who do you trust?
a few weeks ago Amy posted about trust, and how she finds it really hard to trust anybody, even people she knows she should be able to rely on. and it got me thinking – how much do I really trust people in my life? as much as I should? too much? It’s difficult to balance trust, especially if it’s been broken once before. the scar weighs more than everything else, and tips the scales when they should have balanced.
When I read Amy’s post originally I thought I had my trust issues all worked out. I thought I really trusted people, well, the people I should trust anyway. But then doubt started to creep in and I looked at how I really was behaving, and questions cropped up everywhere like weeds. I can be a paranoid person at times. Ever since I was small I could imagine secret passageways through thick stone walls or spies riding black horses through the night, carrying messages written in code tucked in their leather saddlebags. Chalk it up to an overactive imagination, or too much time spent with my nose buried in a book that had maybe one too many violent dragon-slaying scenes, but it’s easy for me to see subterfuge where there is none.
Add to that a sense of intuition that is tuned to a very high frequency, and it means that sometimes I get a hunch that something’s not right which is later proven correct. If my sixth-sense was right five times in the past, surely it’s right this time? And what if I got a hunch that I didn’t act on, and then found out much later that I was right? What if I’m wrong, and I mess things up by telling people what I thought was happening? Nobody wants to look like the suspicious hag in the corner, and it gets rather unpleasant believing in every little fear and shadow.
I also wonder how much mis-trust is actually projection. If I don’t trust myself, how can I trust others? If I know that I have broken the trust of people I care about in the past, how can I know that others won’t do the same to me in the future? This is the part that we actually have some control over, I think. The more we trust ourselves, the better judgement we will have to be able to tell whether someone is trustworthy in general, or telling the truth in a particular situation. Sometimes you have nothing more than your own intuition to guide you.
