The closest that gets me to empathising with them is thinking about times in my life where I have done stupid, harmful-to-me things as a sort of lashing out to claw back any agency I could. For example, deliberately flunking a test because failing by choice felt safer than trying as hard as I could and doing badly anyway; I didn’t realise what was happening at the time, but in hindsight, decisions like that were all about my inability to cope with uncertainty and vulnerability.

I think that people who are unfathomably kind are probably a lot like me, in that they feel scared if they look at the state of the world. They probably recognise in their gut that there is very little that they, as individuals, can do to improve things, and that’s scary to them. However, instead of learning to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty and learning how to lean into the vulnerability to do some collective action, they lash out at the world. Being awful to some poor person who is also overwhelmed doesn’t solve any of the root issues, of course, but I think that it’s cathartic to them to be able to impact the world in some tangible way — it makes them feel less powerless to be able to fuck up someone’s day. Plus I reckon there’s probably some transference stuff going on, where being unkind to an individual may set them up to be a sort of repository for all the bad feelings they have inside them, like a subconscious scapegoat

Hateful people still baffle me, but over time, I find myself able to empathise with them more. I find people like this quite tragic, because I know that I would have killed myself long ago if I didn’t find community and solidarity to keep me pushing onwards. It seems like quite a bleak existence, and it hurts to see them poisoning themselves with their shortsighted hate.