Twice in my life I have hated someone with a blood boiling I-want-you-to-know-endless-pain feeling. A debilitating rage that drowns out all other thoughts and feelings. Both of these people earned my rage by causing profound, deep harm to people that I love with all my heart. I find myself now wanting a tidal wave of hurt to rain down on someone who, truthfully, I’ve never really met. Just thinking about this person makes me want to burn the world down because the fact that he gets to go about smashing things without consequence is an injustice I can’t swallow.

I hate him and I hate the assorted people who have become complicit in his reign of terror. I hate everyone who pretends that there aren’t vast cultural systems undermining her experience and protecting him.

I remember reading this line in The Amber Spyglass, the last His Dark Materials book, and having this big, “Aha!” moment in which a fictional character described a core belief that I’d always had but never found the words for.

“I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.”

It’s hard for me to reconcile the person who believed this with every fiber of her being with the person I am right now. It’s easy when it’s a concept. It’s so easy when it’s in the abstract like that.

When I reach that rage point, there’s this added frustration of knowing that my hatred for this person places me in direct violation of something that I regard as a core truth. It kills me anew to feel that on top of everything else, I must also be a shitty person.

I take it all on eagerly, though. Better to imagine yourself charging in and destroying things than to acknowledge the actual truth: we are helpless. I hate him for hurting someone that I love. I hate him for robbing her of power and for leaving me equally as helpless. Equally as powerless. Left with nothing to do but stand on the sidelines and watch. He gets to smash things. It’s hardly fair.

I can offer comfort, of course, but it seems so insignificant. I feel tiny and small and that’s the place from which I stomp my feet and cry over how painfully unfair it all is. There’s just a whole lot of hurt. Somewhere in there, the anger brews. The anger brews over the mess that’s been made.

But, of course, burning the world down will solve nothing. Neither will smashing his face in.

I want him to know consequences, but mostly I want her to stop hurting. I want to make her all better. I’d forgo all those consequences if it could make her better. That’s the heart of it. I’m angry and flailing my fists because anything is better than crying. Anything to feel like there is a way to reclaim the control that he has stolen. I am far away and can neither hug nor board a plane to fix the broken things and it burns.

Still, I bet it would feel really fucking good to punch him.