Not to be trusted

unraveling inner trust

From across the street came a frantic buzz. Bodies in automobiles rushed from office buildings to fill unsatiated bellies and clogged office air lungs. The lunch rush delicately rattles the splitting window panes. It was loud enough to notice but not enough to congest my mind. I watched the street turn into a streak of white and silver with an irregular break of red and black. 

My therapist observed me across the room from her king-sized ottoman. She dressed modestly in shades of the earth that called no attention to her figure. She kept her head shaven. I always thought it was an outward illustration of her monk-esque demeanor. She wore no jewelry except a layered gold septum piercing that constantly drew my eyes to her nose. She was unabashedly good at holding eye contact - gazing softly but analytically to read my eyes as much as my body. I’m not sure she ever broke it unless to laugh at something ridiculous I said like the one time I pretended I came to her, a magician, to erase fragments of my past. She is tiny, so tiny that when she asks me a question that begs for contemplation and my eyes fixate on the corner of her ottoman to escape her piercing gaze, she sometimes disappears into the fabric. Her aura, despite her size, is commanding and regal - my eyes always come back to meet hers. We’ll call her D. 

We were in one of those moments. I was staring at the claw foot of her ottoman and she started folding into fabric pleating. I was staring for long enough that my sense of time dissipated. From the claw foot to the street traffic one story beneath us. An era elapsed before my gaze returned to the sheet of paper and red pen in my lap. And when my gaze did return I penciled imaginary mountains and cats and apple pie onto the white space that consumed 90% of the page. In black text, the left-hand side of the page reads, “Negative Self-Beliefs.” 50 or so beliefs ran top to bottom, only a few not resonating - “I am powerless”, “I am helpless”, “I am permanently damaged.” But most of them did. My task was to whittle this list down to three beliefs that have the greatest control over me. 

I know myself. I’ve done this exercise before. I thought I could tell her all of the limiting beliefs that puppeteered me without this paper guide. But once this list was in my lap, the crushing weight of my pride closed the room in on me. It shrank on all sides until my cheek was a pancake smudge on a panel of glass. 

The words, I cannot be trusted, stared back at me like the familiar-faced person you passed on the street swearing you know them but not sure how. 

With my cheek pancaked and the air becoming thinner, those words inked themself in red print on all four walls. The t’s and n’s dripped into a pool of red ink at my feet. Those words mocked me, suffocating me in my own abasement. Seeping into the background and then crashing through the foreground, my therapist’s question, “What are your thoughts?” suddenly snapped the room back into its regular shape. Buzzing street traffic, the claw foot, and my cheek back in place. 

“This one”, I said pointing at the paper as if she could see what I was pointing at. Her eyes encouraged me to go on. “This one. I cannot be trusted.” Those words burned like stomach acid rolling over my tongue. I wanted to swallow their battery acid filth. I wanted that stupid piece of paper to combust into nothingness. Those words made me wish I was of the serpentine sort. I imagined crawling out of my skin, leaving it to never surmount to anything other than glimmery translucence. I peeked at her. Too painful. Back into my lap. “I don’t believe I am not trustworthy to others. But. Uh. I don’t think I trust myself.” I stammered.

I peeked back. Her eyes remained unwaveringly kind. “How does that make you feel?”, she pried. My feelings were too messy for anything other than an euphemism. 

“Awful”, I said to her. 

“Like that last ember oscillating between orange luminescence and charred gray before a bucket of water muffles me forever”, I thought to myself. 

After gauging my willingness and emotional capacity to continue this conversation, she asked me to explain where this feeling came from. 

---

The wooden spoon was a deliverer of pleasantries and punishment when I was aging through my toddler and teenage years. It was the leftover cake batter and the gavel before my grounding sentence. I’ll never forget the sound of the kitchen drawer that held our arsenal of spanking weapons slamming open with wild disregard. Before my trousers were pulled to my knees and the wood left me pink and in tears, I was already writhing as sadness tormented my body. I didn’t like being hit. Even more so, I feared to my core being a disappointment. 

Among the reasons I met my fate with the wooden spoon was this one: I was a liar. 

I lied when lying presented me with a back door to escape disappointing someone. I thought it offered me a way of circumventing the obstruction of disappointment. Most of the time, I lied of nothing larger than spilled milk. But I lied often. 

I lied about things I didn’t do. I lied about things I did. Like borrowing my sister's clothes. Failing tests. Leaving the box of crackers empty in the pantry. Not doing chores. 

But the worst things I lied about were the misrepresentations of myself. About my interests and curiosities. About my friends and lovers. About what happened behind closed doors. About who I was and who I wanted to be. 

Lying became my most reliable coping mechanism, a brushstroke of necessity rather than malice. It was a clandestine attempt to navigate a world steeped in exacting expectations and conditional acceptance. But I was never a good liar and my fate was handed to me anyway in double the force for disappointing once and then disappointing twice. 

Each lie I constructed, constructed back. I was returned with a barrier between my vulnerable truth and the false truth I portrayed to the scrutinizing eyes of authority. I thought I was saving them disappointment, and myself shame, yet, little did I foresee the indelible mark it would leave upon my psyche. I was sowing seeds of doubt that would one day mature into a forest of self-mistrust.

And so they did. The lies I once thought necessary for self-preservation evolved into paralyzing uncertainty and persistent doubt that intruded silently into the pauses between my thoughts. I could no longer tell the difference between my authenticity and inauthenticity. I couldn’t tell my pure intuition from that of my falsified self. And if you asked me what the merit of my being was, well, there was none. 

---

A few years ago,

I stayed in a relationship long past its expiration point. I was flying by the seat of my partner’s emotional reactivity. Unpredictability was the only predictable thing about us. Blind to the cauldron of toxicity we were both stirring, I wanted to introduce him to a few friends I had recently made. Before the night ended, I was standing on the sidewalk alone with my vision so marred by tears that I felt like I was ten feet underwater staring up at the kaleidoscope surface. Wiping my tears cleared my vision enough to watch him punch the side-view mirror off of a white van parked alongside the road. His sudden release of angst was followed by an angry outcry. The brick buildings that surrounded us absorbed the yell and absorbed him into their shadows. I went to bed that night like I did most nights, confused and crying. The next morning he told me I was crazy. I believed him, trusting his word more than my own. 

A few months ago,

I found myself in a (virtual) room of strangers who also happened to be writers. They were exuberant and inspiring in an endearing-but-not-far-fetched type of way. They showed up as vessels of love, emptying their holds to share amongst the others. Thirty or so minutes had passed and I realized that my cheeks had grown tender. I became aware of myself. My exuberance matched theirs. I was lively and unreserved. My brain was in an orgasmic flow state of ideation until my cognition abruptly turned everything to blackness. I questioned myself until I wasn’t sure whether or not my exuberance was real or forced. Was I being authentic or a master of manipulation? Doubt cast louder than intuition and I was stuck fluctuating between someone and no-one. What was real and what was fiction, I wasn’t sure. 

A few days ago,

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. The two weeks leading up to this day had been lower than my run-of-the-mill-week-lows. I was struggling. Sleep wasn’t replenishing my energy. My mind was holding fast with an iron grip through existentialistic swings of “Who am I?” and “What am I doing here?”. In the middle of the day, I rubbed my eyes furiously begging for them to stay open. I needed sleep. I instead convinced myself that I was fabricating this gloom turned sadness turned depression. I returned to work. 

---

I grabbed a purple knit pillow and wrapped both of my arms around it so I would stop fidgeting. It wasn’t until this very moment that I learned I struggled to trust myself. I was so perturbed with discomfort. Those four words, I cannot be trusted, brought meaning to moments that were riddled with confusion. Moments I didn’t trust my sadness to be merited were layered with years of being told that I was too sensitive for my own good and believing it to be true. Moments I didn’t trust my happiness to be authentic were layered years of bending myself to appease and avoid disappointment.

I told D that there were many versions of me. I ached inside to admit this aloud. There were versions of me created to conform to singular moments and versions of me created to conform to years of wrongly imposed expectations. I couldn’t trust myself because there were too many versions of me masking my core being. 

I told D an everything but the kitchen sink version of the VHS memory tape that whirred between my ears. I imagined all the versions of myself stacked in rows dressed in uniforms like Barbies on a store shelf. The CEO doll, the doll dressed to appease men, the popular doll, the straight doll, the academic doll, the quiet doll, the catholic doll, the too-afraid-to-speak-up-for-myself doll. They all had my face. They were so easy to construct. I commoditized rip-off versions of myself giving me nothing other than another chameleon to wrongly trust. 

The lineup of dolls was dizzying. At the end of the shelf was a break in the uniformity of plastic heads on skinny bodies. A misplaced heart plush toy. Out of my imagination and out of D’s office that day, I carried that heart with me, turning my back on the line-up of faux-Haley’s. I’d wear it on my sleeve like I used to before the expectations watered me down. I left knowing that it was the only thing I must ask to guide me. 

---

It’s been months since D and I talked about my self-trust. There was a reckoning that happened that day in her office. There are days I squander, adding another doll to that stupid shelf. But most days I trust my heart. 

Trusting my heart brought me the gift of assuredness and abundance. Those gifts were expected. What I did not expect is that forgiveness would be gifted as well. I forgave myself for fabricating truths to protect myself and I forgave others who imposed exacting expectations and conditional acceptance. Born from the crucible of understanding - a recognition that my parents, friends, siblings, and partners, too, were shaped by a world that demanded obedience, shaping them into imperfect architects of their own expectations. I imagine that they too have creepy doll shelves, showcasing their lost and forgotten tropes. 

My resonance with the words, I cannot be trusted - as dingy and nasty as that pit of resonance felt - was liberating. On that day, the restraints of resentment started loosening. And with my heart bore on my sleeve, I walked towards the reclamation of my narrative. 

---

My greatest thanks to

Gradient Ascent

&

Envio by Steven Foster

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