Trust

I used to trust everyone to begin with. Right off the bat. Until someone gave me a reason not to trust them, I would just do so. But then, once they lost my trust (if they lost my trust), then they would never ever get it back from me again. It was over. Done with. The end.

Everyone always seemed to think I was crazy for this. After all – you shouldn’t trust someone you just met. Overall, it went pretty well for me though, I have to say. It felt wrong to not give people the benefit of the doubt to begin with. I mean, I have never met you, you have never wronged me. I trust you, for now. Not that I would spill my most intimate secrets or private moments to them either, but I would trust that they generally meant me no harm and that if they were speaking it was generally truth.

I don’t know when this changed. Maybe it’s just that, as time goes on, and the more people I meet – the more I catch people telling lies all the time. Easy to detect lies. For example, one minute you said you did one thing, and the very next minute you’re denying it like it was an absolute impossibility.

How do you trust people who lie so frequently and so easily about day to day crap, let alone, with their so-called “secrets”? How do you believe someone when they say they have no ill will towards you, but yet, the next thing out of their mouth is a lie.

And, this doesn’t seem to be something I have run into with one person randomly. It seems to be the case with a lot of new people I seem to meet. I don’t understand the need for all the deception, lies, and utter drama/bullshit.

I’m not really sure what the exact turning point for me was, but I definitely hit a place where I decided that, while I will generally trust what you say off the bat – (If you tell me your name is Louis and you work in a pretzel factory, ok, I believe you.) I sure don’t trust anyone with anything other than surface pleasantries. Not at first anyway. Maybe it’s better this way.

I want to think that the majority of people are good, and that they are honest, kind people. But, experience is leading me to stack a small wall between myself and new people. I don’t like that feeling at all, but maybe it’s a necessary evil. Some of us learn these things later in life, I suppose – and hurt does lead to people doing things differently.

I want to trust people, for sure, but I won’t do it until they have proven to me that they can be trusted. That they are worthy of that trust, and that they generally are good people. Writing this out, it is kind of hard to explain, and I am worried that it isn’t coming out right. But, it is how I feel. And feelings are sometimes messy things.