I have heard a powerful quote from my friend Mort Melman sensei (by Friedrich Nietzsche) that always struck me deeply: “You are what you hate.”

At first, the words felt unsettling, even unfair. How could I be anything like the very things I stand against? The thought lingered, though, and like all profound truths, it refused to be ignored.

I’ve seen it happen—in myself, in others, in the world around me. The more we despise something, the more space it takes up in our minds, our actions, our energy. We justify our anger, our resentment, our disdain by labeling it as righteousness, but in reality, we carry it with us. And anything we carry for too long has a way of becoming a part of us.

There was a time in my life when I despised arrogance. I saw it in others—people who carried themselves as if they were superior, dismissing those they deemed unworthy of their time. I judged them harshly, convinced that I was nothing like them.

But then I caught myself. I was so consumed by my contempt for arrogance that I had become something else entirely—self-righteous. I felt superior for not being arrogant, for being more self-aware, for knowing better. But wasn’t that, in its own way, arrogance too?

No matter how noble we believe ourselves to be, it’s the same.

The activist who fights against oppression can become oppressive in their pursuit of justice.
The truth-seeker who condemns deception can become blind to their own biases.
The humble who despise the proud may quietly pride themselves on their humility.

Hate, even when disguised as virtue, still binds us. The more we focus on what we despise, the more it defines us.

So how do we change? How do we free ourselves from the weight of what we hate?

By choosing understanding over contempt. Compassion over bitterness. Growth over fixation. Instead of carrying hate, we can transform it—turning our disdain for injustice into a passion for fairness, our frustration with ignorance into patience for teaching, our rejection of arrogance into a practice of humility.

Hate may reveal what we fear, what we resist, what we have yet to accept in ourselves. But it doesn’t have to define us.

Because in the end, the only way to rise above what we hate is to not become it.