The Dark Roads of Trust and Its Ghosts

I travel down dark streets through Thailand at night. There are no police patrols, no one to call if something goes wrong. Vehicles speed closely past me that I can feel the wind shift across my skin.

Am I being held together by rust and a prayer?

The road is a kind of battleground … not just disarray from broken machines, but from the emotional wreckage behind the wheels.

Including myself.

Trust isn’t just absent, its upended. To trust, means to invite harm and welcome the possibility of betrayal. Letting down my guard would be like driving blindfolded. I walk unarmored, unprepared into a fight I didn’t start, and one I can never win.

I can feel the layers of armor I have putting on over the years. There were times I thought I had shed some of it, peeling it away layer by layer, piece by piece. Yet my antennas are up; I remain on high alert.

I stay ready.

Even if nothing comes, and sometimes nothing does. The weight of the readiness does not lift.

I carry it mile after mile, day after day, and it’s exhausting.

The Tension: “Just Let It Go”?

I want to be able to let go of some of this armor and begin to trust again. There are days when I can feel it loosening, when I can breathe a little easier.

However, recent events have reminded me how quickly trust can turn with every small betrayal. They keep me wary and armored once again. It’s not just the memories of past hurts. It’s here too in the present. In new faces and old patterns.

Another betrayal. More silence, where there should have been transparency and honesty.

I thought my father’s illness would strip things down to what mattered in the family, an opportunity to bring people closer. For a time, I believed old distances could close. That we could meet, not as we had been, but as we needed to be for him.

I opened myself, carefully, like loosening a seam that had been stitched shut for too long. But the familiar disappointments returned — quiet and relentless. Trust doesn’t only break loudly; sometimes it just erodes, a slow wearing away of hope over time.

Yet, I live in a contradiction … wanting to soften and be open … while needing to brace myself for the worst.

The armor I have worn, and shed, and worn again – has never been about my strength. It has always been about my own survival.

And I know, surviving is not the same as living.

Can Trust & Loyalty be Bought?

It leaves me wondering what trust even means when it has a price tag attached.

Living in Thailand has added a new layer to this experience. Here, trust and loyalty can feel transactional — not something built slowly over time, but something bought and sold. The role men play is often defined as economic provider. For foreigners, that expectation is turned up even higher.

I’ve been told that men can “buy” a woman’s loyalty – with monthly allowances, with gifts, with the constant offering of financial security. It’s a very different concept than what I grew up with in the West, where loyalty and trust were supposed to be built slowly, like feeding a piggy bank one coin at a time. And when betrayal happened, the piggy bank of trust wasn’t just cracked, it shattered. Trust is emptied completely.

Here, trust feels more fragile.
More tied to money. 

Maybe that’s why it feels safer to stay armored.
It’s hard to trust what can be bought and sold.

The Cost of Armoring

I am paying the cost of wearing this armor. It’s heavy. Slowly wearing me down. It shows up in ways I don’t always notice – in my hesitation to trust again, in second guessing myself and the constant feeling that I have to watch my back.

It’s keeping me from living the kind of life I want, one where I can breathe easily and not be on guard all the time.

The armor, the distrust, keeps me safe. But also keeps me distant.
Alone.
Once again, I am tired of carrying it.

Sometimes it’s hard to know whether I’m inside a legitimate protection mechanism or if I am stuck in a pattern I don’t know how to step out of.

Yet every time I try to loosen up, to begin opening, to love and trust again, something happens to remind me why I put it on in the first place.
It’s not just old stories playing in my head.
It’s the reality that even now, not everyone is safe. Not everyone can be trusted.

I have been able to release some of this armor before in my life.
I know trust can be built again.
It will take patience and time.
I want to believe I don’t have to live armored forever.

But for now, I will carry it.
Because for now, it’s what I know.