Marked By Your Hatred
Marked By Your Hatred is an intimate excavation through control, gaslighting, and survival. In this haunting collection, J L Herald gives voice to the silent undoing of the self that occurs under psychological and emotional abuse—when memory becomes unstable, trust collapses, and the body is no longer safe ground.
These poems navigate the dissonance between what is said and what is felt, what is remembered and what is denied. With stark imagery, the book explores what it means to question your own reality, to love someone dangerous, and to claw your way back from emotional erasure.
Marked By Your Hatred is not just a record of damage—it is the charting of a mind reasserting its truth in the aftermath of coercion and manipulation. Quietly powerful and emotionally unrelenting, this collection insists: survival is not silence.
MARKED BY YOUR HATRED
you built a personality by taking bits from other people
like random Lego bricks from different sets—hoping
that the construction of an edifice of non-matching
ideologies would somehow make you more attractive.
while stealing those reflections you left behind
grey blocks of your own damaged character
that you could not look at or acknowledge
slipping them in amongst the others’ collections
then pointing them out and shaming them for having them.
I was marked by you as a being you could borrow from
slipping your hand inside my person and taking
pieces of me that you admired and coveted
because you needed me much more than I ever needed you.
you kept me in your periphery, out of reach but always near
so you could create my personality out of all those parts
that you did not want to take responsibility
the loathing of your character from deep within
given as a present that I never once asked for or wanted.
I was marked by your hatred, dragged into servitude
moulded into vessel to pour your disgust into—exposing
all the broken pieces piled up within the container
you had hidden them in—so that others would hate me
as much as you hated and you could feel better
their aversion was aimed away from where you were located
avoiding the consequences of the words of your behaviour
you needed me to be the persona you created
just so you could hate yourself from afar.