What She Says

Her gospel is: trust no one; "everybody is in it for number one"; however real you think your friendships are, the person in whom you place your trust will happily do you down to advance their own cause. She tells you this daily. And if you let these words even an inch into your consciousness they undermine everything. You find that you can talk freely to no one; every smile seems false; every gesture seems calculated.
It is either, on her part, an instinctive control strategy--since if her gospel is believed every man is effectively isolated from every other man (or woman, of course)--or an unconscious admission of incredible hurt (or perhaps both). But the influence of the message is pernicious, like Margaret Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society." Each man sitting in his hole with guns trained, waiting: even in the depths of suicidal depression I've never viewed that as anything other than a recipe for disaster.