“I trust myself. You need that to survive.” ~ Yoko Ono
I’m learning more and more what the undoing looks like.
How to know what our boundaries are when we have spent a long time not knowing we could have them in the first place. How to not trust everyone when we’ve spent our whole life thinking we had to find the good in everyone. How to trust anyone after we’ve come to the saddest realization that not everyone is deserving of trust.
No one provides us a ceremony to let us know when we’re starting to reframe our brain positively after suffering trauma, betrayal, or any damn thing that just plain ol’ knocks us off our tracks and makes us scared to start anew—in friendships, in family, or in an intimate relationship.
The things we want seem so out of reach after we’ve gone into hiding and have had our own roller-coaster experience with everything happening outside of our lives, inside of our lives, and inside of ourselves.
We provide the ceremonies ourselves. I choose to trust that you’ll find some comfort in my learnings, as I have.
1. You have to trust yourself. You have to trust yourself. Repeat, repeat, repeat. You have to do the work to get into a place where you face the inner workings that don’t sit well with you. If you don’t trust yourself, you’re never going to trust another person fully. You’re certainly not going to trust fairly if you get the gift of running into someone deserving of your trust.
2. You have to be yourself. Okay, I know this is said a lot, but I am saying: you have to be yourself. This is a beautiful way to make things so much easier on you right out of the gate. Be your quirky, weird, open, chatty, quiet, reserved, extroverted, introverted, punny, silly self. Be loud with it. Be kind with it. If you need to, be firm with it.
You’ll immediately run off anyone you don’t need to put your energy into, and we all have an energy budget that we need to balance wisely. Don’t take a true ghosting personally; take it with gratitude. There are almost eight billion people on this planet. If you want to find your people, you will. If they’re not your people, they won’t be. Don’t force it. Don’t sweat it. Keep going.
3. Meditate. Sit with yourself. If you need to answer a message later, the right people won’t give a damn. Check in: how is your mind, your body, your heart? Give them what they need. The right people are giving themselves what they need too. Provide space for yourself and for others. You will find many who fit into your space as you fit into theirs. Be present, and acknowledge people who are being present too.
4. You have to practice trust to trust. Though, save your trust falls for the places where you’ve been shown you don’t have a reason to distrust. If you throw yourself into a trust fall in a situation that feels off or where you’ve been continuously deceived, you are likely to be catapulted back into a situation where your trust is shattered—again. You will never learn to trust in this manner. Practice trust when you don’t feel like you’re going against your intuition to do so.
5. Know that you will survive the interim. The in-between. The place that feels like purgatory. That big chunk of time when you have felt completely isolated and you’re not quite sure how to hit the reset button. Trust that it’s coming. Know that you will survive the undoing, the unmasking, the leaning in, the trust falls; trust the process first and the ones to trust will start to present themselves. Many of them have been there all along; many of them would have never arrived if you hadn’t trusted yourself first.
Even if you would capture a spider to let it outside, you would never let a black widow into your bed.
You don’t have to trust them all, or save them all. Trust yourself first and you’ll know where your trust should go.
Trust yourself.
You are getting better.
You don’t have to be alone forever, if that’s not what you want.
You do have to decide what kind of people you want in your life and attract them, and don’t you dare worry; once you decide, it’ll be like a moth to a flame, but without all of the burning.
“Have enough courage to trust love one more time, and always one more time.” ~ Maya Angelou
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AUTHOR: ELIZABETH MILLER
IMAGE: MUHAMMEDSALAH_/INSTAGRAM
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