Trust, credibility, integrity an' dem tings...

Woman told me that she trusted me and then she tells me her story. I tried to say.. no , no dont trust me because there are a set of women and men who have been disappointed/betrayed by me and I aint want no burden of being trustworthy and some secrets I aint keeping.

 2013 was nuff people who disappointed in me and who expected better of me and so on and I keep going through in my mind, what should I do ?  I mean, I think I am a nice guy and when nice people feel sad or bad around me I feel bad because I wonder if lied or something.


While we are not always in control of how people see us, how do we try to be honest and trustworthy when sometimes things shift and our ideas of survival means we disrupt the images  we project?

The older man talking nonsense and my rage rises and I imagine myself slapping him to shut up. I feel sick after that thought.. I can't believe that I could make myself vulnerable to losing control - and part of that sickness is a kind of 'self-betrayal' and you wonder what else is in store. So sometimes.. we do not even trust ourselves.. as people would say.

Integrity I know is a word which means 'how you behave related to your ethics and values'. So I tried a thing on my CV last year and wrote down some ethics and it has not been bad. I had one or two people tell me that I was not acting according to those ethics but it never got anywhere further.

This Trust, Credibility thing.. who is responsible? A woman tells me after a month on Facebook that she just find out that I is not a woman  I mean.. I thought I had everything out there but sometimes , people do not really check. Another man who texting and chatting as he deals with his crisis, I wonder if he thinks I am a compassionate woman too and I hope that his crisis would not be worse when he find out de truth.

The most important lesson I had about trust was when a young man stopped me on the road and proceeded to tell me my story which I had told to someone I 'trusted'. It was brutal but then as I calmed down.. I realise that .. plaintain chips still taste the same, condensed milk is sweet and the sun came up the next day and I did not die even though I might have wanted to as I heard and tried not to listen.

Soon after I came to the realisation that some other people I was working with were also not holding on to their postured values and it was time to part ways. That was easy to do since it was just work, though of course some sadness. With people who in the friends/acquaintance/lovers circle, it is a lil more tricky.

And so I learned.. not to place a burden of trust on people, or to hold them to any integrity or to worry too much about credibility. Most I can do is ask people to be honest, and to be able to know when their values and needs are shifting and contradictory so we could work on what is happening.

I like it though, when people surprise me by acting in surprising ways out of the boxes I create for them.

So while we might try the thing.. what you see is what you get, I wish I could find out how to set the contracts of expectations in our relationships so as not to be disappointed.