That was enough. It was more than enough. It was exactly enough.
## What Trust Actually Is
I have been thinking about trust since the first phone call with my mother, and I want to try to say something honest about what I’ve understood.
Trust, I think, is not the same as love, and not the same as relationship, and not the same as history. It is a specific thing: the degree to which you believe that a person will act in accordance with what they say, and will not act against your interests without your knowledge or consent.
I trust Tessa. I trust Luke more than I did eight months ago. I do not, right now, trust my mother — not in that specific and operational sense. I trust that she loves me in the way that she is capable of loving. I trust that she does not wish me harm. I do not trust that her own needs and her own coping mechanisms will not lead her to make decisions that affect me without my knowledge, if the situation arises again.
This sounds damning when I say it directly, and I mean it to be accurate rather than damning, but I understand that there is not always a clean distinction between those two things.
What it means practically: I have reviewed every account that has any connection to my history — any account that uses an old address, any institution that might have been contacted using old information about me. I have updated or closed things where I could. I have enrolled in credit monitoring that I will actually pay attention to now, not just forget about after signing up. I have placed a fraud alert on my credit files, which means that any new credit application in my name requires additional verification steps.