Trust (Part of a Series)

What is Trust?

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

* Today’s essay is part of a new series that includes

Latham Turner

,

Bowen Dwelle

,

Sincere American Writing

,

Dee Rambeau

, and

Lyle McKeany

and

Joshua Doležal

. You may remember our past series on fatherhood, recovery, and work. This week, all of us wrestle with what trust means to us.

~

What is trust, exactly? It’s a sort of faith in humanity, isn’t it? And in oneself? For a very long time I didn’t trust myself. How could I? I was an angry, confused blackout alcoholic, someone who set out to do one thing but then ended up doing the opposite. In my inner world I pretended to possess integrity, dignity and self-respect, but in truth I had none of these.

It was equally hard for me to trust my parents when I was young until I left home circa 2003. My parents were good people—Mom still is; Dad has passed—living good, ethical bourgeois lives. We had all the external stuff. And yet, between my father’s abstract detachment and emotional aloofness and my mother’s controlling strictness: Somewhere in the chasm between these two extremes was where I landed spiritually.

In other words: I couldn’t trust myself, or my parents. So I reached first for anger, and then for the bottle.

The bottle allowed me to go places, say things and do things I never could have imagined sober. It allowed me to set off on my own sordid, twisted Hero’s Journey. The descent into my own metaphysical hell and return.

I suppose to some degree I trusted some close friends along the wild ride that was my twenties, because I often put myself in harm’s way and they got me out of it. (Or I got lucky and somehow made it out on my own.) It wasn’t just the alcohol’s grip on my heart and soul that made me not trust myself: It was the fact that I lied, exaggerated and told fibs all the time, to anyone who would listen. I had a Mark Twain ability to bullshit and fabricate my life. That said: The truth was also that I had lived a pretty wild, intense life, thumbing and freight-train hopping all over America, and living for spurts of weeks in random towns and cities around the nation, blacked out half the time.

Whether it was picking up heroin from sketchy Latino gangbangers under a bridge in Santa Cruz, age 22, or trying to break a Mickey’s forty bottle over my head for “fun,” or slicing my arms deeply with scissors while drunk-dancing to Iggy Pop and the Stooges’ song Search and Destroy in front of a dozen punkers, or getting in drunk fist-fights or spitting in cops’ faces—all things I actually did—I never had the sense (shocking, I know) of self-trust. And I never believed that anyone had any sincere desire to help me, especially my parents. (Even though they genuinely did want to help me, and tried.)

When I hit bottom and got sober at 27, I didn’t trust Alcoholics Anonymous. For the first year I went to meetings in dank, moist basements but I sat in the back, judged the shit out of everyone, never spoke, never interacted, never participated, and truly wondered whether AA was some kind of sick Christian cult. (This is a common early reaction, I later found out.)

And yet I kept going to meetings and I didn’t drink. For a whole year. The longest I’d gone before that had been 30 days, and I’d more than made up for the pause when I hit the bottle again. This was different.

Slowly, over time, I began to “hear my own story” by others in the rooms of AA. I began, in short, to identify. For the very first time, I started to realize that maybe—just maybe—I wasn’t completely alone in this dark, untrustworthy world, and that possibly, just possibly, other people could even understand my problems. Inch by haggard inch, I began, like some tightly-shut clam, to open up. I started to participate. Finally I picked a sponsor and went through the 12 steps. I made amends with those I’d hurt. Guilt, shame and self-hate I’d carried all my life began to fall away; the ocean of my lack of trust receded. It felt unreal, historical, transcendent, miraculous, impossible.

And yet it was possible. I was doing it. It was happening. I was changing. I started to become more and more involved with AA. I made real friends. Eventually, I dated again. I experienced those sexually-awkward first moments of sober sex and sober dating. It was hard, and good and exhilarating and terrifying all at glorious once.

As the years blurred by filled with meetings, going back to college, friends, girlfriends, writing novels and short stories, working, getting into book editing, attending writers’ conferences, getting work published, traveling, backpacking, etc, I even began, at last, to trust myself. A small amount at first, but then the finger of self-trust punctured the black vail within me, preventing it from moving forward, and suddenly a great wide hole exposing the outer reaches of inner space occurred, and I felt free for the first time in my life. I wasn’t a victim; I wasn’t the sum of my genetics and childhood experiences: I was a deep, wise, insecure, intense, unique individual following my own complex path. I had tools.

With this self-trust came trust of people close to me, including my parents. And yet I was always and still am a man of my own North Star. I’ve never been good at taking people’s advice. As my mother has often said: I’ve always done things the hard way. She’s not wrong. But I learned to trust that instinct within me. One thing I can say for doing things the hard way: You learn on a profoundly rich level. Experience has always been my lodestar, the thing that gives me a deep sense or purpose and meaning. I could never “trust” someone else’s experience, or rely on what they’d been through. I had to find out about things myself, my way on my own terms. Just my nature.

I still very much have trust issues. If my previous argument sounds contradictory—claiming I trust others then turning around and saying I trust no one but myself—that’s because they are. Aren’t we all little flesh-bubbles of contradiction? Aren’t we all in the end full of shit? Aren’t we all frauds? Aren’t we all confused on the deepest levels? Don’t we all lie to ourselves all the time? Don’t we both have and yet totally lack genuine self-awareness? Aren’t we in denial about the toughest truths in our lives? Isn’t this how humans cope with Reality?

Yes, I have learned to trust others…but only to trust their own faith in themselves. When it comes to me, I trust very few people if any; for myself I trust only myself (ironically, since I started out trusting no one, least of all myself).

Because, in the end, my path is my path, and your path is your path. There’s a great paragraph in a letter from Norman Mailer in his Collected Letters wherein he is discussing having kids (he had eight) and he basically says, and I’m paraphrasing here, They are who they are; you can’t change them; any attempt at doing so will be seen as a power trip by mom or dad; they are searching for their own center of power in the world; the only thing you can do is give them some money and support and let them know you’re there.

I agree with this above sentiment. All of us literally are who and what we are, based on genetics and childhood environment and our own intrinsic nature. We can’t even change ourselves, not really. We can fulfil our deepest, most profound roles—getting sober, achieving wild financial success, becoming famous, being awarded a PhD, etc—but these are roles which our nature and nurture have allowed us to achieve. It’s like the notion of physical height, biological sex, etc. These are fixed facts. (Yes, you can identify as a different gender; that’s something else.) It’s not a matter of achieving something because you worked hard—even if you did work hard—but rather of fulfilling a goal your inherent nature was allowed to fulfil based on things outside your control.

The universe of “success” is mostly a matter of winning the genetic and cognitive and emotional lottery. One may be born with genes and childhood environment supporting intelligence, reading, knowledge, ambition, drive, conventional success, etc. Or…one may be born into rough circumstances which are filled with drugs, alcohol, domestic violence, and two divorced parents who are too young themselves and neither of whom went to college or perhaps even finished high school. None of these factors are within our control. (Ergo: Does Free Will even exist?)

But back to trust.

When I was drinking I could never trust myself, of course. Because I never knew what would happen, where I’d end up, whether I’d become Dr. Jeckel or Mr. Hyde. Sometimes I passed out early. Sometimes I got violent. Sometimes I “broke out in handcuffs” as some say in AA. Sometimes I woke up vomiting and hungover the next morning. Sometimes I broke into cars. Sometimes I stole things. Sometimes I was the life of the party. Sometimes I was happy as a drunk punk rock clam. Sometimes I started romantic relationships that lasted months, not even remembering half of the experience. Etc.

But after quitting the booze, slowly, I learned how to trust myself, how to believe that my actions would more or less match my words and inner drives. I wanted to do the right thing. I’d always wanted to do the right thing, the moral and ethical thing. But for so long I hadn’t had the basic tools, the roadmap needed to get from one place to another in my behavior. I felt lost, abandoned and rejected. (Mostly by myself.) Little by little, over the years I learned to be less dramatic, to exaggerate less and less often, to call myself and my own bullshit out when I did exaggerate. Sometimes I’d cut myself off and say, Actually, what I just said is total bullshit. It was three months, not a year. That kind of thing.

It felt good, all of it: Sobriety, honesty, telling the truth for once, trusting a Higher Power, a “God” if you will, to lead me to The Promised Land, meaning my own inner Truth. I’m not talking about religion here, or Jesus Christ. I’m talking about my own inner reality, the ability for me to look myself in the eyes, face myself in the bathroom medicine cabinet mirror in the morning and smile, when so often in the past I wanted to spit.

Trusting myself, I came to grasp, meant total, ultimate freedom. I didn’t have to drink and thus put my faith in The World to save my life each night. I could actually step out on the ledge of things and be me, beautiful, complicated, weird, semi-sophisticated, awkward, exhausted me.

And that felt gorgeous, like a gathering of puffy white clouds sludging across a bright blue clear sky. Everything felt spacious and open and easy, not closed and dank and dark and myopic, which was how things had felt before I got sober.

What does trust mean to me? It means letting go. It means opening one’s eyes and walking across the chasm like Indiana Jones when he crossed the chasm with no bridge. It means having faith. It means accepting that people are people, and I am who I am and none of it is personal. It means hugging the reality that life is brief, temporary, ephemeral. We’re animals, you and I. We need sustenance and water and we have to shit and piss and eat or else we die. We’re all going to the morgue sooner or later.

Trust is believing that Death is real and that this truth gives life more meaning. Trust is knowing deep down that you are enough, no matter what anyone else may say. Trust is having that inner belief that nothing is too hard to transcend, even Death, at least symbolically. Trust is pushing yourself to live your own version of existence, not needing to conform and be “normal.”

Trust, at the end of the day, is releasing control. Trust is transformative. Trust is transcendent. Trust is the opposite of torture. Trust is fluid and liquid and malleable.

Trust is giving up, accepting yourself as you are.