Septic Sceptic

I inherently mistrust people - people at workplace, people in relationships, strangers, and practically anybody and everybody who is not 'family'. I even mistrust my family at times. Sounds paranoid, doesn't it? I somehow feel that people always work to cause you intentional or unintentional harm, and mistrusting their every action provides me a magical shield with which I can safeguard my personal interests. It prevents me from being impulsive. I weigh the pros and cons in my head, analyze the situation and psycho-analyze the people invovled in it, before I reach a conclusion or decide on a response. Seems like a scientific experiment, done ad-hoc and distastefully. I probably am sounding egocentric and too much of a non-believer in the goodness of mankind. However, this is exactly what I have come to realize out of experience, or whatever little of it I've had so far.

It all started with the concept of a 'best friend' at school. I would, the unsuspecting and naive person that I was, place my complete trust in someone I would choose to call my best friend only to find myself 'betrayed'. They would move on nonchalantly to make friends with many more and revel in their companionship while treating me as 'just another friend', and I would be left all shattered. An instant opposition to this argument would be that the friendship above was really a child getting into one, and not a mature adult.

But as I grew older, I was into much deeper and meaninful relationships with a host of people who had varied upbringings and perspectives. But one thing that still remained a constant amidst all the change was the lack of consistency in their responses towards me. Viewed from my standpoint, despite my staying the same always, their perspective towards me kept changing with time. I guess it was the 'Theory of Relativity' at work. From my frame of reference, I was static, but the things around me transformed overnight into something unfamiliar and alien. Maybe it was my perspective that was undergoing a transformation, and much too erratically at that for comfort.

Later, I realized it was more a problem with me than anybody else. Maybe I was expecting a bit too much from others. I thought the best way to remedy that was to stop expecting altogether. A rather radical solution, but it worked nonetheless. I was a believer still, albeit a strange one - one with a null set of beliefs. The will to defend myself from the pain and anguish manifested itself first in mistrusting strangers and caught on gradually with respect to almost everyone I knew, till one fine day, I suddenly woke up to the realization that I had turned into a perpetual sceptic, an abslolute non-believer. Since then I have struggled to strike a balance between the two extremes.

I guess the urge to balance stems from the fact that both the extremes offer something unique that is desirable in all inter-personal interactions. While being a sceptic acts as your defense mechanism that is so essential for maintaining your individual identity, being a believer in goodness of mankind lends you a certain spontaneity in thought and action that is refreshing for the soul of a relationship. Where and how the equilibrium is reached varies with each individual.