the pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. is that why people resort to lies, even when there’s no reason to? one type of person i cannot understand is the chronic pathological liar. no, i don’t take the occassional white lie against people, and i know that people often do a bit of exaggeration to drive a point home. but i don’t get it why some people chronically lie, sometimes for flimsy or no apparent reason at all. how can i trust a person who i know for a fact is telling me fairy tales?

they say that trust is earned. well no, not with me. i think it’s a better way to start on a positive footing so i give my 100% trust on each person i meet. that trust-barometer, however, will drop with each transgression. and that could happen quite rapidly within the first minute of meeting depending on, say, the way your eyes dart, your hand movements, the length of your stubble, the hue of your lipstick, and so on. just eeny-weeny little nicks. then my intrinsic lie-detector switches on and each lie i see through drains your trust-account balance. when that barometer dips low, that’s when i back off. i sense danger and i start building walls, digging moats. and it’ll be hard, even for me, to build a bridge over that moat ever again.

see, i put so much premium to honesty that the amount of trust i put on a person is proportional to the extent i will let him into my life. so if you want to know how much i trust you, you’ll just have to ask yourself how much you know me: what’s in my heart and how my mind ticks. only few people are privy to that (ay, patay, thanks to this blog, more and more people are probably getting there).

it’s definitely not an infallible method, but it’s a coping mechanism i’ve naturally, sub-consciously developed over the years. i know it has loopholes, and it has given me a lot of disappointments and frustrations. i’ve trusted people i shouldn’t have and i’ve written off people i probably could have confided my innermost secrets to. but i’m just human and my sensors are not fool-proof. i’m just glad i have enough trustworthy people around me. kind of makes the untrustworthy ones easier to forgive and forget.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 10th, 2004 at and is filed under i, me, and myself. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.