Trust

Trust, that's a tricky one isn't it. Babies are born with absolute trust that their needs will be met. So at what age do we learn not to trust? No doubt it varies depending on life experiences, but at some point along the way we all learn the hard lesson that trust can be misplaced.

People betray our trust in them, it's a simple fact of life that it will happen to us all at least once. Sometimes it's an extremely painful lesson, sometimes nothing more than injured pride. So what do we do - trust nobody so that we do not get hurt again? That's an option, it used to be my only option for many years. However I eventually learned that not trusting anybody means not letting anybody close to you - sure you don't get hurt but you also don't get to feel strong emotions and that means you miss out on joy.

So the choice is a life without pain, but also a kind of vanilla life in a world packed full of flavours. No pain, but no intensity of emotion, no close friendships, no rollercoaster ride that comes with letting people close to you. Of course some people prefer the more sedate ferris wheel to the roller coaster and that is perfectly fine. Everyone is different.

But for me, I found that letting people - some people, ok a very few people - close to me has enriched my life in ways I didn't expect. (I should clarify here that letting people close, to me at any rate, means trusting them.) Mainly because I had no experience in letting people close so had no way of knowing what to expect. Most of the time I feel like the world has become drenched with colours instead of being sepia toned. I like it, I feel alive and it's a good feeling.

Of course when I am in that hole that I still sometimes fall into, the colours are darker and more dangerous, but then when I get myself out, I am in the bright shining light and it's far more preferable to me than my previous life of merely existing and observing the rest of the world.

So have I found the people I have let close to me to be trustworthy, am I going to say to you all go on, trust in your instincts, it'll be great! Well no, this is life, not a sitcom. I have made a few mistakes, I have trusted people I should not have trusted. Most recently it was a woman I mistakenly believed was a friend. I found out that she was not, she was in fact simply using my friendship in a deceitful and underhand way. That burned, but it only burned my pride. I felt a bit silly afterwards, and angry for a while. But I had no real emotional connection so it was pretty easy to chalk it up to experience and walk away with a lesson learned.

For me, giving trust is difficult, I found that the lessons learned by trust betrayed are ones learned deeply. I spent  - as I said - most of my life keeping everyone in my life at arms length. When I finally learned to break down the wall I had built around myself, and let people in, it was really very scary. It still is, sometimes.

When I was a child my trust was betrayed in a very fundamental way, and that caused deep emotional scarring. Hence the massive wall I build around myself. Breaking down that wall was hard. It was like I had to break down myself, and then rebuild myself. And facing the world without my internal protection was very frightening. I didn't look any different, but I felt so exposed. It took a very long period of adjustment, but I think I am almost there.

Still, I backslide sometimes, I have kneejerk reactions, I fall into depressions and I over-react. I know I do, but knowing and stopping oneself is of course not the same thing. I try, I learn, I hope I am making progress. I am a little like a child I think sometimes. Because I didn't let anyone close, for most of my life I didn't have major emotional crisis', at least none that I really recognised. That is because not only did I not let other people close to me, I also didn't let myself close to me. I didn't know my own emotions because I pushed them away as soon as I felt them. But I found out the hard way that emotions are still there even if you don't recognise them, and eventually continual denial leads to a breakdown. So now, I have not only opened my emotions and my trust to other people, I have also come to recognise my own emotions.

So I've been on a pretty steep learning curve the past few years. I have become a person completely different to who I used to be. I am I think a better version of me than I was, and I will I am sure be better again in the future. I think part of the meaning of life is to strive each day to be a better version of you than you were yesterday. It's not always going to happen like that of course and when that happens, when you want to throw yourself on the ground and have a huge tantrum followed by a pity party, remember we are all human and be the first to forgive yourself :)

Meditation

So, you know I have bouts of insomnia. At one stage I was getting so little sleep that I was beginning to imagine myself as the bride of Insomnia - Queen Insomnia. My wedding dress was deep dark bloodshot red, with huge black flowers of the night on the skirt. I wore a black veil and had the most insanely gorgeous blood red stilettos. I was going to live with King Insomnia and assist in his job of poking people awake and keeping them awake, for which purpose I was given a sparkling deep red poker. I was seriously sleep deprived.

At that time I tried meditation to slow the frantic circling of words and thoughts that kept my mind active in the wee small hours of the night. Only I never thought to try it in the wee small hours of the night. I tried it when I went to bed so I could actually go to sleep (some nights I was still awake at 4am at which point it seemed a waste of time to even try to sleep). This worked - and I admit I was surprised - like a charm. I would go to bed, focus intently on my navel and start deep and rhythmic breathing (but not too deep so as not to hyperventilate - a most unpleasant feeling). This I found actually did calm me, and slowed the circling words, and loosened the tense muscles and even stopped the panic attacks which plagued me at that time also. And I was always asleep in less than five minutes. But I would usually wake at 3am and be unable to go back to sleep. And I never once thought to try the meditation at those times.

So the other night, when I realised that waking at 2.30am and not going back to sleep for the rest of the night was becoming a most unhappy pattern, I had a light bulb moment and decided to try meditation. What a trippy time I had then! When I wake at 2.30am I've had a few hours sleep so I'm not so exhausted. Meditation, I found, does not conclude with sleep in five minutes, I'm still awake. So what happened was rather different. I think that I have not exactly mastered this particular activity, or maybe it's an art.

I breathed out, slowly, focusing on my navel, and I felt my body start to relax. I breathed in, and my mind leapt into action, multiple thoughts fighting for dominance and my body tensed up again as I tried to push all the thoughts away. I breathed out, slowly, focusing again on my navel and my body started to relax. I breathed in and my mind again started spinning. I became a little frustrated - I know, only two breaths in and out, not enough time and all that but it was 2.35am and I really wanted to go back to sleep.

So I decided to try the classic Ommmmm sound but inside my head because out loud at 2.30am would have sounded really silly and pretty loud. So I did this on the out breath, but on the in breath my mind jumped into action again. So I tried the Ommmmm sound in my head again breathing in, but my mind insisted it should be Mmmmmmoo because I'm breathing in not out and it should be backwards. It made sense at the time and anyway I couldn't change how my mind insisted it should be.

So I was Ommmmmming out and Mmmmmooing in and it started to work. My body relaxed and I felt at peace. I even began to feel like I was at one with the universe and as soon as I thought that my brain started imagining me dissolving into particles and I jolted back into myself. And had to start again. And it started to work at which precise point my bladder reminded me it was definitely not at one with the universe. So a quick nocturnal journey and back to bed and back to the beginning. And it started to work, and I started to feel that dissolving sensation again and my mind presented me with a picture of a body shattering into a starburst and I was jolted awake and had to start again.

This time, just to mix things up a bit, at that point between breathing out and breathing in, my mind felt it was ok to frantically think of as many things as possible before it was silenced by the in breath. I found this very disturbing because it was like the words and thoughts in my head slowed their spinning and then sped up really really fast, and then slowed again. That was when I gave up. It was now 4am. I pulled a pillow over my head, rolled onto my side and decided I wasn't going to sleep so I may as well plan the current chapter in the book. I scared myself silly, because my heroine has her first encounter with the werewolf and I imagined the scene a little too well. I fell asleep with visions of yellow eyes in my head and that was my attempt at meditation. I woke feeling like I had been run over by a truck.

Tonight, I'm going to try something different, something I have done before but had forgotten about until now. When I was a child I also had periods of insomnia - actually I had many more sleepless nights than restful ones and that is why I always woke so slowly and so grumpily in the morning. Anyway, at some point I was told about/read about/came up with on my own/can't remember now an effective relaxation technique. It worked then so I'm sure it will work now.

It's kind of a style of meditation, in that the idea is to quiet the mind. But not by emptying the mind; by instead giving it something to focus on. So you start with your toes, and you relax them as much as you possibly can. You focus on your toes and you make sure each one is comfortable and relaxed. Then move onto the feet, ankles, calf muscles, knees - well you get the idea. If you lose focus you assume the entire body has tensed up again and you start from the toes once more. By the time you get to the neck the whole body feels like a dead weight and probably you won't get to the neck before you sleep.

If nothing else, it will slow the words and the thoughts, and give my overactive brain and imagination a rest. I am writing again, and that always help to centre me and it empties my mind of some of these words which is a relief. Not so much at 4am of course when I almost conjure the creature into existence, but still, it feels good to be writing again. When I write, I feel like I am doing what I was meant to do and there is nothing quite like that feeling.

So, to bed, perchance to sleep - with apologies to Shakespeare.