IHere we go with this subject again.

An enemy I am fighting in the video game I am playing keeps telling me I am a fool to trust this other character and that got me thinking about my relationship with trust.

Because on one angle, I don’t trust anyone at all ever. But only if you define trust as a kind of faith – as a belief in things not in evidence.

I am not capable of faith, as far as I can tell. My life has contained too much harshness and abandonment for that. The people in my life failed me constantly and I never had religion so I could not replace them with Allah or Jesus or anyone else for that matter.

I think in order to have faith, on some level you have to think that the world is basically on your side, or at the very least not actively hostile toward you, and my life, especially my childhood, has not encouraged that belief.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

So if I do not have faith  in people or the universe or anything, what do I have?

Knowledge and understanding. I have faith in the products of my own mind. I trust my knowledge and understanding of the world because I can examine it and verify it and even modify it if I find it to be faulty.

This renders faith unnecessary. But not useless, evil, or undesirable.

Sure, I don’t need faith to support my cosmology, my morality, or my insights, but those are only the cold-circuit aspects of faith.

But faith, whether it’s in a deity or just the world in general, does so much more than that for people. It provides comfort, warmth, strength, vitality. and hope. All hot-circuit things. Faith covers so many basic emotional needs that I see it as being like an emotional insurance policy that guarantees your emotional needs will be met at a minimal level no matter what.

Compare that to the faithless like myself and the contrast is startling. If my life fails to meet my basic emotional needs for things like love and comfort and community and so on, all I can do is suffer. I have no buffer against the harshness of the world.

It is like emotionally healthy people who have some degree of faith are fully clothed and standing in the sunlight, and I am naked in the cold and the dark and fiercely clutching the knowledge that sure, I am freezing to death, but at least I am more “right” than they are. My internal model of the universe corresponds to the real world more than theirs because mine contains a lot less “bullshit”.

Big. Fucking. Deal.

They’re the happy ones. The people who can live, love, cope, celebrate, and do all the other things that my cold and barren soul can only watch with drooling envy, knowing that the bright and shining world has no place for me.

It’s like I am the Grinch, high up on my mountain, watching the residents of Whoville through my telescope, and telling myself how much better than them I am.

Well, they’re happy, and you’re freezing, so…

Back to whether I trust people.  The answer is still no, I am afraid. I only trust what I know about people. Now thanks to my powers of empathy, insight,  and analysis, I know a lot about people in general and the people I know in particular.

In fact, I often know more about them than they know themselves.

Took me a while to learn to keep THAT to myself.

So because I have this ability to understand what makes people tick (hint : watches), it is easy to fool myself into thinking I really do trust people. I can certainly act exactly as if I do. And in a sense, I really do.

But in another sense, what I really trust is my own knowledge and understanding of people. Faith, like I said before, is absent.

And while that system works more often than not, it does mean I am a fundamentally suspicious and mistrustful person.

I would rather not be. It’s not the sort of person I like to think of myself as, that’s for sure. I would rather be like Fruvous, overflowing with life and laughter and love, and able to joyfully embrace life and maybe nibble on its ear a little.

But there is who we want to be, and who we end up being. If I could, I would scout all the bitterness, mistrust. hostility, bad wiring, and unhealthy memories from my mind and start over from a happier and more open-minded position.

That would certainly be a much healthier version of me. It might even be the version of me that I would have been had I never been raped as a child.

But I was. And that led to a lot more harshness and unpleasantness that also left huge scars on my psyche and left me emotionally isolated within my hard chilled little world of intellectual pleasures. I spent many formative years living in a world of my own where I went to school alone, was alone at school, walked home alone, then went to my room alone, and read alone, or played video games alone, or watched TV alone.

That’s no way to live, let alone grow up. And there but for my group of friends go I right till this day. If not for Joe, Julian, and Felicity, I would be still be alone in the dark.

There are no words, even for me, to describe how grateful I am for that.

And yet I know even they don’t truly have access to my inner self. I am still all alone in here, and I guess I always will be.

They are closer to me than anyone else in the world, and yet I know that they are not that close to me. Not really.

I am still naked and cold in the darkness of my soul.

But it’s nice to be able to get close enough to feel the warmth of the living from time to time, and pretend I am alive.

It’s not much but it is the best I can do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.