146. trust

giving and receiving like a random wall splatter

When someone mentions they are a parent I scramble like a hungry dog towards them with questions. I feel my begging desire for quick-fix magic words, another perspective, or an anecdote to add to my ballooning collection. What’s it like to have an only child? How do you navigate phones with your teenagers? Would you, hypothetically, have kids in the next five years? I gather answers with fervor, trying to address my inner wondering with pieces of other people’s inner worlds.

I tied the trace figure eight knot and turned it over and over in my hands, counting the intertwined paired up ropes. ‘Is this right?’ My partner glanced at it, ‘looks good’. I wanted them to climb inside it, to find any crack or mistake or reason it wouldn’t hold. I moved up the wall, remembering high feet and straight arms. Two hands on the final hold, I looked at the dusty bolts holding the anchor and the thin rope flopped over it. ‘Take!’ I said, my voice getting ahead of myself. ‘Gotcha, lowering’ I heard from below as my hypothetical and emotional body dropped away from my mind, terrified and certain that some part of this system would fail and my physical body would follow my hypothetical one. I feel this disconnect on every first climb, my trust in the systems growing slowly like a saguaro, taking years to even emerge from the sand.

My phone was stolen while I was studying abroad and I returned home with scraps in my bank account alongside a frantic need to replace it. The man on facebook marketplace was kind, and old, and spoke with a frailty and innocence. I bought him a chocolate bar as a thank you for selling his phone so cheaply, taking pity on me. It was too good to be true and now I know that’s simply too good to be true. His voice hid a scheme and a deprivation and it pulled in my 22 year old heart along with a few hundred dollars I really didn’t have to throw away. I was wrapped around his finger willingly, fooled and filled with shame that lingers even seven years later. Last week someone mentioned that their grandma was scammed and I felt my voice disappear, sucked into that old facebook marketplace chat where I’d thrown trust at the wall without a pause. Me and the elders, fooled, and still shaking the feeling of such insidious juicy deceit.

When I talk about why I moved to Portland, I often say, ‘Well, lots of things fell apart in Reno and lots of things fell into place in Portland.’ That summer, I’d been through the end of my housing, the dissolving of my best friendship, the end of my dog’s life, the end of my romantic relationship, and my parent’s divorce. At the peak moment of devolvement, I felt an arrow like a compass in my body, ‘follow ease to Portland’. Thirty days later I drove into this little city, too frozen and stunned and devastated and relieved to cry or reckon with the fact that Google maps was taking me through tiny downtown streets to avoid the traffic on the freeway. I just stop and go’d my way, eyes wide, calling my now partner to say ‘hi, I’m here, I made it.’ and they responded, looking at my location, ‘You’re here sweetie, but why are you weaving through downtown?’ I felt the compass in my body, it’s not what you expected, hun, but you’re still moving in the right direction, trust that.

I heard that forgiving someone is actually for us, not for the person we are forgiving. It is something we give ourselves, it gives us space and peace, and hoarding away forgiveness means we are holding onto our own pain, our own suffering and anger. I don’t like this. I want forgiveness to be GIVEN when it’s deserved. I want trust to be the same, I want to give trust - in my inner knowing, in anchors, in internet strangers - when someone or something earns it. This week, my bones keep whispering that forgiveness is for me, and at least part of trust is for me, too. I know trust needs to bounce back and forth between two solid bounds, like the old Bounce Ball game where you move the platform to keep the ball up in the air. It takes two, and it takes movement and adapting, but this week I keep repeating, I’m trusting you so I can feel secure. I choose to trust so I do not sit in fear. What is my role here? To be both trusting and trusted, to know that in relationship we have to be on both sides to keep momentum.

I gather stories about children and parenting like they are answers to my questions. I doubt the anchors every day when no one else in the gym seems to bat an eye. I trust strangers who wiggle in with what feels like kindness. I trust my little compass and end up places that overfill me with gratitude. My trust feels like it’s squeezed through a filter that spits out jumbled splatters of answers, not always clear to me why some come through and others do not.

My chest feels sucked into the half-read Pema Chodron book When Things Fall Apart on the table next to me. I imagine Pema would land somewhere in the middle, as she does. Somewhere where the uncertainty is actually freedom, where we can find calm in not knowing what will happen around us, not knowing exactly who is kind and who is a desperate scammer, in not knowing with certainty that that anchor will hold us, that the car will stop behind us too, that the garage is indeed closed and secured. We can’t know that the people in our lives will choose to be here tomorrow, that they will even have the ability to make that choice. I imagine Pema would say that is precisely why each moment is precious.

little body, what’s next?