I think when you ask a drunk person if they are drunk, they say no because they are afraid that if they say yes, they won’t be allowed to keep drinking.
“Oh, you’re already drunk? Then no more for you!”
“Nuuuuuuu! Why didn’t I liiiiiie?”
Plus, drunk = vulnerable and people don’t like admitting vulnerability.
But mostly it’s the first thing. .
Life without trust
Time to take another crack at this tough nugget.
People crack nuggets, don’t they?
Anyhow, the thing is, I don’t trust anybody. But it’s not as bad as that sounds.
See, I have this way of reading people very deeply. I have x-ray vision on the emotional level and I really “get” people. I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember and it’s an ability I intimately rely upon.
So one might say I don’t trust people because I don’t have to trust them. Trust is like faith[1], it covers things unknown. I know people. So who needs trust?
Everyone, as it turns out. Because even a powerful scanning empath like me can “know” people they, well, know. People with whom they are familiar enough to feel like they understand them.
And that’s not most people.
Somehow, I have to deal with the other seven billion jumped up monkeys on this planet. That means learning not to fear them by default and that means going beyond what I know about them and that means trust.
Or faith. Whatever.
And that’s a tall order for someone with the early childhood traumas I had. I’m the poor little monkey raised in isolation then introduced to other monkeys. Instead of connecting with them and socializing, I freak out and see them as a threat and get as far away from them as I can.
Plus, ya know. I was raped as a preschooler. Doesn’t exactly foster a trusting attitude.
But how does one learn trust? By trusting, I suppose, which has a Catch-22 ring to it.
And still leaves me in the twisted forest of my own distorted interpretations of events. I might well trust the objectively right person or thing and still see betrayal and abandonment where there is none.
Without trust, life is very cold and calculating, at least in part. Part of me is always the chess player, plotting my moves out, seeking the advancement of my position.
But what choice do I have? It’s all I know how to do.
Luckily that’s not all of me. I’m also the warm and funny and sensitive person that people know and love.
And a lot of other people too. Sigh.
If I could learn to trust, I could finally relax and be a natural, laid back, comfortable in his own skin kind of guy.
Instead, I am paranoid, reclusive, and desperately lonely. My mind is open but my heart is closed and nobody can get very close to me at all.
But I hide it so well!
More after the break.
Do Jewish women call shopping “wholesale therapy”?
Now how about faith
Don’t get me started on faith.
Oh wait,,, you didn’t.
Let’s start from the foremost and most obvious angle : I was raised without faith.
Religious or otherwise. Neither of my parents were interested in religion. My mother had experienced brutal treatment by Catholic nuns as a child, and my father’s father would have burst into flames if he ever entered a church, so neither of them were into it.
But what I don’t think many ex-religious parents understand is that their atheism will be radically different than their children’s because abandoning church dogma still leaves behind the structures and habits of belief religion gave them.
They can abandon what they have been taught of God and they can reject the existence of God as the frankly absurd lie that it is, but they cannot get rid of the God inside them that exists far below the conscious level and which therefore can support their mood without justification.
Their children won’t have that. I don’t have that. All I have is reality as revealed unto me by my amazing powers of reason and analysis, and the amount those show me is staggering but it is nowhere near enough and never will be.
Because it’s all merely information. It does nothing to support my mood. And unsupported things fall, as does my mood.
I could be fully omniscient and it would not help. I could pierce the veil of existence and see the truth beyond and behind all other truths so that all that is true is revealed, and it still wouldn’t make me feel better for long.
Because truth, revelation, enlightenment, and discovery are all fantastic but in the end they are just another drug. Yet another thing to be pursued because it makes you feel better for a little while but then the high fades and the search resumes.
Maybe that’s what keeps us truthseekers going. I don’t know.
Faith goes beyond religion though. There is what I can faith (or trust) in the universe and it is intimately entwined with one’s sense of safety.
My early childhood rape and subsequent bullying left me with a constant feeling of danger from a cold and hostile world that is actively trying to destroy me.
Obviously I don’t believe that consciously or rationally. I consider it to be hubris to the point of solipsism to think the world considers you worth fucking over, or even noticing.
But deep down it’s different. On the prerational level, I am terrified of everything and paranoid as fuck and in such a state of permanent full on panic that I can never truly rest, relax, or take down my guard.
Because that’s when they will GET me.
That’s what a total lack of faith does to a person. There has never been any person or force to protect me from any of the darkness and danger of the world.
And some people would be turned into a ferocious and furious warrior by this.
But me, I just gave up.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.