, one who disappoints u & gets things wrong & is still, somehow, worth knowing.

thee revolution that requires u to hate ur neighbor has already failed. it failed before it started because what r we doing any of this for, if naut for the neighbor!!

thanks for reading, sweeties! share it with ur sweeties

🩵💙❤️