Thursday, May 24, 2012

Circle of Trust

It’s early morning hours at work and I am here, my brain still sleepy waiting for the caffeine to kick in so I can attack my day full-force.  Carpe Diem and all that shite!   

I find my mind wandering and thinking back on a conversation I had yesterday with a colleague about the concept of the “Circle of Trust”: having a sufficient comfort level with the folks in your immediate circle to know that what you say or do within that circle stays there.  In my dayjob, the Circle of Trust is paramount to my work, as I have been given charge of some highly sensitive data.  It almost goes without saying (though people still do – ALL THE TIME), that what is discussed within the confines of a closed room must stay there. 

In my other life, it’s a little trickier.  I encounter people of varying degrees of professionalism and maturity, much of which depends on age and lifestyle.  I know that with my immediate colleagues, my trust level is high as they have an understanding of what can happen when certain bits of information filter out to the masses.  However there are others whom I work with directly or indirectly who still take the approach that some stories are just fodder for idle gossip even though it would be obvious to most others they shouldn’t be spread about.  I was recently burned by this very mindset: someone whom I thought I could trust flapped his gums about an incident involving myself and another person, and before I knew it the story was all over town and coming back to me in the most awkward way possible – via the other party. 

Not cool. 

But still…I gave pause and pondered the situation for what it was: the offending gossiper is young and inexperienced with a holdover schoolboy mentality where he speaks before he thinks.  So I gave him the benefit of the doubt and told him that he can say what he wants, but in the future he needs to be mindful of where his words go.  My only hope is that he will think twice the next time he wants to tell stories about people he knows.   Just like I now think twice about saying anything to him that has any remote chance of coming back to bite me in the arse.  At the end of the day, it was a win-win: valuable lessons learned all around!

The music community is small.  People know each other or at least have heard of each other.  There is a false sense of security in a business where the person next to you will step right over you to get to that next rung in the ladder.  But the higher you go, the further you fall and you might need a soft landing at some point.   Best not to piss anyone off in the process.  My .02.

Monday, May 21, 2012

Broken.

This blog post is going to get a little personal. I’ve been struggling with it the past few days...do I dare expose myself to this extent, and at what cost? Writing is supposed to be a cathartic and expressive process that allows the author to get what they are feeling down on paper and to leverage life experience for the sake of creativity. Much like a songwriter uses music and lyrics to express themselves and to cleanse themselves of pain, a writer uses words. It is for this reason that I made the decision to share this with you – my few, yet honored readers.



I recently had a conversation with a kind-hearted gentleman – a man of the Church, one who instantly puts strangers at ease with his delicate candor and jovial nature. I’m not exactly a stranger to this man as I’m friendly with his children, but even so – he doesn’t really know me from Eve. Yet somehow I found myself engaged in a conversation with him on a random Friday night about broken people: people who have a hard time figuring out where their place in the world is because they have been hurt and abused by life. I found myself admitting to this man that I didn’t think I would ever find the one to marry. He said to me (and I’m paraphrasing here) “Elizabeth, in a way everyone is broken. When you meet the right one, you will know and God will make it happen.”


Everyone is broken.


Now - I freely admit that I am broken. My heart shattered into a trillion pieces time and again, only to fuse itself back together, but weakened over the course of much heartache and disappointment. I could sit here and tick off the number of people who have wronged me over the years yet somehow that seems counterproductive. And I know there are other people out there who are just as broken, and even more broken than I am. I never once suffered at the hands of an abuser, nor has my life been anything less than blessed and fortunate. I know that my past experiences have – in a way – made me stronger and wiser and I really shouldn’t feel too sorry for myself. But it still isn’t easy. It’s downright difficult sometimes to get out of bed with a smile, to be optimistic and hope that one day I will meet that person who will not only love me for me, but who will appreciate and respect me as well. And someone who can make me stop looking over my shoulder to see who else is coming up from behind because my needs are not being met. So far, that person has eluded me. I thought I found him once, but that wasn’t meant to be and now he is gone forever.


True confession: I have feelings for someone. I won’t say who that someone is and he may never realize who he is for I’m too scared to tell him, nor do I think those feelings would ever be reciprocated. That’s what happens when you are broken: you don’t trust your own heart as it has betrayed you so often. You don’t trust your instincts. You become jaded and pessimistic. My only hope is that one day, I will meet someone that will enable me to overcome those fears, and heal my heart to wholeness again. I may be jaded, but I’m still a hopeless romantic.


Love and devotion all the way, you know?