Tin Foil

Good evening ladies and gentleman.

Life seems to be getting more complicated by the day. Generation by generation the society we are building is becoming more difficult to navigate through. Rules upon rules, social cues that once made sense now mean nothing. Society is evolving at a seemably exponential rate, while we sit here almost dumbfounded, wrecked by the wake it left behind, the inevitable sensation that all of a sudden the society you grew up in makes less sense to you than it did yesterday.

Thing is- we are getting that wrong and the result has the power to make you question the fabric of your existence. Society isn’t complicated, life isn’t complicated- people are complicated.

Life is beautifully simple. The suffering sensation you sometimes feel, the confusion, the idea that nothing is ever going to make sense. Thats just us, trying to defeat an enemy that isn’t fighting.

I’ve said this a hundred times before and will probably say the same thing another a hundred times but it still feels appropriate- we live in a world of instants, in all forms. You wake up in the morning and flick through social media, see a photo you took got a few likes, instant gratification. You get up and go downstairs, make a cup of instant coffee from your instant hot tap as your phone pings with all the news instantly to your phone. You go to work and the sandwich guy brings your food to your desk for instant gratification. Life, society, both, whatever you want to call it is so fast now we don’t understand, or care-for anything less. Even without realising we all do it.

So, how does one look beyond that need for instant gratification, how does one work on a higher plain- to the normalised ideology of the good wage and living for the weekend? How do you bottle that lightning you feel coursing through your veins as your heart pumps in your ears, the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end as you aren’t sure, for the first time in a long time how something is going to turn out, sure only that straight away isn’t an option anymore?

Trust.

5 letters- easy to type.

Hard to build.

Easier to destroy.

Trust isn’t necessarily between two people. I habitually trust very few people- then again very few people have the same rather warped world view as i do. Most people don’t understand themselves what makes you going to think they’re going to put any effort at all into trying to understand you. You are a complex, uniquely powerful human being with a soul, a mind often driven into the depths of emotional madness through tears of sadness and joy, of fear, self loathing, self love, envy, happiness, jealousy and confusion as you try to make your way in the world.

Difference is you see the world a bit differently because you feel it all a bit differently. The world isn’t all sunshine and rainbow (apologies for the cliche Rocky quote) because you can feel the cold rain on your skin that created that rainbow. The icicles that formed to create that glacier as the river bored through the rock to create that outstandingly beautiful waterfall. The world is present in a moment, rapidly moving to the next moment and the moment after that. Blink, blink. Gone.

Never to return.

Beautiful moments. Gone in an instant. Never to return. You felt so good in that moment, it’s easy to wander if you’ll every feel that good again. The details start to play there part when you rely on a memory, on the thoughts that have almost came to define your emotional existence and were the constituent parts of the lessons that made you the person you are today.

What made them so close to that perfect ideal? Trust. You trusted your judgement and in that moment, be it with another person or not you didn’t want to be anywhere else or with anyone else. Life, to you, had hit its peak- no getting better than this. Surely.

Instant later- gone. Your choice to be vulnerable, to drop your guard and be in the moment has now created a sensation like no other. Pain, heartbreak, regret, loathing. In particular with relationships i find the idea when relationships end that you must “hate” your former partner interesting. In truth, nobody can love someone the one day and hate them the next. It’s a protection filter for yourself, because in that moment, looking back at all of those memories- it is you that you hate.

Trust is lost because you believed in yourself and trusted yourself, to only be hurt in the worst way possible. Pain, in that moment, doesn’t get any worse than feeling yourself stupid for believing in someone, in something you found to not be true. You believed in something imaginary, an idea of who you hoped someone could be. Maybe they deceived you, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing as you wandered through the pasture to run your hand down the fluffy beast’s wooly coat.

In this moment, that lightning in a bottle i mentioned earlier? Available for a small fee from Amazon you’d be right there on “Add to Basket-” problem solved.

Not so.

That breakdown of trust, even to yourself just makes those walls a little bit higher and a little bit further away from everyone else. Nobody and nothing will ever have the power to question yourself ever again- not like that. You take the thin wrapping that once kept your soul warm and scrunch it into a ball and throw it away.

In truth, you become a little bit cold.

As well as instantaneous i’ve always thought life had a weird way of making the most joyous of feelings, of love, adventure, wander and freedom quite binary in their nature. It’s one way or the other and you can’t have both. You’re either rich or poor, happy or sad, in love or lost. Without certain things, the world will tell you that you’re less of a person, “broken” by the arbitrary rules and ideas that same society put in place.

I put trust down to be like tin foil. Imagine that roll in your cupboard. As you open the roll, it’s shiny and smooth, ready to help, you can see yourself in it. Imagine then, tearing it off the roll and screwing it up into a little ball and throwing it across the room. Go and pick it up, unravel it and look. Not shiny anymore, see the creases in it, the holes. It still works to wrap your food sure, but it’s not the same. It’s never going to be the same. Just like trust it can be destroyed in seconds- and never be the same ever again.

Society pushes these opinions on you in the hope you will believe them and follow in as you should. Trust your judgement with information from both sides of an argument before you make an informed decision. Re-learn the trust you thought you had. Grow from it, evolve.

Rage against the part of you that wants to keep you down from a mistake. You can’t get “it” back, you can never get back to the way you felt in that near perfect moment. Maybe you decide to never do anything ever again, you will not make a mistake, but you’ll never be who you want to, achieve the goals or become who you want to with such capital self punishment.

Learning to trust yourself again after trust’s untimely destruction is power beyond words- it is a reason to exist. “It” is the lightning coursing through your veins, the wry smile as they walk into the room or as you sit down to write. Seeing that message from someone and it motivates you to be stronger for yourself, to believe in your judgement. There are awful people in the world, and those people will take you for granted and look to destroy you for their own personal gain. Without question. But wanting to be accepted for anything other than yourself as Jim Carrey said is making you invisible. This endless ignorance of self for not believing in the very judgement that defines you will be the end of you.

Step out of your own shadow and into the light. Accept yourself for who you are and understand that people won’t like you, the only person who should like you is you. Understand the importance of trusting yourself again, for the lessons you’ve learned will give you the tools to surround yourself with your people. The people that help the lightning course through you, that hold you to a higher version of yourself. A higher level of acceptance for yourself. Step out of your own shadow and into the light.

Live as if you’ve come back to this day to live it over again. Take the tin foil out of the cupboard, don’t hide it away. Give it away, wrap those you care the most and see them shine. Do that and it will be given back to you all the same.

Yours, with love as always.

D.R x