A friend once said, regarding my Twitter, “I like how Visa says he’s going to do something, then immediately does it.” It’s actually an ADHD coping mechanism. If you ask my friends from my teenage days, they’ll tell you I was unreliable, full of shit, and that you couldn’t trust anything I said.
This was true for me both internally and externally. I was a casual bullshitter by default. I would say things to make things go away, and then I would forget what I said. At some point I got into several tangled webs that led to people getting angry and upset with me. I hated myself for that.
This took years to fix, and my attempted solution to the problem was overkill. I tried to impose tyrannical order on my chaotic whirlwind self. I made some progress, and I also made myself utterly miserable –which I felt like I deserved, for being a lousy person.
A thing I understand intimately — which people who are still struggling are often surprised to hear, because they assume I’m a natural — is that when you’re wack, your mechanism for fixing yourself is also wack. It’s like looking for your glasses when you can’t see without your glasses. You need to be able to focus in order to learn how to focus. It’s a cruel joke.
The broad question of “how do you rebuild trust that is lost”, I had to deal with that, internally. After all, I had a long history of betraying my own trust! There’s evidence! So how can I trust myself? I don’t know. I beat myself up over every failure, then locked that painful core away under layers of jokes and apathy. I tried to avoid making any promises at all.
I think on retrospect I’m lucky that, underneath ALL of that, in the core of cores, I did still have a love for literature and music. I’ve said earnestly that I’d give my life for musicians. I would. I think that’s the light that saved me – the non-coercive, shining spirit of humanity.
But okay, even if I believe that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, I still have to walk my way out. And the way to do that, when you have zero sense of balance, proprioception, muscle control, blah blah blah, is to put one foot in front of the other, firmly, and then do it again.
And what that looked like, for me, is announcing “I’m going to drink a glass of water now,” and then drinking it. Hey, look, I just did 1 thing that I said I was going to do. “I’m going to do 10 pushups now.” Hey, that’s 2 things. And I slowly earned my trust back, 1 step at a time.
This process had all sorts of wonderful second-order effects. It’s like how you “just” wanna play basketball with your friends, then you end up quitting cigarettes, eating healthier, sleeping better, etc, all “just” to boost your game. Then once you do that, you realize that actually, living healthy feels great!
Anyway, a cute vestigial remnant of this whole process is that I still announce what I’m about to do before I do it. It’s like a little ritual I have for myself. Every time I do what I say, I build trust in myself, I build self-respect (which I didn’t have until… 25? 27?)
It still actually surprises me a little bit. When something I say will be done, gets done. When you’ve spent a lifetime making shit up (it all started with “I will do my homework”), it starts to seem like magic. What I say will happen, happens? It’s like magic. I’m a magician.
Of course, I still make mistakes. I underestimated how long it would take me to get my ebooks published and updated. But I no longer think “ah, fuck, I’m a fucking bullshitter and nothing I say has any meaning”. I now think, ah, I made a mistake, I must recalibrate & renegotiate.
What I’m finding is that there’s a sort of “economy” to it?
For example, as I write this, my ebooks are currently “in the red” relative to my projections. but that’s okay – because my youtube videos are coming along beautifully. I’ve been publishing 1 every single day for almost a month. Joy to the world!
I guess this is just to say, if you feel like you don’t trust yourself, I feel you. I know how wrong it sounds when someone says, “Well, just start believing in yourself,” like b*tch, you have evidence that you’re not to be trusted!!! I know. The thing is to build the tiny wins. You can do it. ❤️
If there’s interest, I may eventually update this post with more specific examples of things I’ve done. Heads up, though: most of my attempts at building some sort of system failed, and I don’t think I actually have a particularly good one, even now. It’s like learning to draw – you just keep sucking, and you suck a little less every time you try.
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Trust Bankruptcy
If you’ve had to declare trust bankruptcy in yourself (I’ve been there), the way out is to start with really small wins. “I’m going to drink a glass of water now” → do it. Trust is built like courage: lots of little baby steps. Eventually you can do cartwheels & backflips
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// The following section of the book is a lightly-edited transcript of a youtube video I made.
Backstory
I’ll start with my backstory. I was a very “ADHD” child, very scatterbrained, curiosity-directed. I never quite learned how to focus. I never quite learned how to set a schedule and follow it. I tried, but I failed over and over again, and it was very demoralizing and upsetting.
School
Before school, I could just do whatever I liked, whenever I wanted, and it seemed mostly fine. When I went to school, there were timetables and homework and all these structured ways of being that you’re supposed to be. I couldn’t do it. Reflecting on this now… my parents ran their own business, so they operated on their own schedules as well. So I didn’t really have much of an example to follow of what it’s like to have a strict schedule of some kind. I also developed the terrible, terrible habit of lying – to say whatever words needed to be said to get people off my back. And I did this internally as well. The worst part – I’d tell myself “I’ll just play video games or watch tv for a while and then I’ll do my homework later…” and I’ll end up playing, having fun, whatever, for hours until it’s too late. and then I get sleepy, and then i’m too tired to do my homework.
Bargaining with myself
I would bargain with myself. “Okay, we’re too tired to do our homework now. Let’s go to bed and let’s wake up at 5 am and do my homework then.” But i would wake up too tired, and very rarely would I actually get around to doing my homework. So I’d go to school, anxious, and I’d try to get my homework done on the bus, or, I’d try to do my science homework during math class, and so on, and that was just a horrible experience and a horrible existence.
Even then the solution was obvious, right, just do your homework! Right?! Do it ahead of time before you have fun! But I think I had a scarcity mindset – I had no experience of things going well, so I felt like things were always going to go poorly, and so i think the part of me that wanted to have fun the part of me that was curiosity directed and fun-loving and whatever…
Competing interests
I now have the language and the frameworks for thinking about these things. There are competing interests in the mind, like there’s a guy who doesn’t speak up at the meeting and then after the meeting is over he finds some way to manipulate things to get the outcome that he wants. I can frame it in a bunch of different ways – when i frame it in terms of the meeting, it seems a bit sinister. But it’s also like there’s some desperate part of you that’s afraid of the other part of you and doesn’t feel like it has the right to speak up. doesn’t feel… the longer i went not doing my homework and getting into trouble, the more and more I felt like oh i can’t have fun, i haven’t earned the right to have fun.
And there’s a part of me that’s like, I have to have fun no matter what, because this is my life, and if i don’t have fun now, then I’m just gonna die miserable. right? because i’ve always been miserable. because i’ve never fixed anything in my life and everything’s just shitty and i remember what that feels like. i even remember feeling that way at work 10 years later when i had a great boss great colleagues great work environment. and i could never enjoy – fully properly enjoy our milestones and our celebrations and stuff like that because i’d always be thinking, “oh but you know this blog post is overdue or like this deadline, this task is undone and i always just felt anxious and guilty and ashamed in my life. all the time. wow. that was really… it was so unpleasant and you know… nobody was gonna save me from that. right? everybody’s got their own problems, everybody’s dealing with their own shit.
Yelling at myself did not help
and i remember you know i was journaling a lot the whole time and i remember i would beat myself up– i would plead with myself sometimes. remember very specifically when i was a teenager one day i was crying in the bathroom at home. I was pointing at myself in the mirror, and i said why won’t you study, why don’t you do your homework, like you’re getting into so much trouble, your parents are upset with you, your teachers are frustrated with you, like even your friends, your classmates think there’s something wrong with you… like why do you continue with this destructive path. why don’t you just do the right thing? and i was crying and miserable and sad…
and it didn’t help. i might have done like my homework that day, but like a couple of
days later i was back to before… I feel like I now understand the whole thing better. I have a bunch of riffs about that. One of it is: I was trying to do negative reinforcement, I was trying to punish myself for things that were going badly and hoping that with sufficient punishment for the bad eventually things would be good and I now believe that that’s a terrible way of approaching things. What I should have really been doing is positive reinforcement for what I wanted. and when things felt too big, i should have gone smaller. but you know small always feels like not enough. like too little too too late, that kind of thing. but that’s like… any progress is progress, and it’s precious. however long it takes and however small it is and big things start as little things right.
It doesn’t make sense to be absolutist
To answer the question– what do you do if you don’t trust yourself? you have to unpack that. What does that mean, trust yourself? to do what? Because it doesn’t make sense to talk about
trust in this absolutist, essentialist kind of, “either i am a trustworthy person or i’m not” and then it becomes moralizing, right, it becomes like i’m an untrustworthy person because i am
sinful and shitty and bad. And you spiral. Whereas, you know it’s not so much a moral problem, it’s actually more of a logistics problem and logistics are solvable.
And i know like from my personal experience playing video games– I know that I learn logistics in video games and I can execute those things and I can learn skills and get better.
but you know the thing about games is that it’s not your life so you don’t feel a sense of moral failing when you make a mistake in a video game, right. so that’s the complication. but so the
the lesson to learn is to focus on tiny wins. like you might say “i cannot trust myself whatsoever” like that’s way too broad, way too vague, way too general, and easy to disprove in tiny pockets.
the way to earn back your trust or to build trust where there was none is to do what you say
you’re gonna do. So broadly trust is I trust myself to do what I say I’m gonna do and people tend to fixate on the do part but actually half the problem, or like most of the problem, can be solved at the same part.
You gotta stop making promises that you can’t keep.
you gotta stop lying to people right, and yourself. and you gotta instead start practicing making very very small predictions about what you’re gonna do immediately. right and so and that can feel silly like. write down, i am going to do five push-ups right. A to-do list checkbox. just for the sake of it i am going to do five push-ups and then immediately go down and do the five push-ups then tick the box. it seems really trivial and pointless, but now you can say “i trust myself to say that i’m gonna do five push-ups and do them.” right? and so having done that, you have now earned a little, you know 10 cents of trust or 50 cents of trust. and then you repeat that. look around your life – i’m looking at my desk now and i’m like, okay,i am going to tidy my desk a little bit, all right for five minutes. and you have to design these things such that– you know like there’s this thing about setting smart goals which are like measurable concrete i don’t know the specific words but like just you want to design your tasks… you don’t want to be like, i’m going to do my homework today. That’s too broad, and it’s a long time scale and it’s vague, it’s open to interpretation. You want to simplify it down to like, i’m gonna spend half an hour working on the math problems from chapter three. right? Let’s conquer that, and then I’m gonna reward myself after that. I know people say things like uh, there’s this whole meme that I completely agree with which is like, you know, but you can just reward yourself right away though. That’s true. and I did that for a long time. It did feel like I was getting away with something. But over a long enough time scale you feel that the lack of trust, and the lack of self-respect is something that becomes oppressive and frustrating. if you can’t respect yourself, you know, you don’t enjoy yourself as a roommate in your head, then that tension and unpleasantness comes out in your face, it comes out in your utterances, in your body language… it just spirals out of control.
Building trust is an ongoing process
The point is not to be “i’m the most trustworthy man alive” or like “i do everything i say i’m gonna do”. Even now I don’t do every single thing I say I’m gonna do. but it’s a process. I negotiated. Whenever I feel like I haven’t been doing the things I’ve been saying, I try to suspend the project. I take a pause, I take a piece of paper from my notebook, and i’m like, what do i want to do today, that I can do today? Okay, I’m gonna spend half an hour updating the book that I’m working on. I’m gonna send out this one email. and then each small task that you set for yourself, and then you do it, it builds trust and becoming someone that you can trust is one of the most valuable things you can do with your life.
You know like it’s night and day, the people who trust themselves and the people who don’t. There are people who have blind faith in themselves, but that’s not what i’m talking about… I’m talking about this cool, calm, measured, almost sleepy casual confidence that comes from knowing that, if you say something, you’re going to make it happen.
And it can become kind of subconscious, the way you know you can type without thinking about each letter. like you can start doing things without thinking about what you’re doing and that might seem very far away for some people but I have been on that journey and I want to say that it’s possible. and you do have to believe.
I don’t necessarily think you need to believe in like this grand promise of oh everything’s going to be great like but it’s sort of more you think about how reflect on what was a part of your life a long time ago or what your state was a long time ago and how your life now is different than it was then, and just consider that all of your experience – which is real, and yours, and true… is still not the whole picture. and there’s a whole world beyond what you have seen so far. just as you know there’s a whole world– there’s other countries that you haven’t visited that you don’t know what it’s like, the cultures are different and so on.