Hate

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.
~Martin Luther King

I was looking up quotes from Martin Luther King for the students.  I wanted his main line from "I Have A Dream" speech.  I stumbled on to this one also.   What caught my attention was the line "...causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful..."  I often describe some of the events from my childhood as a topsy-turvy being taught black as white and white as black.  Part of what the pedophile did to me was to inspire in me a self-hatred so deep that 3 counselors trying to uproot this malevolent cancer out of my soul.  In light of the hope I am studying, I believe part of the damage was the hammering into my soul that my situation was hopeless.  The pedophile twisted scriptures until I believed God could not love me.  I didn't blame God, I blamed myself and absorbed the self-hatred into my soul and it grew like the cancer that it is.  My world rocked the day my counselor told me I could not love anyone more than I loved myself.  He referred to the scripture to love my neighbor as myself.  In order for me to love my neighbor, my children, my sister, my husband or anyone else, I need to love myself.  I am hoping to scour out this soul cancer called self-hatred.  I don't deserve to be hated especially not by me. 

Sometimes my soul feels like this saguaro