Hate

For my nemesis, and yours.

To your credit, it’s fun to be mean online.

Back in the pre-pandemic, pre-X, Trump I/Woke I days of Twitter, I was more of a shit-stirrer than I am now. My regular sniping at hard-right “anti-SJW” accounts (mostly those who orbited a certain now-defunct right-wing online magazine) earned me a reputation for being a shrill social justice harpy in a certain sector of the online lit community. And that was kind of a fair assessment of my behavior.

At the time, my real-life circumstances felt isolating and uncertain. I had moved to a new state to be with someone I’d met on Writer Twitter. We were living together in his childhood bedroom in his parents’ house in the middle of Nowhere, New Jersey, him unemployed and depressed and me making variable amounts of money every week after (stupidly) downgrading my first real professional office job to a much-less-secure WFH contract position. Not enough to live or build a life on. I had no car, no drivers’ license, no friends in the area, and there was very little I could do on my own to pursue hobbies, carve out a social life, or begin in any other way to make things better for myself. I was less close than ever with my family, with whom I didn’t feel like I could be fully honest about my life situation out of fear of being judged for such disappointing choices. My sole source of entertainment and validation during this time (besides my increasingly turbulent relationship with someone with whom I spent 24/7 trapped in a small room on our separate computers) was whatever was happening in online lit.

So, of course, it felt good to endear myself to other people by starting fights with people I saw (and, to a large extent, still see) as entirely deserving of mockery. A relatively safe outlet for my rage toward both my own circumstances and the broader political situation. Expressing disdain for the “playfully” pro-rape and anti-woke-for-its-own-sake shit-stirrers on the other side of the aisle also earned me positive attention from my peers. Those horrible things I said publicly to real people on the internet were a net good for the ecosystem, a meaningful display of dissent in a culture where the stochastic violence of my opposition had quickly become normalized. I got to let off steam, advocate for my sincerely-held beliefs about culture and where it was heading, and people praised me for it as if I was doing actual material work. Being read as a shrill bitch by people I already didn’t respect and who would have hated me anyway was a small price to pay for feeling, in whatever small sort of way, like I had triumphed.

But no matter how much attention you’re getting on the internet, you eventually have to go to bed, alone, at last, with yourself. And in the moments before falling asleep under the cigarette-burned flannel sheets in that house in New Jersey, I would feel ashamed, physically sick.

I believed the things I was saying to those people and my reasons for saying them. I also knew that given even half of a chance, they would say, and do, so much worse to me—and for pettier, less ideologically-sound reasons. Why, then, that odd uncertain feeling, like I’d just gone down a residential street drunk and blindfolded with my whole weight on the gas pedal and couldn’t be sure if I’d hit anyone? Maybe I just didn’t have the constitution for it. A sensitive soul incapable of that kind of sustained cruelty, shivering next to my only real friend in his childhood bedroom feeling lucky to be alive.

But I’m not uniquely compassionate or kind, and if you told me you were built different, that you slept like a baby, I wouldn’t believe you. You have felt this. You have DMed me from the very same car.

I have wanted to call you my “nemesis” for the sake of explanation. Call it shorthand.

I think it’s interesting that “nemesis” seems to be the term we in this Online Lit Space have settled on to describe our petty rivalries with one another. Definitionally, a nemesis isn’t just any opponent or enemy but a fundamentally unbeatable one, and one that doles out retributive justice. Naming someone as your nemesis imbues what would otherwise be a petty, envy-driven Twitter slapfight with the power of myth,—one particular myth, actually, in which your opponent’s vengeance-seeking is justified and their victory inevitable.

I don’t think anyone refers to their rivals as nemeses with the literal Greek goddess Nemesis in mind, but I also don’t think learning the origin of the word would change much for anyone. By accident, we have been using the most precise terminology. Maybe not the bit about rightful vengeance-seeking, but their triumph over us, our permanent victimhood. It’s easier to stomach hating someone when you’ve convinced yourself they’re winning, always, no matter how unjust or unfair it seems. Otherwise, you’re just punching down.

(There is no such thing as shorthand.)

It’s kind of like that bit in Umberto Eco’s “Ur-Fascism” where he says that followers of a fascist government must view their opponents as both too strong and too weak at the same time. Your nemesis needs to be a no-talent loser so that you feel justified in disliking them, and a lit scene darling who is well-published and gets tons of attention, so you don’t feel like a loser yourself for sinking so many of your emotional resources into hating on a no-talent loser. A would-be mean girl overcompensating for childhood mistreatment and also goddamn Macchiavelli. Per Eco, this inability to objectively evaluate one’s enemy makes a fascist government “condemned to lose wars.”

At times, to you, I have been both a hapless “enby”¹ doomed to destroy my own life and someone you feel threatened enough to need to destroy. At times, to me, you have been both more and less. I’m not trying to write an exposé here, and we are both up on “the literature,” a term which here means, as it always does, tweets.

Eco argues that fascist governments are unable to objectively evaluate the strength of their enemies because of the mental gymnastics required to evoke the cockail of humiliation-cum-fear² that keeps their followers in line. In the context of interpersonal rivalries, there is another reason: that old cliche that the things we dislike in others are directly related to that which we are unwilling to accept about ourselves. Jung, shadow projection, etc.³

kat@giordkat

no that’s okay, i don’t want to deal with what i dislike in myself. yep, just the thing i dislike in you, please. thanks.

4:24 PM · Apr 3, 2026 · 225 Views

---

7 Likes

I wrote a bit about this in my previous post, where I spent some time dissecting Carrie Bradshaw and how her character allows women an external place to dump all of their unacceptable “male-centered,” emotionally-dependent thoughts and feelings. They can throw up their hands in exasperation with Carrie’s instability and self-sabotage, creating distance between those parts of themselves and the image of self-control and independence they wish to project.

It’s baby stuff to point out that we all do this to each other. When you complain about the guy who speaks up too much in work calls, it’s the same script you use to admonish yourself internally for being annoying and speaking up too much. And maybe when you look at him, you see the version of yourself you would be if you found a way to tamp down that discouraging voice within you that keeps you tight-lipped in meetings, and he is both an object of envy and a kind of cautionary tale that entrenches your own cruelty toward yourself in this regard. You can’t have compassion for those parts of yourself—look what it does to that guy!

Maybe instead of a guy who talks too much in work calls, it’s another woman your age in your literary scene who has softened in the places where you hardened to protect yourself. Maybe she maintains, in the face of all adversity and ridicule, a commitment to Winning as a Brand. Maybe she’s you if you’d had the balls to explore your gender in public, or if you’d never moved states for a man. Maybe she’s the dog left out in the rain inside you if it’d just barked a little longer to get itself fed and carried inside. And you hate her, and you envy her like you envy a toddler screaming in a long line who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and whose parents crouch down, still, to pick him up.

I suppose it doesn’t matter why.

When you know this much, trying to see your enemy for who and what they are is a minefield. Sometimes people say cruel things about you, and I can’t agree in good conscience because of what it would mean about me for them to be true. It would be foolish to call the enemy of your enemy your friend by default, because some of those enemies are casuals, clearsighted enough to see the plain truth that both of you are fucking crazy.

Will you cop with me to being crazy?

Over the course of writing this post, I have hesitated to be completely vulnerable out of fear that I will be accused of being “obsessed” with the character I repeatedly address. Ultimately, I suppose my point is that yes, I am obsessed, but this is mundane. Obsession is the price of admission for the kind of symbiotic rivalrly to which not a single one of us is immune. We would all be healthier if we admitted this, but I think one of the reasons we so rarely do is because doing so does not obligate our counterpart to be just as honest with themselves.

I have had to ask myself honestly whether I am okay with hitting post and having people who refuse to look into themselves in this way try to distance themselves from this phenomenon by insisting this is all a “me” problem, that I am crazy all alone, that other people just have nemeses they somehow hardly think about and it’s all totally chill and normal. To be clear, I certainly don’t think every petty Twitter beef is on this level, or that everyone has experienced this. I do think that it happens more than people are willing to admit, though, and that it’s almost never a case of one person being an obsessive rival to someone who doesn’t care about them at all.

“Rent-free” is a term people use a lot to disparage their enemies for thinking about them. I have used this language, and I certainly recognize its utility. It’s not untrue that disliking someone means devoting to them some amount of mental real estate. But if I can belabor just one more figure of speech, maybe cheaply: the person who lives rent-free in your head is living there. They are getting something out of it. A roof over their head? A place to store the things their primary landlord doesn’t want them to keep around? I don’t know. But it’s a mutual arrangement, and I think it’s a shame to be too self-conscious to think deeply about how it plays out.

At the very least, being brave enough to pull the trigger on this 2,000-word social suicide note is one thing I won’t have to hate somebody else for.

1. Quotes original.

2. These are a few of my favorite things… (Yes, I have made this joke before.)

3. This is not laziness but a thing they call Trust in the Reader.