People, as a whole, confuse and frighten me. I have often said that I can't stand people - but individual human beings I quite like. While a somewhat wry statement, it is, for the most part, completely true. Most people inspire in me a profound and subtle sense of distrust.
I would note that I have, on the whole, a fairly keen sense of people and their emotional states, in the abstract and in the specific. However, almost universally I do not trust that empathy - it does not feel to me as something dependable, though I certainly use its information, i do not do something based entirely on the whim of what I think someone else might be thinking or feeling. That is an arrogance of mind-reading, which is something that I have serious problems (edging towards simply despising) with.
However, this instinct I have of trust - that is something I depend upon. It is only recently that I have started to question it - not the sense itself, but the reasons behind it. Why do I trust the people I do? What makes them more worthy of access to my thoughts?
I already pondered - in one of the other Hunt documents - over the fact that I have never had a powerful trusting impulse towards another female. Yes, I have had and continue to have female friends. However, the closeness that we have is always carefully structured, and never manages to approach easy cameraderie.
People - as a whole - fit into a few broad bands of categorization. One, the sort of unwashed masses, deals with most of humanity. I haven't met them, I don't have to deal with them, or I ahven't known them long enough to drop them anywhere.
Then there are the people who I would consider friends. Unlike many people of my acquaintance, those people I consider to be friends are universally people who I am comfortable talking with about more or less anything. Mind, some things just don't get talked about with some people, but that's more a factor of the person than the depth of the relationship.
Closer in than that falls family. These are my heartsibs, the people who truly matter to me. I know of quite a few limbs I would go out on for these people. I can - and will - brak myself into exhaustion simply because they need some attention, or my own particular sort of care.
And then there are those people who I Trust, in a very smple, instinctual way. They fall into that category very quickly, often on very little acquaintance - leaving me with the question of how to talk to someone who my entire psyche agrees is a safe person to talk to about anything, but who I've only been talking to seriously for ten minutes. This is awkward; especially since I tend to get nervous and babble when I'm not certain how I stand with someone who matters to me.
It was suggested to me recently that I tend to trust those people who think like my father. This was a profundity so obvious that it had completely eluded me before, but now it seems to be completely obvious.
The people who I will trust are dreamers. They are idealists, they understand pain. They understand overcoming the odds. They have deep passions, often well-hidden, they understand the strength of language. They read, they think, they care, they make things matter. Appearances are less relevant than content. A moment of sarcastic or wry wit, self-directed or else-directed, is understood.
These are the people who I love upon knowing them.