Trust

There are always people around us who anxiously fight for what is theirs. Before the time even comes, they are already there, afraid they'll be shortchanged, afraid that what ought to be theirs might slip away.

To be honest, I don't much enjoy being around people like this. Something in me feels uneasy. I dislike that feeling of being backed into a corner.

Because I've slowly come to see that a relationship able to last is always the kind where, when you are with the other person, you can simply, naturally, be yourself. Where everything is that natural, that at ease, that comfortable. No need to guard yourself, no need to grasp or fight.

And yet, just as I was thinking this, I suddenly remembered myself, many years ago.

Back then, I was just like this. There was once someone very important in my life. He had every intention of treating me well, and yet I could never quite be at ease. I was always the first to speak, the first to press for it, the first to nail everything down, wanting it all settled in advance.

I didn't understand it then. I thought I was protecting myself. I did not know that my rushing, time after time, my unease, time after time, was really telling him that I did not quite believe he would be good to me.

And slowly, we grew apart. By the time I wished to return to the deep trust we once had, it was already too hard. We had become, somehow, strangers.

It was only today, watching this anxious person beside me, that I truly understood him, all those years ago.

So this is what it feels like, to be rushed by someone. So it was I, back then, who cooled a trust that had been so good, little by little, with my own hands.

I no longer blame her. Now, I understand people like this.

She and the me of those years are the same. It is not greed. It is only that, like the me of that time, in that moment, that little bit was perhaps her everything. She could not afford to gamble, could not afford to lose. And so she is uneasy, afraid it will slip away, and reaches for some certain rule, some small certain promise. That is not greed. It is the most instinctive self-protection of a person who cannot afford to lose.

And I slowly came to understand something. True trust is a kind of ease. It is my believing that you will be good to me, so that I need not grasp, and fight, and nail everything down.

The more tightly a person grasps, the more anxiously they fight, the less they are able to keep. Because that unease of yours, the other can feel it. And little by little, it cools the very thing that was once so warm.

The more you try to hold on, the more it slips from your hands. And if you can loosen your grip, and trust first, and give first, those things will, of their own accord, stay.

As for that relationship, long grown distant now, I think, perhaps, it was simply a matter of fate.

Some people come into your life, teach you one thing, and then go far away. What he taught me was this lesson about trust. Though by the time I understood it, it was already late, and a small regret was left behind.

But I am grateful to him. And grateful to that younger self, who did not yet understand. It is they who allowed the me of today to finally learn how to loosen my grip, how to give first, and how to tenderly guard every trust that I now hold.

And at last, I truly understood a certain saying. To know yourself is to know others, and to know the world.

I cannot, from the outside, truly understand another person. I can only come to know the whole of the human heart, through knowing my own. Because the unease in another's heart, the fear, the longing to hold on and also to be trusted, all of it is in my heart too. And when I came to know these things in myself, I came to know everyone. It turns out that I, myself, am the mirror in which every person can be seen.

— Marie, Founder of Lyfairs