TRUST

Yesterday we opened the door with a question.

Today it gets more personal.

TRUST is the first song on Circles Of, and that placement was intentional. If Chapter 02 is about the circles we live inside, then I wanted the first song you hear to come from one I’ve spent a very large part of my own life trying to understand.

This one was difficult to write.

The Truthbearers already know some of that. In Signal 004 we told them that I had rewritten the lyrics more times than we could count. That wasn’t an exaggeration.

It wasn’t because I didn’t know what I wanted to say. Quite the opposite. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, and every time the words landed somewhere close but not quite there, I scrapped it and started writing again.

TRUST comes from something that happened a long time ago, but also from everything that came after it. I survived something my body wasn’t really supposed to survive.

There is an obvious meaning to the word survival when something like that happens. Your heart keeps beating, you wake up, you endure countless surgeries and then finally leave the hospital. Eventually people start using words like lucky.

And you are!

But surviving something and being finished with it are two very different things. Your body remembers, and your mind never forgets. Sometimes for much longer than everyone around you does.

That is part of the circle behind TRUST.

Not the accident itself, but what happens when something that should have been a moment becomes years. When pain becomes normal enough that you stop thinking of it as something temporary. When the solutions meant to help you continue living slowly become part of the life you’re trying to continue. When everyone says it’s impossible to reach normality, and that I won’t be able to do the things I wanted to do.

I didn’t want to write a song saying that help is bad. I didn’t want to write one saying medicine is bad, doctors are bad or that there is some simple answer everyone else has somehow missed.

There isn’t.

I wanted to write about something considerably more uncomfortable than that. What happens when keeping someone functioning becomes confused with actually saving them?

That distinction became one of the hardest things to get right in the lyrics.

I kept rewriting because anger made the song too simple. Make one side the villain and suddenly everything becomes easier to explain, but that wasn’t true to my experience.

There were people trying to help.

There were systems built to help.

There were decisions that made sense at the time. And there was still a person living inside the result of all those decisions.

At some point during the writing, this stopped being about making a song sound good.

It had to feel true.

That sentence was in Signal 004 before TRUST was finished, and I don’t think I could describe the process better now.

There were nights when we stopped.

Versions disappeared, lyrics were thrown away. Parts that worked perfectly well as music were rebuilt because they didn’t carry what I was trying to say.

I have a tendency to keep pushing when something matters to me, sometimes considerably further than I probably should. This is my circle at its core; I can keep pushing myself harder and further than what is sometimes healthy, and it has hurt me countless times. But it’s also what has made a lot of things possible in my life, spanning from career to physical and mental health.

The people around me noticed that pattern even more so before I did while we were making this one.

And maybe that’s another circle in itself.

One of the lines eventually became the centre of the entire song for me.

Existing does not mean saved.

It’s a simple sentence, and it took me a long time to earn it. Because TRUST isn’t really asking whether I survived. I know that answer.

It’s asking what we mean when we say someone has been saved, helped or made whole enough to continue.

And who gets to decide when the job is done?

That’s why TRUST opens Circles Of.

Before we look at generations, technology, relationships, ageing, history or any of the larger patterns running through this Chapter, I wanted to start somewhere I couldn’t comfortably stand outside and point at someone else.

My own circle.

Which is what the story TRUST is about.

I put trust in my own body, it failed the first time. I pushed harder, to the limits of what should be possible, and every time I got a little bit closer to what I tried to accomplish, to prove them wrong.

Prove that I could walk again, I could live a life of my own choosing, and that if I choose it, I don’t need to trust my body, I only need to trust my mind.

So the lesson I learned was that my own physical journey was more dependent on my mental fortitude and strength than it was on the strength of my muscles or how far I could push my pain tolerance.

And yes, I did prove every single doctor wrong.

I shouldn’t be here, I shouldn’t be able to do the things I have done in my life.

But I did.

I’m walking, running, singing, guitar-playing evidence that the trust I finally put in myself was well placed.

Tomorrow we’ll stay there for a little while longer.

TIME gets even closer.