We have no choice but to trust even in face of betrayal and hurt

By David McElroy · January 17, 2021

People are going to hurt us. That’s one of the certainties of life.

People we trust will betray us. People we love will hurt us. When we are vulnerable, some people will harshly judge us, often misunderstanding what we’ve allowed them to see inside us.

Once you’ve been betrayed and hurt often enough, it’s easy to feel numb. It’s natural to feel distrustful and to want to shut others out. But one of the central realities of life is that we need other people. Whether we like it or not, we have to go on loving and trusting and being vulnerable.

For some of us, this is one of the central contradictions of life. We know what our experience has shown us, but we also know that the love and connection and trust which we so desperately need can’t be found without reaching out and hoping that everything will be different this time.

This has been the central struggle of my life — whether to trust and love in the ways that I need or to run away and hide as a misanthropic hermit.

I found out a couple of weeks ago that someone had betrayed me. It’s not going to be a big deal in the long run, because I didn’t have a huge emotional investment in the woman. It was a friendship — without even a hint of romantic interest for either of us — and I had invested a good bit of time with her over the last year.

But when it became convenient for her to cut me off without explanation — when she did something that couldn’t be justified — that’s what happened. I don’t regret trying to help her. I don’t regret being her friend. But it hurts to be discarded so casually when I’m no longer convenient.

We create our own narratives in life, but it’s impossible to know whether the circumstances of our lives create the narratives or if the narratives we create actually lead to future experiences that correspond to our expectations.

You can make an argument for both sides. A rational materialist would say the facts of life are objective and that a narrative simply reflects that. Some more esoteric thinkers would say that we create our own circumstances based on what we believe and what we expect. I suspect there’s truth in both at times.

I had a long conversation with one of my sisters Saturday night. She unexpectedly brought up an incident that happened when I was only about 14 years old and she was 12. It was a time when I stood up to an older and bigger boy who was bullying her at a community swimming pool.

I had remembered the incident for years, but I was surprised that she remembered. It turned out that the memory of me standing up for her was a very emotional thing which had meant a lot to her at the time. She said that her big brother standing up for her — trying to protect her — was the first time she had ever really felt that someone was trying to take care of her.

I was floored that she remembered, but I was even more surprised at how much it meant to her. She was really emotional in explaining to me Saturday night just how much that little incident meant to her.

That led to a conversation between us about all the ways in which we had not felt protected — all the ways in which we had felt betrayed and hurt and scared and endangered. We both have vivid memories of feeling afraid and alone.

I understand now that all of what we went through back then laid the foundation for me to feel the conflict which I feel today about trusting others and taking chances on others. It also makes me wonder how often I might have chosen throughout my life to love or trust someone — someone who was destined to hurt or betray me — simply because that was what I was trained to feel as normal.

I felt like a freak as a child. I wasn’t like the others. I was always the new kid at a school or in a neighborhood until I was around 14. I was from the weird family. I hid my feelings because I was so afraid of being hurt, both at home and outside home.

No wonder I’ve felt like an alien among humans.

But despite my feelings of not belonging, I have the same human needs that you do. They’re the same human needs that I’ve always had.

I’ve spent my life wanting to be loved and understood. I’ve spent my life wanting to be connected to people who were not going to hurt me or betray me or abandon me.

I still haven’t learned — not entirely — to trust just the right people. Like Robert Heinlein’s young human character Valentine Michael Smith, who had been raised by Martians and had no understanding of how to fit among humans, I am a “stranger in a strange land.”

I wish that I could run away from human society and never again risk being hurt by trusting or loving the wrong person. I often feel as though I want to hate everybody. I often feel as though I’d like to be a hermit.

But I am hopelessly human. My needs for love and understanding and connection are too great. I have no choice about this.

Despite the experiences of hurt and betrayal and abandonment, I have to choose to be open, at least in a measured way. I have to be open to love and understanding and all the things which I couldn’t find when I was young. And which I’ve been looking for ever since.

I have no choice. I have to keep looking — and trusting that my experience will finally be different next time.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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