It’s hard when you’re always afraid
You just recover when another belief is betrayed
So break my heart if you must
It’s a matter of trust
You can’t go the distance
With too much resistance
I know you have doubts, but for god’s sake don’t shut me out
~ Billy Joel
Yup, Billy Joel wrote the soundtrack of my life…
The original opening quotation to this entry was a line from The Lion King II, “do not forget what we cannot forgive” but as I was writing, I realized that’s not what I wanted to say at all…because that’s not actually true. Not about me anyway. Not really…
So anyway….
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking in the last few days about trust, what it is, how to handle it, how not to break it. What happens when it gets banged around a bit.
A couple of things to point out about me – first off, I am fully aware that I am extremely imperfect. I have a nasty tendency to high drama and I cry at the drop of a hat; but I try my very best to be a good person. I try to treat others with dignity and kindness, and while I get angry more often than I’d like I try to take the higher road.
I’m also an Empath, which means that yes, if something is wrong I’m going to have some sense of it. If something is going on behind my back I’m going to often be aware of it, and I can usually tell when someone is hiding something from me. The annoying biproduct of that is that I’ll usually keep bugging people until they *tell* me what it is that is going on under the “everything’s fine”, which can lead to it’s own problems.
Anyway…this started out being about trust.
The long and the short of it is that I don’t really give trust easily. I want to. From the bottom of my heart I want to, and I’ll give superficial trust out like candy, but real trust? That I hold close. That I’m afraid you have to earn. And if you do, and then you break it? I will forgive you. I will always forgive you. But I won’t forget. I can’t. No matter how much I love you, no matter how much I care, I won’t forget. I can’t. My head and my heart don’t work that way. That kind of breach doesn’t go away. Or at least, if it does…it takes a little time. Sometimes a lot of time.
I’m a big big fan of the Japanese art form of kintsugi, where a special kind of lacquer is applied to a broken object that is then dusted with gold. When the lacquer hardens, the object is repaired and fully able to serve its purpose once more, but it now looks like it has been mended with gold. No one tries to hide the breakage, or to pretend that it didn’t happen, no one tries to pretend that the piece is how it used to be – but the cracks are now part of what makes it more beautiful, they are an acknowledged part of the new whole.
That’s me. That’s what I am. That’s what my trust is.
I don’t forget, I can’t always pretend that everything’s the same as it was, and I will usually respect you too much to pretend that “everything’s okay” until it actually is (and it will be, eventually, I promise, sometimes sooner, sometimes later, but it will be), but … I mend my cracks with gold. And whatever we went through? Whatever happened? Unless it is really really terrible… I can promise you it will usually just become a shining new piece of whatever our new whole is meant to look like.