“Trust Me?”

Trying on masks at the Earthbound Trading Company at the Silver Sands outlet mall in Sandestin and having the funnest Labor Day weekend ever! I’ll be wearing this one at the FPG Samhain Festival in November.

I confess, I’m still a little shaken.  I haven’t told the person who shook me up or why, mainly because I’d have to explain something I’m still thinking through myself and working out here in this journal.

“Trust me?” my friend asked toward the end of a conversation that had been going for about 4 hours.  It wasn’t an eye-rolling demand for me to trust someone and give up something of myself that I wasn’t ready to give up.  It was a hopeful question, oddly placed in our conversation, after I’d admitted losing the occasional friend for being too “open-minded.”  In other words, my acceptance of things like gay marriage, paganism, D/s, Law of Attraction, political standings, birth control, dating guys half my age, etc, has had a cost, and I was a little nervous that my expansion of friendship with a long-time collaegue I’ve always admired  would cost that friendship, too.  I’m unconventional, and this friend tends to play by the rules a lot more than I do.

“Trust me?”

I

I couldn’t respond.  I must’ve sat there for a several minutes while years of thoughts swirled through my head.  I wasn’t being told to trust but asked.  In a light-hearted but still meaningful context.

My trust has been broken many times over the past decade.  I’ve never wanted to become jaded.  I like that I’m a trusting person.  As Jewel said in her earliest hit, “I’m sensitive, and I’d like to stay that way.”  But I realized very suddenly that I haven’t allowed myself to trust anyone new–male or female–since last spring.  I’ve withheld part of myself, and for good reason.  The last person to demand my trust would have destroyed my life had the Gods not intervened.  I was hours away from allowing him to use my trust to break me, but I didn’t know it then and my Gods are very protective of me.

You rarely trust someone just so they can break you.  You trust someone because you’re willing to put some part of you in their hands and believe they won’t crush it.   Your heart.  Your reputation.  Your relationship.  Your future.

I’ve been asked by a female friend (now gone) to trust her, too, and was rather surprised by her sudden departure, but it didn’t have anything to do with me but rather her own heartbreak.   It still hurt that she left.

And I’ve had another man ask my trust and  before I could give it, allowed himself to be caught in a lie.   I haven’t thought much of trusting anyone in months.  And I didn’t even realize it.

“Trust me?

It took a few minutes and I was queasy in my stomach when I answered, “Yeah.  Yeah, I do.”  It was a surprise, but we have a long history where he’s acted with integrity again and again.  I don’t have any doubts.  I know there are other people out there whom I also trust because of long, positive associations, but none of them have asked.  Maybe this is the beginning of a new phase for me when I’m surrounded only by people who deserve my trust.