Trusting In Love One More Time

Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.
Maya Angelou

It’s really easy for us to immediately think about and replay over and over again past hurts and the times when another person has broken our trust. We too often look through a lens of disappointment and pain in reacting to our current circumstances. We too often don’t want to share pain and feelings that we need to share out of a sense of fear that we will be hurt again. We fear that what we have shared will be used against us. And too often, it is. But sadly, that which is most personal to us remains hidden – and when it remains hidden it also remains unhealed. It continues to burden us and fill us with shame. But we have to work against that tendency not to trust, not to reach out, not to open up.

The fact is, we all need someone whom we can let in, with whom we can be nakedly open emotionally, someone we can trust to actually care and to listen to our hearts and enter into our souls. If you have not had someone who has actually done that it is easy to think that no one cares what you are going through. But people do have the capacity to care and to respond with sensitivity, with compassion and with empathy. We must never give up on finding that trust, in seeking it. If we do give up we will constantly be lonely, fearful, anxious, cynical and judgmental, ourselves. Yet when we take the risk and seek to trust and be trusted we see that love, which all of us need, can be found.

The poet and author Maya Angelou knew what it meant to have trust destroyed. We’ve written before about her story, a chilling and yet triumphant one. Raped by her mother’s boyfriend at the age of eight, literally not speaking for five years following that devastating assault, she eventually began to speak out about her experiences, not only of sexual violence, but also of growing up black, poor and female in a racist and sexist society, and of emerging from her circumstances beginning to trust and to feel worth and strength, and then to begin to feel love and share love again.

Maya Angelou’s story is so compelling because against tremendous and seemingly insurmountable odds, she would not and did not give up. She found and summoned the courage to trust that, despite the horror she experienced all too early in her life, there were people in her life and in the world who could love her well and not violate the trust that she needed. Maya Angelou used her extremely challenging circumstances, similar circumstances that have broken many others, to learn and to teach, to grow and to inspire others to find trust and love and new life again.
It is imperative that we do not give up on finding those whom we can trust, to share the essence of our lives. It is far, far too lonely a life when trust is not there. We miss, tragically, the essence of life – which is simply and totally about love – when we have lost the trust that makes love possible. When you feel as if trust cannot be found, try one more time.

One more time. Always, one more time.

Photo by Christopher Beloch on Unsplash