DailyBlog: Who do I trust and why?

** The first three books in my six-part dystopian series have officially made their way out into the world! Check them out!
For the sake of blogging, self-exploration, and contemplation, I’ve been slowly making my way through answering questions from this list

Today’s question: Who do you trust and why?

Trust is a highly precarious concept because we as human beings are not stagnant. We change and shift all the time, little by little every single day, bending with the wind, sometimes breaking, sometimes putting ourselves back together but never in the same way twice. This is one of the reasons that fiction fascinates me, I can feel my characters changing with every new situation they are presented with. Writing fiction really helps me to put real life into perspective.

I’ve learned through my past experiences that it’s okay to trust someone, but I trust someone today. I no longer assume that if I trust someone today, they’ll be the same trustworthy person they are tomorrow. Don’t get me wrong, once I find someone trustworthy I don’t look for reasons to suspect otherwise, but I no longer make excuses for suspicious behaviors, either. I don’t say to myself, “Oh they did that to someone over there, but they’d never do that to me.” We are never “special.” There is never a reason to believe that a person wouldn’t treat you the way they’ve treated someone else.

I feel lucky to have some people in my life whom I trust wholeheartedly, and those people are the group of my closest girlfriends. They are the people that I get together with on Fridays for dinner and drinks, and they are also the people that I call when I’m having a difficult day and I really need someone to talk to that won’t judge me no matter what I’m thinking, feeling, or saying, because they know me, they know the heart of the person underneath the struggles. Even recently when a childhood friend committed suicide, I had thoughts, feelings, and reactions that I feared would make me sound like a pretty awful person if I voiced them out loud, but I knew that my group of girlfriends were people I could talk to who would understand the process of working through something, people who wouldn’t judge even my weirdest thoughts and reactions. The gratitude I feel to have people like that in my life is limitless, because I haven’t always had that. I know what it’s like to feel betrayed, exposed, and extremely alone.

Yet, I can’t swear that I will be as equally close with these people a year from now, five years from now, ten years, etc. If we are lucky we grow alongside our closest friends, but that isn’t always the case and that’s nobody’s fault. There are others that I used to trust, but their circumstances changed, and they changed along with them. I’ve also changed, I’m definitely not the same person I was twenty years, ten, or even five years ago.

Trust the people that treat you no differently when you’re at your worst than when you’re at your best. Anyone else is just an acquaintance that should be kept at arm’s length.