On Trust

Trust is a delicate flower. Like daisies in the summer, we take it for granted when it is there and, like the petals of a daisy, it is easily destroyed. For most of my life I have never thought much about trust and whether it was something that could be recovered. My world was always very black and white, full of comforting absolutes and certainties. If someone broke my trust, that was an end to my dealings with them - permanently.

I often wonder if moving away from the absolutes and allowing the possibility that things might be 'mended' or made better was a part of the confusion and disorientation of menopause, or perhaps the tiredness that I have felt for the last few years. That phrase "My get up and go got up and went" seems to have been coined for me. So, when my trust was broken recently, instead of becoming angry, strident and cutting out the thing that caused me pain, I sat on my hands. After a while, I decided that trust could be recovered and earned back, so set out on a long and painful journey. I am nearing the end of that journey now; I know this because I'm too tired to continue with the trip, so it has to end.

Many times since I made the decision to give this thing a second chance, I have wondered at the sanity of that decision. In the end, I had to try moving away from my comfort zone and very black and white world. Life before this had been about making decisions, often hard ones, and then living with the consequences. Making a decision is not a hard thing; facing the consequences of one's decisions can be a lot tougher. Mainly, I have been happy with the decisions I have made and for those that went wrong (and a couple were catastrophic) it has never been a problem dealing with the fall out, not always easy, but always something I was prepared to do because I had initiated the situation I found myself in.

Writing this has made me clearer that the difficulty I am having is that I did not initiate the situation that caused my trust to be broken and so the consequences I am suffering are not of my own making. Thank you blog for that insight. Knowing that helps because I have always been willing to live by the things created by my own hand. Likewise I have not accepted what others have dished out meekly or without question, yet when something like this happens, you have to take the person who just broke your trust on trust and hope you are not going to fall for the patter a second time around.

That puts me, or whoever takes this step, into the delicate position of not being entirely the master of their own destiny. The trouble with trying to rebuild trust is that it take a long time. There are ghosts, resonances of the things that finally alerted you to the mug that you had been, there are oversights that mean little or nothing to the person committing them, but are laden with dark promise and endlessly unfolding scenarios of what might be happening that I don't know about...

Over time, these forebodings diminish, but can come rushing back with a thoughtless phrase. So now, I am asking myself, how long is one expected to give it before this sort of thing stops? Will it ever stop? Is it possible to glue the petals back on the daisy? You see, I'm tired of it. Just when I relax and think it has stopped, or rather don't think about it, something happens to shake the security and comfort one should feel with a trusted friend. Maybe I was right all along and should have stuck to my absolutely black and white world where there were no second chances, no grey areas. I shall have to sleep on this...