Trust those who trust you
I have spent my entire life learning how to trust — and who. I didn’t learn it from good examples. The examples all around me were colonized ones: cheaters and liars, addiction, shame and blame, hurt passed down like an inheritance nobody asked for. Trust was not something I was handed. It was something I had to find. And I didn’t find my way out of all that by chance. I found it by persistence.
That long road taught me to pay attention to trust the way you earn the trust of a wild creature — no words, no shortcuts, just showing up gently, again and again, until your presence itself becomes the proof. And it brought me to a conclusion that took years to accept: many people who cannot trust, cannot themselves be trusted.
That sounds harsh at first. Let me explain what I mean, because I don’t say it to condemn anyone. I say it because understanding it set me free.
Trust and belief are tangled together. What people are able to trust depends on what they believe — and not all beliefs are formed honestly. Some are installed through organized efforts to control people: taught, repeated, rewarded, enforced, until they feel like truth. My beliefs were built a slower way. Hundreds of books. Years of walking the walk and talking the talk — healing my own life through the way I live it, and healing land by working with nature instead of against her. Beliefs earned through experience make one kind of person. Beliefs installed to keep people manageable make another. And the two will always struggle to trust each other, because they are reading from different maps.
The mirror
When someone assumes the worst about your motives, they are usually not describing you. They are describing themselves. We all read other people through the only lens we have — our own way of operating. A person who gives freely finds it easy to believe that others give freely. A person who keeps score assumes everyone is keeping score. A person who would take advantage of an open hand cannot imagine an open hand that isn’t a trap.
So when I offer something with no strings attached — my time, my skills, my resources, years of work given for free — and someone responds by searching for the angle, asking what I’m really after, guarding against a theft that was never coming, I’ve learned to hear what that reaction is actually telling me. It isn’t information about me. It’s information about how they move through the world.
This is the quiet truth inside the old saying that a thief believes everybody steals. Distrust, held long enough, becomes a confession.
Scarcity makes generosity invisible
There’s a second piece to this, and it matters just as much.
When people spend years fighting over something scarce — status, recognition, a seat at a table with too few chairs — scarcity becomes their whole operating system. Every resource looks like it’s being taken from someone. Every newcomer looks like competition. Every gift looks like a move.
I understand how people end up there. Fighting for something you don’t have is exhausting, and it trains you to see the world as a contest. But here is the cost: a person living in scarcity literally cannot recognize abundance when it walks up and offers to help. The motive is invisible to them, because it doesn’t exist in their framework. “She’s doing all this for free” does not compute, so the mind supplies a hidden agenda to make the story make sense.
I no longer take that personally. It isn’t personal. It’s a worldview meeting a worldview, and the two speak different languages.
What I trust instead
I’ve stopped trying to convince the untrusting with words. Words can’t reach someone whose experience tells them words are tools of manipulation. What I trust instead is time and action — the two things that cannot be faked.
Show up for years. Give without invoicing. Keep your word in small things and large ones. Let your work sit out in the open where anyone can walk up and inspect it. Trustworthiness isn’t a claim; it’s a record. And a record speaks even to people who have stopped listening — maybe not today, but records are patient.
The people I trust most in my life are, without exception, people who extend trust easily. That is not naivety. It is strength. It takes a secure person to risk being wrong about someone. Trusting people get burned sometimes, yes — and they recover, because their wellbeing was never built on winning every exchange. The chronically suspicious never get burned and never get anything else either. Suspicion is a wall that keeps out loss and keeps out everything.
An open gate
So what do we do about people who can’t trust us? Mostly, we release them. Not with anger — with understanding. Their distrust is a burden they carry, formed by battles I didn’t start and can’t finish for them. I can’t hand someone a new worldview. I can only keep living mine where they can see it.
And I keep the gate open. Because people change. Scarcity loosens its grip when someone finally experiences abundance up close — a gift that stayed a gift, a promise that got kept, a table where there turned out to be enough chairs after all. When that day comes for anyone, they’ll find me where I’ve always been: doing the work, in the open, with an open hand.
Trust is the oldest technology a village has. It’s how our ancestors moved food, knowledge, protection, and belonging across long distances without contracts or courts. It still works. It’s still the only thing that really does.
Extend it carefully, but extend it. What you can trust tells the world what you are.