Tag: trust

The Struggle

There’s a purity in selfishness.

An enticing simplicity.

A seductive ease.

I know my own desires, my own needs fully, but I’m just guessing at yours. And who knows what the guy down the street thinks. No, I know what I need, what I want, what I deserve, and that robust and certain knowing contrasted with my supposition of your thoughts – even if it’s well-intentioned – gives exaggerated weight to my side of the scale.

Plus I don’t get a direct return from investing in your satisfaction.

So I have a thorough understanding of the geography of my desires and I reap the entire benefits of what I do for myself. No wonder it’s so tempting to ignore you.

And yet.

We live communally.

I need you and the rest of our neighbors to do things for me, like build roads and schools and hospitals and parks and recreation courts and fields. I need you all to help provide police and fire protection and maintenance for those roads and schools and hospitals we built. I also want you to keep an eye on my house when I’m on vacation, and I need to have some social interactions with you to feed my real need for human connection. Plus I actually like hanging out with you. We play well off each other, you make me laugh, and we both like beer and the Bears.

So for a plethora of reasons, I interact with you, and you need a reason to interact with me. But this is where it gets complicated, I suppose. Some of my interactions are motivated by necessity – I need to be nice to you so that you will do what I want. Others are motivated by good will – I like you, and I like doing things with you. So what looks like altruism might actually be selfishness dressed up. Or it might really be altruism. Giving for the greater good.

How can we tell the difference?

I can’t know another’s heart. So I choose to believe that what looks like altruism really is altruism. That assumption creates emotional risk, of course – the good feelings end when there’s no further gain to be had – but I much prefer it to the stress and distraction to which suspicion and second-guessing lead. And I really do believe that most people are honest. Or at least guileless. They tell you what they think, perhaps shading the truth here and there, but you can generally trust what someone tells you. So I figure I’ll be right more often than not when I give the benefit of the doubt.

There will be pain, of course, because people sometimes lie. But maybe that’s selfishness talking again. If I’m worried about getting hurt and strategizing about ways to reduce that risk, then I’m just saving my ass again, and I’m not thinking about how to make life better for all of us.

And maybe that’s where we should really start.

Emotions, cont.

Here no longer works very well for me.

I’ve been intellectually precocious for most of my life. I’m smart, maybe even very smart. (Obviously humble too.)

Ideas have never intimidated me, and I think I can consider most ideas without much emotional baggage to get in the way. Mainly because I keep my emotions at arms length. Or securely locked away from my consciousness.

Emotions, though, are relentless.

I’m currently experiencing quite an emotional upheaval. There are many reasons for it: My business, into which I’ve invested much of our retirement savings, is under significant stress, so I’m feeling anxious about that. I can’t dispel the anxiety without support, and I recognize that I don’t have much emotional support that I can comfortably access. So I am questioning my relationships, which brings more anxiety. I feel lonely and sad. With much of my current situation in flux, my future is uncertain. Which feels even more stressful.

I’m not in a good place. I don’t like feeling stressed, lonely, and sad, but I’m not sure what to do about it.

I am where I am largely of my own making.

Some of it comes naturally. I am generally shy to those I don’t know, so it takes time for me to establish emotional connection. I am both reserved and a bit self-centered, so in my relationships I tend not to reciprocate with proportional emotional intensity.

Some of it is conditioning. My family moved every 2-3 years as I grew up, and not just down the block. From Illinois to Maine, to Ontario, Canada, to Chile, to Vancouver, to Tucson, to Denver. I don’t have lifelong friends. I had to make new friends every time we moved, and since I am shy in new situations, I felt emotionally isolated a lot during my formative years. Isolation is familiar to me, and it feels like my default state. It is comfortable. My parents – and theirs – kept tight rein on their emotions, so the examples that I saw showed me that emotions must be leashed. Like everyone, I feel emotions, often strongly, and the intensity of my most powerful feelings terrifies me. If I can’t control them, I feel like my emotions might destroy me.

Some of it is choice. My wife is my opposite. We complete each other, but we don’t mesh well. Natural tendencies and habits developed over 30+ years of marriage have left raw friction points and hidden fault lines in our relationship, and trust is not complete between us. Where she reaches out broadly at times of emotional stress, I withdraw into myself. There is no small amount of pain and resentment (though our marriage is not just pain and resentment). And I have no one else I share my feelings with either. I withdraw to avoid emotional intimacy, because I lack confidence in my ability to manage my emotions in important relationships.

The combination of nature and decisions, initially by others and then by myself, have left me here. And here no longer works very well for me. I don’t want to feel stressed, lonely, and sad, but I wonder if I have missed the window to make that work with my current relationships and if I have enough runway left in my life to make it work with different relationships.

And I’m not sure how I will decide.