Don't let the hate percolate

January is never an easy month. In fact, we often - as a collective - judge the rest of the year based on what terrible events take place in January. This year I want to challenge you to look at the first month of the year from a different perspective. Instead of looking at January as an excuse to doom the rest of the year, look at it as a reference of what not to do for the 11 remaining months.

Personally, January has always been an exceptionally terrible month for me. I won't go into it because victimising oneself only leads to more pain. But let's just say this; January '22 hasn't been any different. In fact, it may have been one of the worst Januaries I've had to date. So here I am once again, trying to turn my pain into pain-onade (a magical healing elixir that I just decided is a thing). Showing you my mistakes so you can learn from them and better yourself in 2022, and beyond.

2020-2021 Hala divided people into two categories: Good and Evil

So I am putting this in writing, In 2022, I will try to stop dividing myself from others. I did a lot of that for the past two years. I think a lot of us have, and with good reason. Some of the collective decided to choose themselves during this pandemic, and that didn’t sit well with the others. Some chose others at the expense of themselves, and excluded anyone who disagreed with that decision. There has been a lot of push and pull. Polarity in a way we haven’t seen in a long time.

I’m not going to sit here and lie to you, it’s hard to see both sides of the coin. It’s hard to empathise with people who seemingly have no empathy. But I’ve recently lost someone very dear to me to this polarity. It broke me, but it also changed everything.

This pandemic has shown us ugliness in a way some of us have never seen before. Hatred and division manifested in physical attacks and yelled obscenities. Some of us never saw it coming; some of us weren’t surprised at all. I will never in my life defend that level of hatred, that is not what this piece is about.

This piece is about those family members that you avoid because you know an argument will ensue shortly after the small talk runs out. I know that most of you don’t truly hate those people, some of them are our parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts. It’s hard to hate family (trust me, I’ve tried). What I am going to try to do instead is listen, and earn the privilege to make them listen too. The world is not going to improve if we sit back and let the hate percolate. Avoiding ammo Ahmed (or uncle Sam, respectively) because he’s casually racist is not going to help him. Avoiding ignorance leads to it turning into hatred, and we've all seen what the extreme version of that can do.

I know it’s hard. But calling someone toxic and walking away is not an option anymore. We are complicit in that inaction, allowing hate to exist when we could 100% have a conversation with that person and try to meet them halfway. Hate only reaches extremes if it is not softened. It’s too easy to walk away. It’s too easy to curate your timeline and circle to only contain views that align with yours’. I am the first to admit I’ve fallen victim to this mentality.

TikTok has made it far too easy for me to forget that extreme hatred and division are still very much alive and present, even in 2022. With the For You page becoming truly curated for me, I’ve become too consumed in my own bubble. And I for one, do not believe in watching the news every day, since doing that has made me severely depressed in the past. So much so that it rendered me useless. I prefer selective news consumption, since I can’t help better this world if I can't even get out of bed. It’s just what works for me and I know others can consume news on the daily without a second thought. So I am going to try to find a healthy middle ground, exposing myself to enough that I am aware, but not overwhelmed.

“Allyship is a journey, not a destination”

– Layla F Saad (From Me and White Supremacy – which is a book you should definitely read if you haven’t already.)

In 2022, we must continue to educate ourselves on the hatred others are experiencing daily. We are often too consumed by our little privileged bubbles to notice. But we must urge ourselves to look hatred in the eye, until it is forced to soften. We must have the difficult conversations, bite our tongues, and listen. We must try, and continue to better ourselves and others in the process. If not you, then who?

When it comes down to it… we are all one, united in this human experience. Fighting each other is only going to make this experience worse, so let's we try union for once. It can’t hurt us more than the polarity already has.