My life has been a series of trust falls into decisions that didn’t make sense to anyone else. 

LA was an accident. I ended up here after what felt like fleeing a situation that was supposed to be heaven but ended up being the first layer of hell. 

After that, there was a huge breach in what I thought was my infallible trust stream.

Trusting always came easy to me. Or so I thought. Until I came face to face with not having any at all.

What did I do? I moved to a new place where the circumstances made it harder to trust more than most other places. In hindsight, considering the environment I was leaving, I was walking even further into the lion’s den but I followed what was a very strong, unshakable feeling that I was meant to be here. In LA.


Maybe it was to get clear on one thing: I can trust myself to get out of anything. 

Although, trust can sometimes be a nebulous thing.

Last week I wrote about how trust is against all odds in LA.
Shortly after posting, I read something in the Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck by Mark Mason that really resonated:

“Russia had me reexamining the bullshitty, fake-nice communication that is so common in Anglo culture, and asking myself if this wasn’t somehow making us more insecure around each other and worse at intimacy. 
	I remember discussing this dynamic with my Russian teacher one day, and he had an interesting theory. Having lived under communism for so many generations, with little to no economic opportunity and caged by a culture of fear, Russian society found the most valuable currency to be trust. And to build trust you have to be honest. That means when things suck, you say so openly and without apology. People’s displays of unpleasant honesty were rewarded for the simple fact that they were necessary for survival - you had to know whom you could rely on and whom you couldn’t, and you needed to know quickly.
	But, in the “free” West, my Russian teacher continued, there existed an abundance of economic opportunity – so much economic opportunity that it became far more valuable to present yourself in a certain way, even if it was false, than to actually be that way. Trust lost its value. Appearance and salesmanship became more advantageous forms of expression. Knowing a lot of people superficially was more beneficial than knowing a few people closely.”


And there you have it folks, the reason for our mass epidemic of loneliness. It’s more beneficial - especially in LA - to know a lot of people fake-ly than to know a few people for real. 

How else could you sell your course? Or get attendance to your album release party? Or gather payment for your hidden sauna in the woods?

Trust is less than opportunity.
And sure, maybe that helps us live really comfortable lives but we sure do feel hella lonely in our nice cars with AC.

I’ve been slapped on the hand more times than I can count for being honest. And I will go to the grave believing that there is no good way to tell someone a truth about themselves that they don’t want to hear, but no matter what, I have always wanted honesty over someone telling me what I want to hear.

When I started asking people if they were lonely, most people didn’t know how to answer the question. And a bunch of people didn’t give it enough thought before answering with a “Pffft, no.” As any good scientist knows, if you aren’t getting good answers, you need to ask better questions, so instead - I changed my barometer for loneliness to asking people if they feel that they have “real, true friendships”. This one started getting people thinking. Next they almost always asked, “Well, what does ‘real friendships’ mean?” And I would say, “friends that you can depend on no matter what, to be there for you, in the middle of the night will get in their car and come pick you up friends.” 

Jackpot.


That got people thinking long and hard. Some people came back with definitive answers. Some people just kept thinking. Some people wanted to avoid it all together.

I pose the question to you; Do you have real, true friendships in your life?

To cultivate that kind of trust, the kind that shows up at your doorstep with ice cream and weighted blankets at 2am, you need a few things:

You need honesty.
You must be honest and truthful, even if it’s painful, at all times in your relationships and with the people around you. Most of all, with yourself.

And you need confidence.
You need to believe you can rely on the people around you and yourself, no matter what.
Confidence dawned on me as a synonym to trust. It feels a lot more concrete, a lot more sure of a way to answer than whether I trust someone.

Confidence, like trust, can only be built over time. You must go through enough scenarios together to be confident in someone else’s ability - mostly to receive and reply in honesty. 

Confidence, like trust, in yourself must be built over time. You must go through enough scenarios to be able to rely on yourself no matter what.


There’s a confidence to letting someone see you in the most intimate moments, sex is one of them. The snotty nose, admitting of a deep innate quality that feels like a flaw is another.

Letting someone hold you in hurt, at the pit of your lowest pit, that’s trust.

There’s a confidence to let people see you in such emotional rawness that it takes everything to be there and let it be seen.

Initially it starts with confidence in yourself to pick the people you have around you. 

If our bar for intimacy is that we are able to have complete fucking breakdowns around people - who do you keep in your life?

What's a true and real friend in that capacity?

The truth about trust is that it’s hard. It’s hard to let people see you these ways. It’s hard to see yourself in these moments. It’s hard to trust yourself after you’ve chosen something that ended up being bad for you. And it’s hard to trust people again after they’ve hurt you.

It takes an incredible amount of courage and some would say idiocy to trust after bad things have happened to you. No one would blame you if you didn’t. 

Ultimately, staying in that place is unfulfilling. And terribly, terribly lonely.

There’s a lot of things in this city that make it hard to trust, to be open, and maybe that’s the kind of thing that makes us discern about whom we trust and whom we confide in. Because maybe, just maybe, it’s possible that before we were putting our trust in the wrong people. 

And now, after the many times we’ve failed, we can have confidence in choosing the right ones.
As long as there’s complete honesty. There can be trust.

Then the whole thing wraps back around on itself to be a reminder to have confidence in yourself. Because if you’ve gotten yourself through, out of and into new things before, you can do it again. 

Life is just a series of trust falls into better and better decisions for yourself until you end up with the people you can celebrate around just as much as you can snot cry with, confidence in yourself and in them unwavering.

xx
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