Facets of Love | The Story of Trust Issues

Dearly Beloved,

It’s nice to create a post again after a while! These posts may not be as consistent as the YouTube videos, but that doesn’t make them any less valuable or necessary since they provide a way to create an invaluable connection between me, Chasmic Desist, and you. Today’s post is no different. As we delve deeper into the story of trust issues, why it’s illustrated the way that it is, and how I chose to bring it to life, you may discover more secrets about the poem as well as yourself.

The Creation of Trust Issues

First, this iteration of Trust Issues is the second go-around version. If you’ve experienced Chasmic Desist during its original journey, then it is vastly different from what it used to be. This is also true when it comes to the overall meaning, purpose, and poetry. To understand the meaning, I first need to describe its source.

For any meaningful design, it’s important to find, trigger, and control particular memories and associated emotions within myself such that I can elicit an inspirational, yet therapeutic response. In the case of trust issues, I turned towards past interpersonal relationships between myself and family members, friends, and lovers in the context of feeling unloved, betrayed, silenced, and belittled. In a different regard, I also turned towards my own tumultuous intrapersonal relationships with different aspects of myself (my inner child in particular) where I ignored calls to be healed, neglected the need for boundaries, believed that I was the primary reason for many negative situations and didn’t have the adequate ability to fix them, and repeated cycles of constantly seeking love when there was none to be found. As a result of these memories, the following emotions and concepts arose:

Sadness	Dying Flowers	Love	Worthlessness
Grotesque	Thorny Rose	Hate	Nothingness
Betrayal	Vile	Blame	Loneliness
Malevolence	Hopelessness	Delusion	Ignorance

After I had established this set of connections, I had to understand how to connect the design with other people while also correlating its illustration and/or poem to how I and others could have or have healed. Additionally, it was (and still is) essential that no piece of art had a source purely rooted in negativity since such a stance always proved to limit and dilute value, creativity, and beauty. I needed to make sure I was adequately healed and coming from a place a nurture, positivity, and love prior to planning the sketch. As such, I was able to properly align the connections and memories with the negative emotional situation known as trust issues. This then allowed me to depict it in a way that embodied what it meant for a heart to protect itself by using parts of itself to form and feed something that would protect it from both internal and external harm, even after someone’s healing process was either complete or in the process thereof.

The pictures above showcase the progress I made in terms of creating the design. The next section goes into brief detail on how the design encompasses the two primary facets of love.

Trust Issues and the Facets of Love

To correlate Trust Issues and love, love can be generalized into two sides: light and dark. Both the light and dark sides of love are needed in order to heal and grow since both sides have lessons to teach, bridges to cross, and obstacles to conquer. Trust Issues can correspond to each side by also splitting it into two sides: love and blame. Specifically, loving yourself and blaming yourself. The points below go into detail about the meaning of each side.

1. Trust Issues | Blame Me

   To encapsulate the dark side of love, the “Blame Me” side of Trust Issues embodies the self-hate and self-blame aspects of people that stem from thoughts that make one feel like it’s their fault they can’t be loved, were betrayed, were violated in some way, or were never able to protect themselves because they were never strong enough to do so. As a result, people could end up shutting off their emotions so they won’t have to feel such things again, steep themselves in depression, or live in complete distrust of nearly everyone. Consequently, their inner child and other important aspects of themselves are ignored and left unhealed. Nevertheless, despite the dark side of love partially portraying this reality, it also serves as a teacher in that it helps you to realize that you can’t ignore your problems, not everyone is for you, and prioritize yourself first (i.e. be selfish in that you make sure you’re good and love yourself enough first before giving yourself to others).

2. Trust Issues | Love Me

   The light side of love in terms of healing from trust issues is simply loving yourself more than you or anyone else has in the past. In particular, it is loving yourself to the extent that you acknowledge, accept, heal, and nurture all aspects of yourself that you ignored, in addition to acknowledging how beautiful you truly are. Moreover, it encompasses the amount of self-love that garners a level of self-respect that prevents you from overextending yourself by establishing clear boundaries in order for you to live your life to the fullest. You trust yourself enough to protect your space and let it grow wondrously due to the amount of love you have for yourself.

The poem for this design describes these facets in addition to other concepts that you must discover yourself. Furthermore, a YouTube video has already been made that goes into further detail about the sides of love and their respective relationships with Trust Issues.

The next section finishes off this blog post by describing how and why I went about creating the photos and videos for Trust Issues.

Bringing Trust Issues to Life

For the self-blame aspect of Trust Issues, the all black attire I wore in the video and photos, in conjunction with my more solemn attitude, symbolizes the shadows in the heart and the seriousness of it all that begets the inner turmoil, darkness, and harsher lessons associated with the dark side of love. On the other hand, the “Love Me” side is showcased in the majority white video and photos where I was more carefree, calm, joyful, and light in order to depict how much loving yourself can free you from your own inner darkness. The full Trust Issues video highlights the key aspects of each side of love and how both need to be balanced in order to fully protect your heart, trust in yourself, and grow. Each video’s music helps to accentuate the meaning of each aspect of the design. The videos from the Poetry Book have been placed here for your convenience.

Although this is a longer post, I do believe that it was necessary to clear things up in order to better connect with you all. If you have reached this far, then I hope that you found something useful and that we have reached a greater level of understanding as a community!

Love Always,

Keyshawn