Just to clarify something. In the past, I’d been baffled by my fellow citizens, frustrated by them, annoyed by them, agitated, displeased and disquieted by their poor choices and their harmful habits of mind and body, but I’d never — not even once — hated them.

But this long year for the first time in my life, I find myself actively and bitterly despising many of my fellow Americans. Not all, of course, but too, too many. Not just MAGAts, either, but surely that is a lot of them. I’m just so fucking unbelievably pissed at so many people here for taking so much time away from me and my partner and my friends by refusing to wear masks, by not avoiding gatherings when it would’ve mattered, by not following even the precautionary principle in the face of a global pandemic. This could’ve been over in a month. Truly it could have. But here we are still living through this purgatory and I hate every motherfucker who had anything to do with it.

I loathe them now and I will hate them forever and if I could hurt them all a lot I would. I would hurt them a whole lot.

That’s why I want to depart as soon as practicable, because I can’t let this hatred consume me. I am just so angry all the time and it comes out in reactive and poorly-reasoned posts and in my interactions with others. I have to ease back even before I can get out of this country.

Even more than this exhausting and unsustainable hatred, I feel contempt. And as anyone knows, contempt is the doom of a relationship. I feel contempt for their lack of comprehension of risk (on both sides), their lack of empathy for their fellow citizens, their lack of any notion of civic duty or responsibility. Contempt and revulsion is all I have left for many of the citizens of my own country and what they’ve caused this place to become and I feel all that because they fucking deserve it.