Retreat into yourself, but first make yourself ready to receive yourself there. If you do not know how to govern yourself, it would be madness to entrust yourself to yourself. There are ways of failing in solitude as well as in society. – Michel de Montaigne

Hi, Ghost.

A long time ago I read many parts of the collected works of Michel de Montaigne, a French statesman and philosopher who wrote in the latter half of the 1500’s. I still have the book on my shelf, and I reach for it sometimes. I found him gloriously insightful, and kind, and raw. He was endlessly curious about himself and the world. He wrote essays on writing, on solitude, on his public-facing persona, on the state of the world, on grief, on Stoicism, and Epicureanism, and Pyrrhoism, among other topics. He wrote a beautiful study about his cat that I will never forget, delightfully observing that when he looks at the animal, it’s little soul looks back at him. That essay is a thoughtfully expressed discourse on compassion.

But I digress. Sort of. His quote above is what I’m really trying to address.

Read Montaigne’s quote again, please. He had more eloquence in his little finger than I will ever have in my whole life, but a few months ago I posted a picture of my BMX bike on Instagram, and my closing words in the caption were: “In the meantime, I am slowly learning to meet myself where I am, to come home to myself without fear.” This is what I think Montaigne was also expressing. It is something I am working desperately to achieve, but retreating into myself continues to be an elusive quest.

After my last litany about my mentally ill neighbors and their wild treatment of me, as well as my totally off-the-charts weird physical and mental reactions to their insanity, I had a profound realization about myself this evening.

I am not trustworthy.

Faith in other people, and other people’s faith in me, is one of my core values. To be trusted by someone else is a pure and precious gift. For myself, I tend to trust wholeheartedly when I believe someone is in my corner.

My trust in others has been uncharacteristically shaky lately, because of a weird loss of a dear friend last summer that coincided with the loss of my cat. The loss of the friend, oddly, was partly due to the loss of the cat. But the trust has been re-affirmed by mutual friends who continue to do the important things with me: trust me with their physical and mental health by working out with me and telling me the things that bother and hurt them. They also trust me to do the penultimate friend thing: help them move. And they trust me with the ULTIMATE THING: to babysit their pets, which I love.

I also recognize that my trust in others has a lot to do with my confidence in myself. But the thing is, I don’t trust myself, and this is the key to…well, everything.

I fundamentally expect myself to fail. I rarely keep promises to myself. I chastise myself for the most minor indiscretions, misdemeanors, perceived failures, and for things like tripping over a rug. I am a HARDASS and an ASSHOLE to myself.

I’ve started to pick up on things that I routinely do that are detrimental to my person. For example, I say “sorry” in almost every interaction, whether I’m writing an e-mail or opening a door for someone, inadvertently encountering someone around a blind corner or making space for someone else on the sidewalk. My life is a litany of “sorry”’s.

How is a person like that expected to react in the face of adversity? They’re not betting on themselves, I’m sure. How is that person expected to face themselves in the mirror? They probably look away. I know I do. How is that person perceived by others? As weak. As incompetent. As flaky, and wrong, and unable to meet their needs.

I have to create an atmosphere of trust around myself. Based on myself. I need to keep my promises to me. I need to know that I am here for me, first and foremost. The knowledge that no one else is ever going to bail me out, the certainty that I am 100% on my own, those thoughts are true and valid, but are never going to do anything but make me anxious and drive me to drink. So I need to establish a basis of safety from which to operate. Financial security is one aspect of that, and is pretty fundamental. But mental security is the thing. Knowing that when I say something to myself that is positive, I cradle that idea, nurture it, and keep to it, that is building trust with myself. I have to meditate on it. Breed it.

Creativity and physical fitness are other ways to build trust. I used to keep those promises to myself, why don’t I do that now? Part of that problem is remembering my fitness level when I ran my marathon at age 50, and feeling the decline since then now, at 53. I know that women over 50 routinely slay at 50k’s and other long distances. I can get there. I am able to do that. I know I am.

I have to trust myself. I have to build on the self-reliance that allowed me to move 1500 miles and leave my partner of 24 years. I have to build on the confidence that allowed me to run 26.2 miles. I have to remember that I did those things, and that I am capable of greatness. I know that I am capable of just about anything if properly motivated.

So I have to find the thing that moves me. I’ve had experiences, like weddings and funerals and graduations and barbecues and shows and concerts and private times with myself and dates and bike rides and snowboarding days, and I’m not any closer to the thing that moves me. What do I love? What could I spend so much of my free time on that it seems worthy? It’s definitely not my phone or my TV, so what is it, then? It has to be something other than BMX, because that’s simply not a possibility for me right now.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I wasn’t taught to adult, so I’ve been winging this since 1988. I talked with my therapist today and realized that everything I’ve learned about being a responsible adult has been taught to me by my peers over the years. The things that children learn from their parents, I learned in the schoolyard, I was taught over a period of decades by people who actually knew how to live, in part because they’d learned it themselves, or because they had parents who loved them for who they were and gently steered their course through life. These peers most notably taught me how to treat other people.

Through all of that I found myself, to a certain degree. I found my values through cutting and pasting the things that I perceived others did right, and incorporating them into my own life. I’m still working on that. What I’m finding, my dear Ghost, what I’m finding about myself, is that I am a gentle, beautiful soul, horribly flawed, who wants to stop screaming herself into existence for the benefit of others’ understanding. I want to keep to my learned compass, and keep heading forward, regardless of the pitfalls and obstacles. Hopefully, in the end, I can see someone in the mirror who isn’t backstabbing herself.