I feel like in [failed] relationships, the first thing people will do is make themselves a victim, because the easiest way to heal from things is to blame something on the other person. And I feel like I’m really opposite in that sense—a lot of the time, I’ll take the blame for everything, and I’ll overanalyse everything that I did wrong to wreck something. There’s that line ‘After I just put you right through hell/You couldn’t hate me more than I hate myself'—I think that was a really cool way to approach this situation. I had just recently gone through a fresh breakup the day I wrote this. You can hear my voice cracking because I was actually crying while recording it. I take the blame throughout the song, and I feel like I make myself the villain in the story. But then you get to the bridge, and there’s this point where it’s like, 'I know that you’re gonna be happier with another person, and that’s the most painful thing in the world for me.’ That’s what makes the song so heartbreaking.

—via Apple Music

In an interview with Seventeen, Tate described “hate myself” as the hardest song to write on the album, saying,

There’s this one song called “hate myself” that was really hard to write. As a songwriter, you can make your own perspective and you have all the liberty to describe scenarios however you want, which is crazy. In this situation, it was hard because it was the first time that I wrote about immense guilt. It’s a weird feeling to talk about because the whole time I had like a massive pit in my stomach.
I remember it happened right after I went through a breakup and my friend called me and he was like, ‘Come over right now. Like, you have to talk about this.’ I was standing at the mic stand sobbing. I was crying as I was recording the song and you can hear my voice crack. I was crying because it was so real. It hit so close to home at the time and it was just brutal, it was really hard.