Trust

There is a form of trusting that puts faith in the imagined perfection of another human, and then gets crushed by the inevitable reality. We are all flawed, we mess up, misjudge, and misunderstand even when we’re doing our best to get it right. For trust to be meaningful, it cannot be based on any anticipation of perfection.

I found myself thinking this morning about the handful of people I trust most. You’re an interesting set, let me tell you. All of you are damaged and troubled people, to some degree or another. All of you are a bit wild and unpredictable. I don’t trust you to turn up and do specific things, to remember, or even reliably to be gentle with me. Some of you are pretty challenging when the mood is upon you. You people who I love and trust the most, are a difficult bunch. So, what am I trusting? Nothing in there suggests what trust is normally considered to be about. It’s not about your reliability or predictability, that’s for sure.

Although in fairness, some of you are reliable about some things.

You are the people I can and do go to when I am in trouble. You are the tiny number of people I can cry in front of and feel safe, and feel no shame. I can let you see me when my body doesn’t work properly, when my mind is flaky, when my heart is breaking and all I can do is whimper.

What I trust, is that you have accepted me, flawed and messy as I am. You know what I’m like and you’re ok with that, and it doesn’t matter what facet of myself I put in front of you, you’ll know what to do with that. Probably because things in your chaos resonate with mine. I trust you because you are passably able, or in some cases remarkably able, to accept your own nature, whatever that is, and in accepting who you are, you have room to accept me.

Then there is the trust that comes from knowing that if there was a crappy way of interpreting what I said, and a well-meaning way, you’ll assume it was the second one. You won’t look at what I do when I’m ill, or tired, or in pain and assume I’m just trying to get out of something, or that I do not love you any more. Part of why I am able to trust you, is that you reflect that same kind of trust back to me. I don’t have to explain, and you’ll take me at my word. If I say I am ill, you will not worry that really I was bored and didn’t want to be honest with you. Or any of that crap.

I’m pretty good at liking and accepting people. I do it as much as I can. I try to see how the world looks from other people’s perspectives, try to take people on their own terms. I want to learn, and understand. Mostly I am not very good at trust, and that definitely isn’t because I seek impossible perfection in others. I’m coming round to thinking that a lot of it, is simply that I am tired of dealing with people who do not trust me, and this is a two sided thing.

Don’t trust me to be awake, or clever, to know or be able to do. But you can trust me to care and to try, to give it what I’ve got, and not to bullshit you.

Do not trust me with cake, though.