Trust

I’ve been feel­ing a dis­tinct lack of trust in my life late­ly. Usu­al­ly I’m fine in my inde­pen­dence, but some­times I need some­one I feel com­fort­able talk­ing to. It is a weird sort of lone­li­ness, as if every­one who knows me is con­tent with their own per­cep­tions of who I am, unin­ter­est­ed in any­thing oth­er than casu­al under­stand­ing. I feel like I’m on no one’s pri­or­i­ty list. I wish I felt com­fort­able talk­ing to some­one, but even when I talk to my mom I feel like she has no con­fi­dence in my abil­i­ties and no desire to accept that I’m not the per­son she has always want­ed me to be. She will read this and, as usu­al, think that I’m paint­ing her in bad light instead of real­iz­ing that I feel this way because, though I love her, talk­ing to her caus­es me stress and that I haven’t felt com­fort­able telling her what is close to my heart since junior high. She will feel attacked instead of won­der­ing why, when­ev­er I talk to her, the only thing I hear is dis­ap­proval. My uncle Col­lier gave me some frank and excel­lent advice about this while fish­ing in Cana­da one year, which is one rea­son why those trips are so spe­cial to me.

I’ve been try­ing to help peo­ple out with their prob­lems, small and large, quite a bit late­ly. I get the idea that oth­er peo­ple need my help more than I need theirs. So on the rare occa­sions when peo­ple ask me if I need any­thing, I feel oblig­at­ed to say no. I don’t want to both­er them with my uncer­tain­ties and fears. This is a prob­lem I’ve always had. I don’t like appear­ing weak or vul­ner­a­ble. This comes across as aloof­ness or arro­gance to many peo­ple and pre­vents me from becom­ing close enough to tell and trust some­one with the things I need help with.

I think my fear of trust­ing was born from three dif­fer­ent sources.

1. My father: find­ing out that he cheat­ed on my moth­er, see­ing his vio­lent, hate-filled and hurt side to the point where jump­ing out of a car was a viable and best solu­tion. That was much worse than his nor­mal casu­al indif­fer­ence and manip­u­la­tive dis­ap­proval.
2. My moth­er: In junior high, shar­ing with her the ini­tials of a girl I had a crush on, and her ask­ing around and find­ing out who it was. I was mor­ti­fied that oth­er peo­ple, strangers, knew who I had a crush on. Also, when she put my dog Rosie to sleep with­out telling me. Cou­pled with her dis­ap­proval, I’ve not felt secure talk­ing to her about any­thing remote­ly per­son­al since then.
3. My room­mate: Pret­ty much the only friend I had in the class of 2003, he hooked up with a team­mate he knew I had a crush on when I went home for my moth­er’s 50th birth­day and pro­ceed­ed to bla­tant­ly fool around with her in our room for the rest of the school year.

Writ­ing that last part made me real­ize that the whole rea­son I start­ed this weblog was to place my trust issues in a place exter­nal to me where they can be exam­ined and [most like­ly] for­got­ten about for a time. I might be cre­at­ing my own inter­nal infor­ma­tion­al cas­cade. Late­ly I’ve been doing my best at being com­plete­ly open and hon­est about my inse­cu­ri­ties with one per­son, but it is very scary because, even though I’ve been doing so, I still don’t know if I can trust them.

I expect that I’ll get a few com­ments say­ing “You can talk to me, man.” but that will be the same mech­a­nism as when some­one talks about how they need a hug and some­one imme­di­ate­ly offers one. Some of the authen­tic­i­ty of the offer is lost. Of course, the pre­vi­ous is also just me pre­emp­tive­ly say­ing that I don’t need any help. A cleft stick of my own devis­ing, and the only way out is to just go ahead and trust.