Trust is a complicated thing

Trust is a complicated thing for me. My mother was cheated on by the man she married. My best friend in high school loved to tell lies and I was too naive to believe them all for a long time. My next best friend turned-first love cheated on me while I was on a trip to advance my career. I was in a relationship with someone I met over the internet for 6 months who tricked me into thinking that they were someone else who I later found was a completely different person, who created other ‘characters’ to play off with a manipulative story, and by the end of it I ended up with the certainty that I didn’t know such person gender, nationality, age or real intentions. This kind of thing truly messes up with you, and to this day I don’t understand why someone would put so much effort and time into pulling off a ‘catfish’. At one point there was a robbery in my home while I was inside so I wasn’t even able to trust the space I lived in. The relationships I have built now are beautiful, but I still find it very hard to trust anything or anyone especially right off the bat. I’m a skeptic of it all now, and thinking that someone I love might be lying gives me an overwhelming amount of anxiety that I wouldn’t wish to my worst enemy. Although I know this is all a survival mechanism, I sometimes see this as a blessing, other times I wonder how much I’m really missing out.

— Mariana