I’ve come to realize today that I start every relationship with distrust. Be it friends, family, love, my music, my TV, essentially anyone or anything. It doesn’t matter who or what it is, not trusting has become my primal instinct. Does anyone else feel the same? C’mon, be honest.

Deeeeeep into unfathomable depths of the abyss of our feelings and heart is a wall/layer/cover that protects our core essence. This wall saves us from all further hurt, from all incoming dangers. Some even go on to call it survival instinct. I NOW beg to differ. Unless worked upon, the core essence isn’t what defines every atom our personality, our social cover, our mask. No it is not easy to find either. And it is made harder to find by this thick handcrafted layer. It requires a lot of work from our part. We chisel it, carve it, pain-t it, decorate it and this wall becomes our most trusted ally, friend, partner in crime. I realized while talking to a dear friend today that I hadn’t been coming to her from a space of pure blind trust even though I may have repeatedly told her so. A layer of defense was always up. This layer that I was downright frightened to touch. I hadn’t been honest. I didn’t even know I wasn’t being honest. I can mount a barrage of evidence to convince myself that I can be forgiven but really, isn’t that treatment superficial? Isn’t my honesty my commitment?

Not knowing and doing something that we actually hate doing, sounds weird or complex? Feels 2 faced? I hate being dishonest because I know what being dishonest to myself feels like. It is the betrayal of the highest form. When we can’t honor a simple commitment to ourselves, we reject our BE-ing. Just think, how someone else would feel if we dishonored their BE-ing by not honoring a commitment to them. We lose trust in ourselves. We create a boundary by consoling ourselves. We pacify ourselves, that just this one time will be OK. We can rectify it later. Totally fine, if we honored our commitment to rectify ourselves but what if we didn’t and forget it? The “Later” never arrives. One upon the other, the betrayals start to pile up, our consolations only acting as sugary gum that attracts more and more dirt and ants and flies and the simple boundary then turns into a heap of lies and filth. This heap now prevents anything or anyone from trying to reach our core essence of honesty and trust, not even ourselves.

The next worst betrayal is from our loved ones – parents, spouse, children. When we know that they are being dishonest with us, we start to maintain a distance from them. They can’t be trusted any more. We soon realize that if they are being dishonest to others, there will come a day when they will be dishonest to us too, maybe they already are. Their relationship to us won’t matter in such cases – just blind pull towards a desire. Then we recognize that desire, what gets them off the beaten path and we recognize the oncoming betrayal. Our guard goes up. We setup a boundary because we still love them. One upon the other, these situations keep stacking up and so does our distrust in them. Now think about a child, a 6 year old, who just saw his mother fuck someone other than his father, a father who was just never there. How would the child have processed it? The pain and the betrayal he may have felt. He had no boundaries. He didn’t know what to avoid. He didn’t know whom to confront. He was clueless and so he, slept.

After several such incidents, the now grown up boy has learnt to steal, fake his father’s signatures and doesn’t fear being beaten up any more, in fact, in some dark and weird space, he looks forward to them. He has stopped crying. He secretly and rather guiltily enjoys it. The twisted psyche of this grown up boy goes to an extent in which he sees his mother naked in his dream. He chews on and on, stuff that has started making him sick. He never opens up. He now holds immense resentment and anger. But can’t talk. So he chews more. From some point in that time, he starts associating food with emotions. He starts associating music with solitude. He never talks. He never asks. He just watches the patterns repeating in his house and around him, his anger and resentment growing all the time. He is still peeing in his sleep on his bed. He has no confidence. Everyone is better than him. And if all that wasn’t enough, one night in a surge of his ever budding hormones amidst this turmoil, lying alone in his bed, he learns to masturbate thru pain, and it instantly makes him feel alive. And just like love at first sight, he is instantly hooked to the feeling. The only physical pain he had known thus far were from the beatings from his mother. The fear of humiliation and shame keeps him on his toes, he starts feeling alive on his own. He is starting to associate the pain from his trust issues with physical pain. The physical pain gains extra traction because he starts forgetting his anger. He starts getting more comfortable with himself. He feels more intimate with himself. The only intimacy he has ever known. He knows he needs to preserve this space for it is his to safeguard. Now he starts seeing the world from a safe point in his heart where he can jump in whenever he wants to. He simply has to hurt himself to feel safe and close to himself. He knows his place in this world and it’s where he feels real and alive.

He grows up and discovers a whole different world in which his kind of pain is valid. He finds that he isn’t the only one and gets more confident about himself. He feels he now belongs even though secretly and silently, he wishes his pain and feelings are validated by people who love him and whom he loves. This never happens. While at one hand he starts experimenting with pain, hurting himself more and more, on the other, he yearns for companion who understands him. He never found a listener in his parents and has already given up on them ever listening to him. He is suffering from this intense dichotomy. The dichotomy pushes him even further into self-sabotage. He grabs on to alcohol, chewables, smokables and what not. In that though, he finds company that is available to hear him, not listen to him but at least hear him and acknowledge him. They can’t feel him but he now sees hope. “There have got to be people who relate to me deeper than that”. He searches the internet, dating sites, matrimony sites but to no avail. His partner can only help so much. His search for answers lands him into spirituality, traces of which he had often found in himself years ago, but which got lost in the turmoil of a broken marriage and issues so emotional, he had no way to feel himself while still feeling the betrayal and hurt.

But in some mysterious universal ways, he was getting himself back, gradually and in increments, a step at a time, getting help from people and resources he had never expected from, all the while learning lessons of receiving and unconditional acceptance. He deserved it, but he had never learnt it. He never gave himself enough credit. He was tough, but fragile. He was fast, but slow. He was high, but low. He was talking, yet silent. He was near, but distant. He was calm, yet angry. He was gifted, but rejected. He was true, but falsified. He was giving unconditionally, but was being received conditionally. He was laughing, but crying. He wanted an ear, but found no voice. He saw, but found everything invalidated inside his head. He was the epitome of living breathing dichotomy. Why?

Remember all that anger he forgot while learning to feel alive thru pain? He had stopped feeling that anger and had started portraying his empathy and sympathy towards people whom he cared a hoot about. He was lying. He was cheating himself. He lost the feel of the feeling itself unless it was with himself thru pain. Pain was his pleasure, and often the only source of his pleasure.

One day he recognized the dysfunction. He observed closely and found that his patterns were repetitive. He was running to his dysfunctional center way too many times and it had started to impact him in deep ways. He was isolating himself even further, and with no friends, he knew he needed help. He sought medical help which left him with a label, that he found easy to cower under. That label would become his defense for next 2 years, till he would finally realize his weaknesses, laid out embarrassingly in front of him, displayed naked, leaving him with no place to hide. But this time, he stayed. He didn’t run away. He needed to trust where he was. He couldn’t run towards the dysfunction that his insides had become. He had no place to run to. He was left bare and vulnerable. He was now VULNERABLE. Yet he felt strangely empowered, full of virility. His energy may have found a direction. He saw a way out. He knew he was yet to feel a lot but couldn’t. He had refused to do so for so many years that it was now a nature for him. He couldn’t right then.

And so he started a journey to self-discovery. He started trusting his dreams. He started trusting his experiences. He started trusting his intuition. He started TRUSTING. In doing so, and while working with so many other smaller walls, he came upon this big wall (remember the heap he had created earlier), he had built for himself. While he was trusting everything else, he was still not being honest to himself. And in doing so, was unconsciously pushing people away. He realized, he had, by not trusting himself, pain-ted the wall, one fuck at a time – from his parents, siblings, friends, colleagues, teachers.

He has to act with himself, for himself, by himself. If he can’t trust himself, he’ll never be able to trust anyone else in this lifetime. The wall will persist. He has to put actions to his words. Be true to himself. He knows too much. He feels too much. He is too sensitive. He has to build a world for himself where there is no place for dishonesty and lies. He has to love himself. He has to be his own priority. He has age by his side. He has his gifts by his side and a universe that is always providing. He will go out and express himself. He knows his purpose. He will create goals that are achievable. He will feel safe.

He is acting for himself, with himself, by himself. He is trusting everyone. He is trusting the universe. He is creating a world for himself where only honesty and love are respected and accepted. He is his priority. He is young. He is healthy. He is loving himself. He knows his gifts and is accessing them frequently. He is true to his purpose. He is himself personified. He is safe. He is.

I Am.