Medical condition, trust not trust

I know that I am far from perfect.  Anyone who is honest about themselves will admit that they have faults.  Among my many flaws are that I do not accept compliments. gifts, or help well, and I do not have a great experience with feeling emotions. This is not an exhaustive list and are, most definitely, not my only flaws.  The first two flaws are self-explanatory and I have gotten a considerable amount better over time as I have matured and been a parent.  The third flaw, not quite as easy to understand and I have not experienced as much growth as with the other two.

I do not want to suggest that I do not feel emotions or that I do not emotionally react to situations and scenarios; I have been excessively upset, felt great joy and struggled through a variety of emotions at different times.  However, these emotions do not last long. The brevity of these reactions point to my apathy toward myself.  Although I hold firmly to the identification of my personal apathy I care a great deal about others, their pain and I have a sincere empathy for the suffering of others.

Building from this contradiction indicates my willingness to trust others.  Unless I have a reason to distrust a person I am willing to trust the veil that all people construct to keep others from seeing themselves.  This is a truth; not matter now one may plead that they are “an open book” or “wear their heart on their sleeve” they have a shield that they construct, in fact, from my experience, people who claim the previously stated cliches are less transparent as others.  I have a tendency of being able to see how translucent their veil is but I am willing to trust what people say until they show any number of reasons why they should not be trusted.  In fact, many people have found that they trust me and share excessively personal and private information about themselves because I have not broken the trust of those people they continue to be comfortable with their sharing with me, thus giving me the ability to make the previous claim about the correlation between cliches and veils.  They trust me well enough to expose themselves and make themselves vulnerable.

Personally, my trusting of others with who I am is limited.  I do not open myself up to many people and there have never been any individuals who have earned my full trust for me to withdraw my veil, there have been 4 people who were close, but that is over.  It is overly rare that I allow myself to be vulnerable and when I do allow myself to be vulnerable I do not share sensitive portions of myself easily.  I understand this flaw makes it difficult for me to have a well-rounded relationship with many people and that makes me sad.  It is not as though I do not want to share myself and be trusting of others so I can trust to share myself, but I have yet to find someone who I have grown close enough to trust, then share.  I acknowledge the Catch 22 and am willing to admit it is my fault.  I do feel good about the prospect because I do care, even this blog post exposes my soft underbelly.