trust seems to be an oddly visceral, yet completely shape-less and slippery concept.

we tend to think we have a sense for how we “trust” people or things, that we actually have a sense of what trusting entails; what it feels like. we tend to think we find it in people, behavior, or words, in institutions or fancy documents & signatures.

a loaded notion that relies on belief and expectation, it engages both hope and dependence; sureness and obligation; it is performed through assumptions and actions, both conscious and unconscious.

these assumptions are based on our beliefs and experiences, rather than any real “trustworthy” attribute. what we trust and how we trust, evolves in relation to what we do and what we take to be given about experience. trust lies less in objects and others, and more often in what is unintelligible or unnoticed. explicitly, through what produces comfort. security. certainty.

trust feels like being surefooted, but hinges upon the wavering, ever evolving conditions of complex relationality. read: trust involves relations. but emerges from our choices and beliefs, of which are shaped, and shape, our relations. trust is personal, but shape-shifting and dependent. entangled in the histories of affective memory’s past/present/future.