When the retreat leader asked for three volunteers who were comfortable with looking ridiculous and could be trusted to not cheat, my hand immediately went up. We were each asked to stand in a two foot square drawn in blue painters tape on the floor, close our eyes, and start marching in place. The retreat leader then put on music and told us to march in place, and no matter what else happened, to just keep marching.
Almost as soon as the music started I could hear laughter breaking out amongst the larger group. I wasn’t sure what was happening, what other non-verbal instructions might have been given to the rest of the group. At one point I was certain that others had been asked to get up and start dancing around us. But I was focused on my task: march in place, and have fun. That meant letting my legs keep me moving in place while my upper body danced along to the music. At different moments I could feel myself leaning in one direction or another, so I made sure to account for that and recenter myself.
Then the music stopped and we were told to open our eyes. When the other two volunteers opened their eyes, they seemed shocked to find themselves having strayed very far from their boxes. I, on the other hand, seemed to have shocked everyone else in the group by having spent the entire song not moving from my box. Multiple people expressed this shock by naming that I never stay in the box, and that they expected me to have strayed so far that they would have had to stop me from hitting a wall. But one of my friends, the group's dance leader, told me she was not surprised. “You’re very grounded in your body”, she said, “it makes sense that you were able to sense where you were in space, that you were able to feel yourself walking”.
I don’t remember learning to walk. By the time I started making memories that I can still access I was already walking, running even. In fact, one of my earliest memories is of running. I was three years old, it was early in the morning, and I was running down the apartment hallway to my parents' rooms. If I sit still and close my eyes I can remember what it felt like in my three year old body to run. It was, perhaps, more of a rumble, my legs racing to keep up with my inertia. I was in that moment of development where running is easier than walking, where I didn’t quite have the body control to stop, where I would just run until there was something that stopped me. In this case my rumble ended with a flop into my parents bed. I flopped because I couldn't yet jump.
Jumping came a couple of months later, and that I do remember. My family was spending a week at a farmhouse in the country. Just across the street there was a field full of bales of hay. My best friend and I spent hours climbing, or getting placed, on top of a hay bale and jumping into the arms of an awaiting adult. I remember standing at the edge of the hay bale, feeling the knot in my gut as I got ready to leap into the air, to know that the surface beneath me would disappear, to trust that I would be caught. It was terrifying and it was exhilarating. When atop the hay bale I could feel the fear, feel that I didn’t want to jump, until eventually I would. Then, almost immediately upon being caught and returning to the ground, the exhilaration would take over and I wanted to jump again.
I was getting to know my body. I was learning what it was capable of, what its limitations were. I was also learning what it felt like to trust. The adults standing below me were telling me that they would catch me when I jumped. The knot in my gut was my body working out the dissonance between the physical knowledge that the ground was too far away, that it was not safe to leave the stability of my hay bale, with the emotional knowledge that the person who said they were going to catch me would do it. Each time I chose to jump and was caught, my body was learning how to blend its own sensory perception with the information that these adults in my life could be trusted.
A couple of years later, I learned that these adults also trusted me. I was walking with my father along the California coast. The waves of the Pacific Ocean were much larger and rougher than the Atlantic Ocean waves I was used to. Ahead of us was a formation of rocks that jutted out into the ocean past the rest of the coastline. I was immediately, and very predictably, drawn towards these rocks. They were wet and slippery and quite jagged. I remember the feel of these rocks. I remember what it felt like in my body to navigate the slipperiness, to take measure of my balance, to calculate where it felt safe to venture off to and when I needed to step back.
At first my father stayed close, ready to catch me if I fell. But then, after a while, he let me go a little ways beyond his reach. Could he see me taking these measurements? Was he able to tell that I was starting to figure something out about how my body worked? Did he know that he could trust that I knew how to be safe?
I think about that moment a lot. It is a significant moment in the story of how I learned to trust myself. Was some of that trust I developed in myself built off of a transference of his trust in me? I have always thought that it was. My father’s trust in me lives at the center of the trust that I have in myself. They are intertwined. His trust in me gave me the space to develop trust in myself, and that trust I built in myself was reinforced by the fact that one of the people that I trusted most, so demonstratively trusted me.
I learned very early how to trust my body in space, how to read the visual and physical cues coming both from the external conditions around me as well as my internal senses of balance, strength, and capacity for keeping myself safe. I don’t think I fully understood the importance of these early experiences, the ways that they helped me develop a deep trust in myself for navigating not only the physical world around me but the intellectual, emotional, and social worlds as well.
I was recently talking with a friend who asked me how I balance trusting myself with knowing that there are things that I don’t know, perspectives that I cannot have. What do I do, they asked, to ensure that trusting myself and my own perspective doesn’t slip into arrogance, into believing that I always know the answer, into assuming that my perspective is always right or better? How do I know when to trust myself and when I should be trusting someone else’s perspective?
I’ve been thinking about this question a lot, about what trust is (trust of self, trust of others), about where it comes from, about what it can do for us. I know that trust must begin with trust in self, that only by trusting myself can I begin to truly trust others. If I place my trust in others before knowing how to trust myself then I am giving my self away, I am relinquishing my responsibility as a person in this world.
Ultimately I keep coming back to that day on the rocks by the ocean. I think the difference between trust in self and arrogance is that arrogance would look at those rocks and say, “I trust myself completely to be able to climb safely along all of those rocks and get to the very end”, and that true trust in self would say, “I trust myself completely to, every step along the way, be able to take the measure of my body’s strength, balance, and capacity to navigate the conditions of those rocks, and determine if I feel safe taking that next step”
Another way of putting it: trust in my ability to know my own capacity does not allow me to go climb those rocks, but to know which rocks not to climb. And it is my trust in my ability to know which rocks not to climb that allows me to feel safe and comfortable setting off to go climb the rocks.
This is also what trusting myself looks and feels like in the intellectual, emotional, and social worlds. I don’t trust that I will always be right, or know the answer. I trust that I know where to look inside myself to determine what I know, what I don’t know, and what it feels like when I am up against things that I don’t know that I don’t know.
