Bustin' some Trustin'

I find myself tete-a-tete with a moral quandry that I am not at liberty to divulge. A classic struggle of intellectual rationality versus emotional irrationality. The answer seems simple when presenting it in its purest simple form, but my heart still challenges me. The consequences of making the right decision would be minimal. The wrong choice would lead to a path of inevitable deceit. I don't like secrets yet I always feel like I am buried in them. My family has a lot of skeletons, some dead, others ongoing. It's not healthy to grow up in a house of secrets. The ability to trust someone who hides secrets is a difficult task. I don't want to be someone who people cannot trust. To be able to trust somebody is perhaps the deepest form of communication. Trust cannot be handed over with kind words. Trust needs to be earned over a great deal of time. Through ours' and others' actions we gain or lose that trust. I hate those things that are so valuable to us yet so fleeting. We can spend a lifetime building and maintaining our trust in other people, but with one faulty step the ground, one mindless action the ground can fall from beneath our feet like an Indiana Jones movie. I think that is so scary. The ease from which we can betray another's trust. I believe most everyone has had such an experience. Where, at the right time at the right place, have said that most singularly wrong remark and lost a deeply personal, well esblished connection with another person. That one action or comment that changes everything. When there's no going back to "how it used to be." I'm rummaging through my brain for the last such episode I have endured. I lost a minor friend before Hurrican Ivan. We had been hanging out a whole lot when I slipped the old "I am attracted to you" into conversation. She stopped speaking to me for a while and even though we have cordial conversation on occasion, it's never been the same. I wasn't too messed up about it, because we hadn't gotten incredibly close, but all it took were those famous words. That situation seems pretty common, where one individual admits attraction or feeling to the other and when it is not requited the relationship walks the plank. The last time I lost the trust of someone I loved was back in college. No regrets though. That one wasn't meant to be. Still slightly painful though. Is that pathetic or what?

I spent a good two hours today playing a b-ball and baseball with my landlord and two kids from the neighborhood. I've never been a superstar at sports, but I've always been able to exceed folks' expectations of my capabilities. We tied Jack up to a tree and just let loose. It was a beautiful day out, surprisingly warm.

A fireworks tent popped up right by my house last week. I'm feeling the id in me commanding me to go buy a whole slew of them and have some good old boyhood fun. I remember some crazy friends of mine who would shoot roman candles at each other for fun senior of college. They'd play tag with the fireworks. It was an accident ready to happen, but they provided hours of entertainment. Let's just say my roommate who was studying for his LSATs didn't quite appreciate it. Tomorrow night, I will go down to the levee to see the mile long line of bonfires that they set up every year. Should be a spectacle. That's it for now.

Comments

[Anne]

This was a really thought-provoking post.

A few thoughts:

- Presenting your quandary as 'intellectual rationality vs emotional irrationality' judges emotions on the terms of the intellect, but not vice-versa. It's biased in terms of the intellect, because rationality and irrationality are the children of the intellect. A parallel error would be to say, 'a classic case of intellectual coldness vs emotional warmth.' No wonder your 'heart still challenges' you! It may feel unfairly judged.

- Someone maybe 10 years ago talked to me about transparency. It's not about telling everything, she said, it's about being willing to tell anything, if the context were appropriate and it was needed. Then, the things you have are not 'secrets,' but they may be things that are not right to say. I think you can still be trusted as such a person -- and can be even more trusted, because you are considering the people around you in the decisions you make.

- I can really relate to losing trust through just a single sentence. The first time that happened to me, it totally rocked my world. It was similar (though much less horrible) to someone dying in a car accident through one faulty move.

- However, as I was reading this, I was surprised by your taking the example in the direction of a love/interest disclosure. How can telling someone you like them break their trust? I mean, unless you're related to them or something? But even then, the same principle applies -- you're talking about what's inside you. To break someone's trust, you have to mishandle something of theirs. Even if someone might feel like they had been mis-interpreted somehow, I don't think that would be a matter of lost trust.

- That's not to say that you can't damage relationships by talking about what's in your heart. Now *that* is the part that keeps me up at night. Ugh. I think this broader point is the crazy one -- if what is in you doesn't match what is in someone else, the disjuncture can rip your common world in two, rough it up so much that it just doesn't come back together again. I've definitely lost friendships by disclosing interest. And then it's like, who's angrier? Me, that I said it when I didn't care all that much, or the other person, who now thinks that all this time, I didn't really appreciate them as a *person*, I just had a *thing* for them? I don't understand why it is that having higher/deeper/stronger feelings for someone somehow undermines the genuineness of more fraternal/gentle/general/social feelings. As if people then feel used or something. Bah humbug. Sorry, I'm thinking about something in 2002 that I'm still annoyed about.

In general, these are some really good words about trust. It's a favorite topic for me. I went to talk on it last March and am still thinking about it.

As they apply to relationships and strong emotions, all I can say is, oof. It's hard. I read your post before bed last night and it affected my dreams. I was thinking about trust all night long.

I guess my salient point is, don't feel that what is within you is primarily a betrayal of someone else, or even primarily a commentary on someone else. It's primarily an expression of your soul.

Oh, I had one thought about unrequited love/crushes. I have had a lot of these. I no longer think it's pathetic. I now think it's something sacred -- something powerful, rare, and beautiful. There's this saying I read once, "To fall in love is to see a miracle invisible to the rest of the world." Who doesn't want those miracles? For some of us, that's where our inspiration and growth comes from. Seeing loveliness in other people is a way of growing, and even if the shoot comes out of the ground sideways, the sun and rain, in time, correct it.

Okay, all for now. Happy bonfire day!

[Garrett]

Anne,
I am going to begin responding to your comments more fervently. Most days I write what pops into my mind and you come back with some incredibly insightful comments. I deeply appreciate them. I cannot hesitate any longer at your provocations. A dialogue/discussion with you is incredibly enticing. Thus...

I agree with your assertion that I was not in fact being fair to the emotional side of my dilemma. By using rationality/irrationality as opposite poles then tethering on intellect/emotion immediately contradicts the stakes of the conundrum. I guess I was trying to establish that intellect stems from rationality and emotion from irrationality. I guess rationality does not necessarily need to exclude emotion. At time they can work together. Perhaps I was resting on the cliche that emotion and irrationality are linked, omitting the underlying premise that irrationality is an intellectual conception.

I like your reference to transparency. If nothing necessitates divulgence, than no deceit can be placed. Yet those things that remain transparent still feel like secrets, whether or not I choose to reveal them. My dicsussion of secrets revolve around two big ones in my personal closet. One involving my family that becomes less secretive and more common knowledge over the year; the other being my personal secret that I've attempted to disguise in scattered utterances across many seasons. I would never let my personal secret go completely unguarded. Even though the consequences qould not be permanent, my embarassment might be. On the other had, the family secret involving bulemia is actually quite fascinating. A close family member suffers from the disease, yet all of us suffer from emotional bulemia. Seeking attention, especially me, my sister, and my father, we purge our secrets even when a strong sense of trust has not been established.

You were surprised as I turned toward the path of love/interest disclosure. This comes from personal experience and I believe it is guided by an unspoken bond. Through the slightest of physical and verbal inuendos, we insinuate our feelings for one another, whether it be positive or negative. Some people have an incredible ability for reading others' intentions. I did not clarify, but I think I was referring to this unvocalized trust that the uprising of feelings goes unmentioned. I've had that bond before with women where I acknowledge to myself that I know they do not feel the same way and thus I will never bring it up. Sometimes, curiosity and the "what if they do have feelings" factor comes up and I break that bond of trust. That is when the relationship changes due to a "lack of trust."

As for losing someone due to your disclosure. Some people can handle it better than others. Some people have lived through the pain of losing a friend and immediately replay the entire experience in their minds the moment it happens. Some people blame themselves for not withdrawing or limiting their flirtations, others blame the initiator for weighing a potential romance over a friendship. The better we know our crush/love/soulmate, the better we can predict their reaction. But nothing is ever certain in that realm and it all requires the risk of such a disjuncture as you mentioned.

I'd love to hear more about your talk that you had in March. What was it pertaining to? Who participated? What were the conclusions or further questions that were raised?

Finally, I wish to say that admire your adoration for unrequited love. It is poetic and painful. I'll aspire to conceiving the pain and beauty as sacred.

Anne, Thank you for your continued support.

Love,
Garrett