Building Trust

This still isn’t quite what or how I want to say this, but this is what came out of my head today…If you read all the way through, thank you!

I was 4 months old when I was first separated from the only family I had known. 4 months old. For the next 4 years, I was in and out of foster homes. 5 to be exact. 5 different homes, 5 different families. 5 different environments. To say I had trust issues would be an understatement. When I was officially adopted, but evaluation stated the following “…she related rather superficially to adults and was generally too trusting of adult strangers. She has had a tendency in the past to become rather depressed when anxious and uncertain and to show little affect or enthusiasm…” It also says that “Meredith appears to perform best in a nurturing, accepting and consistent environment”.

The next 13 years of my life, from my perspective, were the exact opposite of nurturing, accepting or consistent. And for years I thought what my life could have been like if I had been adopted into a different family. What possibility could have been brought forth with nurturing instead of punishment? With acceptance instead of shame. With consistency instead of chaos.

In grade 8, after sharing my struggles with another student, they encouraged me to talk to an adult about what I was going through and what I was living with. And so, I found a teacher that I trusted. A teacher that I loved and respected. And during recess, I sat in her office across from the music room and I poured my heart out. I held nothing back. 
And she called my house to verify my story. She called and spoke to my mother and told my mom everything I had told her in confidence and in trust. Everything I had told her…about what I was living through in my home.

I’m not telling you this for sympathy. I’m not telling you this so you can hate the people in my past. I don’t hate them. I know and understand now that they were doing the best they could with what they had. I’m telling you this so you can understand that when I say I trusted no one, ever, you can see for yourself the broken, lonely world I lived in. So you can see, how truly alone I felt I was. Because I truly trusted no one again…until December 2018.

In December 2018, I finally learned to trust myself. And from there, so much more trust has grown. And I can see that just because I didn’t trust myself, didn’t mean that others didn’t. I was simply seeing my life from my perspective. My very lonely, broken, untrusting perspective. I wasn’t seeing reality. I was seeing my version of reality through the lens of my perceived broken emotional state.

Trust wasn’t easy for me to accept, it caused me a lot of anxiety. There had been nothing but pain associated with trust in my life. But my past does not define me. My past simply made me who I am today. I can change absolutely nothing about it; all I can do is take what I’ve learned and move forward and create something better with the knowledge I have.

Trust is growing into love for myself, my husband, my kids, my friends. Now that I finally and fully trust myself, my world is exploding with previously unseen possibility! I am literally building my life up from the very bottom. And it all started with trust.