Losing faith

Every so often in life  there comes the opportunity to open your world, your inner thoughts, your dreams, your fears, to someone or to the many. And you can choose to open that door, or to leave it shut.

When we each make this choice to trust, to believe in and to give of ourself to someone, well, we risk loss. And that risk of loss is our own choice. This I understand, much more than I wish I did since reaching adulthood. That's life.

Recent events leave me sort of speechless, disappointed and sad.

It happens. That's what relationships of any kind are all about. It only hurts the most with the people who matter the most. This one hurts. But it was my choice to risk and it's a lesson to learn, perhaps. Perhaps not.

You can surround yourself in bubble wrap, or down pillows, or cottonelle. But nothing takes the sting away when you risk and you get hurt.

Recently I shared some very personal information with people that mean more than they may have imagined. I could have shared it with many many dozens of people, I'm sure easily over a hundred or hell just let it all hang out on the internet. However, I am intensely private, to a fault, I know, but that's me and I accepted me a long long time ago :) I trusted them to understand the importance of my privacy, for many reasons. I needed privacy to feel safe, I needed privacy to find my way through, in my time, in my way. This is after all, my life.

And I needed to know I could count on them to understand how important silence was for a while.

And so I never thought I'd find out each of them had taken this information and passed it along. Whether it was passed to one or to many it still altered the landscape of our friendship and I felt great sadness.

Not only did trust sort of evaporate into thin air, when I thought the air was thicker than the smog over Beijing and LA combined, but it also robbed me of the wonderful feelings I would have felt had I been able to share and talk to others myself, over time. In my way, regarding my life.

I know. Life is full of risk. Life is full of choice. And while I did choose to take the chance, I honestly didn't think there was a single ounce of risk in sharing. I never thought for an instant it would be a not so hot choice.

Many emails transpired and we all know how email sucks for relay of quality of content and feelings. So I've chosen to let the last round lay idle for a while. To allow some distance and to hopefully change my perspective on being sad. It's not that I don't want to read or gain some type of closure... but quick typing leads to perhaps some not so well thought through sentences, at least that what I hope transpired. I may not read those emails, but I've thought of them every day since, and many many days prior. I always did.

Will time help? I'm not sure. But I made a choice. I made a choice to create time and space so that the sadness wasn't as difficult and the sting wasn't as strong. Any you know what? In the grand scheme of things, when weighed against the bigger things of life, well, it's just not as important. It will pass.

Where am I now? Well, I now feel less comfortable sharing and so I revert... back into that shell of silence where it feels a tiny bit safer... lonelier for sure but safer.

Life is full of trade offs and risk. C'est la vie.  :)