Sunday, March 4, 2012

Trust, belief, and responsibility

I realized recently that I spent 24 years in school. When I left, it was because I left, not because I quit. But I think I never really left school. I treat everything as an assignment. About a month ago I admitted to a friend that even the smallest, least important deadline for me is serious, serious business. If something is "due" I'm late if I get it done the day of, and it is on time if I am done a day early. I may have left school but it never really left me. I still approach things as homework. My trainer gives me a workout, and we agree on what I will do for cardio, and I refer to it as my exercise "assignment." When I was working, if I didn't have enough office time then my "homework" was to sit on the couch at night and catch up on my reports. (This is ironic because my office was 4 feet away from my couch so my homework could have been "office work" but . . . you know.) Even now that I'm not working, I make long to-do lists for myself each week and break them up by days and treat the things on them as my assignments. If I don't find a job in the next month I will have failed to complete my job search "homework" on deadline, on some level, even if that's not a reasonable reconciliation with job search realities or finances. So, when a friend texted me today and said, "Blog assignment . . . Trust. I would like to see what you have to say," I set aside the post I was writing about something else and began working on thoughts about trust in earnest..

I've written, not once, but twice about honesty. I've written about patience and forgiveness. I've even spent time talking about faith and confidence. Three of those posts were thoughts that burned deep and that I couldn't not take the time to fit words around. The fourth was a request from this same friend. Not an assignment, I can tell, because I sat on it for almost two months . . . and needed to because I had been grappling with it for many more months before she suggested it. It's probably important to note that this friend has a way of pinpointing the exact thing that is paining me; the thing that my skin is barely covering at any given moment. Who knew that such a bond could be formed over treadmills and swim practice?

I think some people are born with an innate sense of who to trust, how to trust, and how to be vulnerable and open with people that they trust. Or maybe I am wrong and everyone is born with an intuition about this. I've won enough children over to liking me (and in my not-expert-but-deeply-analyzed opinion having a young child like you is synonymous with them feeling safe enough to trust you to do right by them) to know not everyone does this at the same pace. Some kids have to gauge things over a few encounters, or watch others interact to get a sense of what they think of a new person. Others dive right in. If I can be vain for a moment, I've never had a kid NOT come to the conclusion that I was worth a shot, but have had a couple I've had to work a bit harder on. Is it their personality that makes the difference? Is it their life experience? Some of both? In two young-child anecdotes I have in mind, I can tell you that I am completely certain those were kids who have naturally cautious personalities and who take their time with everyone and everything. In two other cases, I know there was damage done before I met those little boys, and that it had shaped those younglings to fear judgement, reprisal, and to play everything close to the vest.

I remember so, so much that I wish I could forget, but it's impossible for me to look backwards from where I stand now and tell you what kind of kid I was. Was I one that ran headlong into believing in everything and everyone? Was I cautious and guarded, taking my time to warm up to people? I can't be sure, because I know everything I see from this stance is colored deeply by how little I trust or believe in fully now. I have to consciously choose to trust or be open to most people and have written much about the tough outer shell that not everyone cares to crack. I'm not pessimistic, exactly, it's more that . . . I'm never done collecting data and am accustomed for looking for the downside as a firmly instituted countermeasure to my tendency to so easily see the good in someone or something.

Trusting someone, and caring for them or loving them are two very different things. I can list for hours the people I love and care for. I see good in them. I've seen moments of amazing intellect, accomplishment, grace, talent, and good-heartedness in every single person that is in my life.  Generally, I believe Randy Pausch is right when he says in The Last Lecture that if you give people long enough they will show you their good side. I see it in abundance and so there are many people I love, who I suspect love me . . . I guess no one can ever really know what someone else feels, but in as much as I can know, I know those people love me too. So, I trust some people to love me, but not to be there for me. And some, I trust to be there for me, though they might not be the people I feel love from. I can count on one hand the people I trust to both love me and to be there for me.

The sad part of that statement is probably not that the list is so short, because the people on it are phenomenal. I would trust them with my life. In fact, one of them is my power of attorney, so I have literally trusted him to end my life according to my wishes. There is nothing sad I can say about these people but it is less than stellar that I'm not always on my own list. I don't always trust myself to show up for my own best interests. If I'm being honest, I've seen amazing growth in this area in the last two years, but some of it has been either thrust on me, or, it has to be mentioned, is marked also by huge failures in this area (and hopefully, equally huge comebacks). I think, for me, how this works is that I go through growth spurts with this. I grew immensely in college in being able to see myself as being worth trusting . . . and it's probably not accidental that that happened because I left home fully. I grew immensely in this area as I was deciding to leave grad school. I grew painfully as I discovered a way to stay here even when the reason I had come to Colorado had left. I think I'm now in the middle of another growth spurt, and it does make the joints a bit sore, but it also means I maybe have a clear image of not just who I am, or how I am, but how all that I know about myself can be trusted and loved.

For some people trust and feeling safe and secure comes from being able to predict what will happen, or how another person behaves. And for some, I think it comes from knowing that they if they can't see everything coming, they can at least trust someone to have good intentions and to do everything to act consistently with that. I grew up with a lot of inconsistency when it came to both of those routes to building and maintaining trust. And I've had a lot of experiences since where it has become painfully obvious to me that predicting how someone will act is just asking for trouble, and that I have imperfect intuition when it comes to who has my best interests at heart and who doesn't . . . On the one hand, I have 5 people who I know would walk through fire for me. On the other hand, I've been engaged twice and then walked away from those people, entirely because of trust issues. I had a friend break-up that affected me at least as much as those breakups. I've had advisers and mentors let me down, and I've placed my trust in people who didn't deserve it.

It's maybe not surprising, given all of this, that my brain is committed to collecting data. Whatever else I am doing, there is always some corner of my psyche that is collecting information, and either filing it or future use or stopping to analyze it against other data points. My therapist recently said, "You can't analyze your way through that one," about something we were discussing. I sat in shocked silence for about a minute after he said that because if analysis was off the table then . . . what else? It's also perhaps, not shocking that I use structure to control so much in my life, or give the illusion of control. Predictability gives me a chance of feeling secure, and collecting data gives me the best chance of seeing people and situations for what they really are.

But, ultimately, what has evolved is that trust for me comes from something much simpler than predictability or believing that someone has a good intention in their back pocket. I believe that the five people who I both love and trust have good intentions, and since I have collectively known those people for more than 50 years, while they may not be predictable, I know enough to make some good guesses. But, what ultimately sets those people apart from others in my life is . . . they are heartily responsible to something higher than today and tomorrow. We all have inconsistencies, but these are people who have worked hard to define their own values and principles, their own benchmarks of morality, and to live up to that. When they make mis-steps they feel remorse, but also a need to take responsibility for not falling into the same hole again. Anyone can trip and fall down a well, and people can even get lucky and find a way out, but it's the people who get out, step back, and do everything in their power to make sure they don't put themselves or anyone else in that situation again that earn my trust.

For me, trust is then not about what I feel for someone, or even about whether or not I think they have good intentions towards me, but so much more about a person's actions. I'm a verbal person. So, tell me you care, and I will listen sincerely but don't expect me to believe it unless you SHOW me. Tell me your plan, but don't expect my buy in until I see you take action. I may have faith on someone's ability to change, grow, or progress, but until they take responsibility for it I'm unlikely to have a lot of confidence.

This is maybe the heart of finding fidelity with myself. I haven't always been a person of profound integrity, but I have been deeply, profoundly defining myself by my honesty for more than two decades. I wasn't always this way. Like most children, as part of normal development, I tested the boundaries of honesty. I maybe tested these limits a little more or a little longer than some - probably it was normal, maybe it wasn't, but it was most definitely not treated as normal in my family. Looking back that seems to me to be significantly about the need to break out of the intense limitations and expectations placed on me, or even maybe the fact that not all of my needs were being met. But, since my view is very much from the inside I can't be sure about that. What I can be sure of is after about a year of that, it occurred to me that it felt horrendous to know that people didn't trust me, and it felt good when people did believe in me. It was that simple.

What I had to do to be trustworthy was ACT different. If being dishonest meant people couldn't trust that I would do what I said, I had to be careful to say only what I could live up to, and to then DO it. It's not small to me that I figured that out before I was old enough to choose important things for myself. And my convictions about honesty over social niceties, personal responsibility and independence, and moral structure followed from those actions and results. In this way, I feel down to the marrow of my bones the difference between an orthopraxy and an orthodoxy. When I don't find myself trustworthy to myself, it's not because I believe anything different, it's because I haven't taken responsibility to act that way. It's because I've drawn a moral line in the sand, and then tiptoed backwards across it. It's because I've declared a need for accountability and then eaten more than the designated 3 cups of popcorn for a serving of carbs.

Being trustworthy is extremely important to me. And the only way I know how to do that is to be honest. All the time. Without fail. Even if it costs me. And to back it up. To act consistently or own up to it when I haven't and sincerely try to change so that it doesn't happen again. It is how others see me as being worthy of keeping their confidences, of being let into their inner circles, of walking their dogs and holding their babies, as being loyal or compassionate or reliable is all in being talk plus action.

This is, of course at the heart of my issues with God. I can believe in all kinds of things when it comes to my spirituality, but it's hard to measure actions when it comes to God. In my post about ATM fraud, I talked about love providing and protecting. But I also admitted that it was impossible to separate whether it was people and systems or some bigger force acting through people that accomplished that. And I flat out refused to answer the question raised at one of the last church services I was at of whether or not we can trust God. Do I trust God? I suspect this is at least in part the question my friend was really hoping I'd tackle. And I might answer that question differently, moment to moment, especially right now. But, I'd probably have to say something towards what I heard in a 12 step Al-Anon meeting last summer - the speaker said that if she had to bet something that mattered, like her kids' lives, on God existing, she wasn't sure she could answer a resounding yes. But, she knew with certainty that she was more successful, more healthy when she acted like she believed and turned things over to her higher power because it meant she spent less time being crazy about things she couldn't control.

I want action. I want answers. It's hard to bang a trash can and get God to do that on my schedule or to get my higher power to make it clear that the things I'm experiencing are by design. And because I'm not just a "walk the walk" girl of action, but also not blessed with a lot of intuitive trust or innate faith, it's a hard problem for me. I'd rather act and see if belief takes root from that (orthopraxy) than believe and not act (how many approach orthodoxy). Put another way, I'd rather act and then believe than believe and NOT act. The words of my sensei come back to me, "Fake it 'til you make it."

Here's what I trust. I trust five people in my life to care about saying things that matter, and living up to them. I trust that when I don't know what to do, I can talk to them and get a meaningful reality check. And if I can't talk to them, I can ask myself what one of them would think of what I'm doing or how I'm doing it. I trust myself to act in ways that maintain their trust in me, and I'm learning how to treat myself as well as I treat them in that respect. I want to be the sixth person on that list of people. And I have a handful of candidates to round out that second hand of people I can count who I love AND trust. I trust myself to do the right thing, according to my values, as long as I take a beat to line everything up in my head and collect all the data in one place. I trust that I can't control everything, but I know too that controlling a certain amount of my environment helps me function. I trust that If I keep doing these things, I will someday be able to match my intuition with the data in the corresponding basket. I'll never stop collecting the data and analyzing, but maybe I'll be able to someday trust the picture I see forming from it.

No comments:

Post a Comment