Trust: The Distance Between Understanding Others and Being Understood
Trust is a strange thing. The older I get, the less I see it as a simple question of whether someone is trustworthy or not. Instead, trust feels more like a spectrum, a series of small decisions accumulated over time, shaped by experience, personality, timing, and sometimes luck.
For a long time, I thought trust was mainly about other people. Could they keep a secret? Would they stay when things became difficult? Would they use my vulnerabilities against me? As I have grown older, I have realised that another question often sits quietly beneath those concerns:
Can I accept being trusted?
I have been fortunate to meet people who have shared their stories with me. Friends, mentors, colleagues, strangers encountered on buses, in waiting rooms, in saunas, or during chance conversations while travelling. Some of these exchanges lasted only a few minutes, yet I still remember them years later. Human beings reveal themselves in unexpected ways when they feel safe.
Perhaps because of my interest in psychology, writing, and observation, people often open up to me. They tell me things they do not usually tell others. Over time, I have come to recognise that this is both a privilege and a responsibility.
The ability to understand people is a double-edged sword.
In the age of artificial intelligence, information has become easier to collect, analyse, and reproduce than ever before. Boundaries are increasingly blurred. Understanding someone's motivations, fears, desires, and insecurities can be used to help them, but it can also be used to influence, manipulate, or exploit them. The skill itself is morally neutral. What matters is the intention behind it.
As a writer, I constantly wrestle with this tension. Much of writing comes from reality. Every writer is, in some way, a collector of observations. We listen, watch, absorb, and remember. The challenge is how to transform those observations into something meaningful without betraying the people who unknowingly contributed to them.
I use aliases. I change identifying details. I merge stories together. More importantly, I try to preserve emotional truth rather than factual accuracy. My goal is not to document individuals but to explore themes that extend beyond any single person.
After all, most stories are not really about the people who inspired them. They are about loneliness, uncertainty, ambition, grief, belonging, freedom, or identity. The individuals may change, but the underlying human questions remain remarkably consistent.
Yet trust becomes more complicated when I turn the lens inward.
What surprises me is that despite having people in my life who know me well, I sometimes struggle to believe I deserve their affection. Intellectually, I know they care about me. Their actions demonstrate it repeatedly. Emotionally, however, there are moments when I feel overwhelmed by the gap between what they seem to see and what I see in myself.
This creates an odd paradox.
I trust that certain people care about me.
But I do not always trust my own worthiness of that care.
The two are not the same.
For many years, much of my life was organised around achievement. Academic success, career progression, financial independence, immigration security, personal recovery. Achievement creates a simple framework: effort produces results. Love and friendship do not operate according to the same logic.
No one earns friendship in the same way they earn a promotion.
No one receives affection because they achieved a particular score.
Yet many of us continue applying performance-based thinking to relationships. We ask ourselves what we have done to deserve loyalty, understanding, or kindness, as though affection must always be justified through measurable contribution.
The people who care about us are rarely conducting such calculations.
They are not evaluating us through quarterly performance reviews. They are responding to something broader and more human. Sometimes they see qualities that are difficult for us to recognise ourselves.
Perhaps this is where trust becomes most difficult.
Not trusting others.
Trusting their perception of us.
Accepting that people may know our flaws, contradictions, insecurities, and limitations, and still choose to stay.
Accepting that understanding and being understood are related but distinct experiences.
I have spent much of my life trying to understand people. Sometimes I wonder whether I have become more comfortable occupying the role of observer than participant. There is safety in observation. It allows distance. It allows reflection. It allows control.
Being understood requires something else entirely.
It requires allowing another person to see us without knowing exactly what conclusions they will draw.
Perhaps that is the deepest form of trust.
Not the confidence that someone will never disappoint us, because no human being can promise that. Rather, the willingness to remain open despite uncertainty.
Trust is not certainty.
Trust is a decision made in the presence of uncertainty.
It grows slowly through conversations, shared experiences, small acts of reliability, and countless moments that seem insignificant at the time.
Like most meaningful things in life, trust cannot be forced. It can only be cultivated.
And perhaps the final lesson is that trust is not solely about placing faith in other people.
It is also about allowing ourselves to believe that we are worthy of the faith they place in us.