Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Trust


Trust is a minor word for a major part of life. There seem to be two types. The type you are born with for your parents, family and caregivers that can be either nurtured or shattered, and the kind for the rest of the world that has to be earned. I argue that we have the former because we don’t know any better and really have no choice.

In my life trust has been given to, earned by, and shattered by more people than I care to count. My ex-husband violated my trust on a daily basis. He seemed to lie for no apparent reason about trivial things and at one point told me he liked to feel like he was getting away with something. In the beginning, he regained my trust on multiple occasions, but mostly because I wanted to trust him. In the end, he violated it so badly that I was not mentally capable of trusting him again, no matter how much I wanted to.

It doesn’t always take something major to make a person lose trust in someone else; rather it is the culmination of smaller things. A person says they will call and they don’t. A person says they will be there at a certain time and they aren’t. Someone tells you that he or she will help you with something, bring you something, do something, and when you are let down repeatedly, you lose trust in that person. At some point or another, my trust in 95% of the people in my life has been challenged. I have done the same to others and I have been fortunate enough to be forgiven and have a chance to rebuild that sacred bond.

Trust is such a fragile thing. Once it is lost, there is a chance that it will be impossible to regain. It’s like whittling a piece of stove wood. Every piece whittled away makes it weaker until it falls apart and nothing is left. You can’t put it back together. All you can do is hope for a new piece.

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