I used to be obsessed with trust.  Seems like people were always letting me down, and I was always seeking someone totally trustworthy.  Whenever I trusted I got hurt.  If I didn't trust, I lived a life of paranoid existence, always believing everyone was out to get me.  It was sort of like alcohol... and not being able to live with it, or live without it.  I needed a third alternative.

My third alternative when it comes to trust is difficult to explain.  I still trust - or not - based on experience, I think we all do to a large extent.  But if that trust is betrayed, I am not mortally wounded.  If my happiness is dependent on someone else, and that someone else never betraying me, I've created an impossible set of conditions for my own peace and sanity.  I think many of us who come from alcoholic homes see the deck stacked against us, damned if we do, damned if we don't - there is only alcohol to numb the awareness temporarily.  I only believed I could stop drinking when I somehow won that unwinnable game against the house.  Which of course I couldn't.

A funny thing happened.  I stopped drinking anyway.  I believed you people when you said it gets better, when you said I don't have to solve all my problems before I can quit drinking.  Actually, I don't know if I believed or not.  I was just at a place of both desperation and curiosity.  I had done it my way, and my way was to drink.  My desperation wasn't of total misery and loss, but just an awareness of the deepening rut.  A rut that was forged entirely out of my own footprints.  I didn't find a ladder or a helicopter to fly me out of the rut - I just stopped digging.

Amazing how quiet things got when I stopped digging.  The problems weren't so loud in my head.  The people trying to make my life miserable seemed farther away.  As their voices began to fade, I realized they weren't really ever talking about me. 

Maybe trust isn't a yes or no thing.  Maybe it's just coming to grips with other people's motives.  Aren't they, like me, trying to do the best for themselves?  When I consider that it's not about me - not to them...  then what's mine is mine and what's their's is their's.  If a person genuinely has a resentment on me, it's none of my business.  I can give them space in my head rent-free... or I can keep my eye on my two feet in front of me, and my hands firmly gripped to my broom, and get back to sweeping my side of the street.

Someone said at a meeting tonight, character is who we know we are - not what other people think we are.  If I work on my own integrity, and become a trustworthy person in my own eyes... then trusting of others becomes irrelevant.  We can get back to living one day at a time, taking it like it comes - instead of constantly trying to figure out who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.  When I'm in that mode, it's no wonder I feel like a pawn on a chess board.  I'm surrounded by enemies and we're all jockying for position.  I can walk off the board - a free man - any time I choose to stop being a game piece on the war board in my head.

Barisax