Who do you trust?

I’m sure, if you’re like me, you could make a quick list of all the people you trust AND it wouldn’t be that long. As humans, it’s very difficult to find trustworthy people and even more difficult to build relationships with them. To have a trustworthy inner circle is a rare gift nowadays. Most people I know are too selfish or too flaky to be trustworthy. However, when it comes to our world today, I have found that there are many different ways people can be untrustworthy.

No one is perfect, and while I consider myself a trustworthy person, I know that even the most trusted people can have moments where they fail to live up to their trustworthiness. This is because we’re human. We have emotions that affect our ability deliver on a promise or we forget what we’re doing because our brains are focused on other things. Life circumstances come up all the time, and I am absolutely certain that we can’t be alive without having a life full of unknowns. 

This world is selfish

All of the humanity aside, someone’s aptitude for selfishness is one of the biggest obstacles I’ve seen to establishing trust. A selfish person will more often do what they think should be done or what they desire to do the most than remain trustworthy in a given scenario. Of course, in order to determine that they’re truly being selfish, we must examine how selfish the situation at hand is. Ethics are key.

Imagine you’re a teenager and your friend is notorious for shoplifting. You go to the store with her and she steals a shirt by stuffing it in her oversized purse. Security cameras pick up on this and suddenly you have a loss prevention security guard tapping your friend on the shoulder. He insists that she is stealing, but you don’t say a word. Your friend expects you to be trustworthy and NOT tell the truth. However, you know that the Bible demands that we are truthful. In this case, being untrustworthy is the unselfish thing to do. It’s unselfish because you obeyed God’s Word over helping your friend steal.

That brings me to my point about true selfishness and how it relates to untrustworthiness. If we expect people to be trustworthy in scenarios that aren’t sinful or morally wrong, then they will deliver based on how selfish they are. From my own experience, I lost my group of friends back in college. I thought I could trust them. Then, one day they all stopped talking to me. 

I didn’t understand what had happened. I trusted these people to be my friends and I was actively doing my best to be a good friend to them. Of course, no one is perfect, but I never expected them or myself to be perfect. I never expected my friends to fit in a “perfect” box. I thrive when people are authentically themselves around me because I am so very true to myself as well. When I confronted one of these friends about why they stopped talking to me, I was told I talk too much about social media, I don’t drink alcohol, and I couldn’t offer to be a listening ear to any one of them because I’d never understand what it was like to be them.

These friends wanted me to check the boxes on a thin list of friendship requirements that I couldn’t meet. First of all, I talked about social media a lot because I was just starting my content creation career. My friends didn’t like that. They couldn’t check off that requirement on the list. They also had to uncheck “likes drinking” and “doesn’t have emotional baggage that’s different from ours.” To be honest, I don’t even think some of them believed I had bipolar disorder. For most of my “friends,” I was either too sick to be their friend or too NOT sick to actually have bipolar disorder.

These friends broke my trust. Upon thinking about all of this a few hours ago, I realized that my ability to be an honest and open friend has been destroyed partially. Even though I make an effort to be authentic in all of my friendships, I don’t do so fearlessly. It’s like I’m constantly battling my trust issues. I’m afraid that if I share too much, I’ll lose my friends. I also wonder about losing friends to not sharing enough. If I don’t share about my struggles, people start to feel wary of my joy and kindness. They’ll label me as “fake” like they’ve done in the past. 

It is the selfishness of others that has left my ability to have a peaceful, stress-free friendship to suffer. To this day, I have a hard time reaching out to friends because of the belief that they’ll leave me once I “slip up” in their eyes. I’ve been made to feel like I need to fit a perfect mold for someone in order for them to want to be friends with me as well. Making someone check boxes and fit a mold is selfish.

How do I heal from these toxic friendships? Well, for starters, the Bible says “do not fear” 365 times. I can choose to communicate with others even though I’m afraid. I can also work on becoming more fearless through the help of the Holy Spirit. I will learn how to trust through God and I will become more trustworthy through Him as well. Trust is like faith, it starts out small. When it blossoms, it allows us to have peace in our relationships and the freedom to not worry or fear about losing them.