So Me, my Trust Issues, & Cleo Sol walk into a bar…

What percent of yourself do you give to people?

My mom presented this concept to me years ago, and we’d have long discussions about it. It’s this idea that for everyone in your life, you implicitly give them only so much of your authentic self. For instance, your parents may get 60-70% of you, whereas your best friend may get 90%. The concept has always stuck with me because it’s a perfect barometer for my trust-levels.

I used to pride myself in the fact that I’m always my authentic self, and I give roughly the same high percentage of me to everyone I know. I hate code switching; putting on a face or a front of a personality depending on the social situation. Though I’m good at it if needed, I’ve never liked having to suppress a certain aspect of myself for the sake of being liked. So I personally made it a point to be the same person no matter if it’s a college professor, a close friend, or a grandparent. But somewhere along the way, I realized that for the sake of my trust issues and my own comfort, I removed vulnerability from that definition of authenticity all together.

I have a hard time trusting people because I have a history of being scorned. I’ve had “friends” take my feelings and emotions that I shared with them in confidence, only to have it weaponized against me for the sake of winning an argument. I’ve done people a thousand favors only to be ghosted when it was finally me who was in a time of need. After a while, for the sake of self preservation, I’ve just stopped believing that people had my best interests at heart. I stopped being open about my mental health, stopped being transparent when things bothered me, stopped being vulnerable about most of my life experiences all together. I began to only trust people about as far as I could throw them. 

So when it came to the question of what percent of me do I give to people, I managed to convince myself that I was giving around 90-100%, when my lack of vulnerability really made it about 75%. I recognized that I can’t go on sharing some cherry-picked aspects of my mental health and pretend like that suffices as “being vulnerable”. To reference my favorite film in Shrek, if I’m an Ogre & I have layers, I need to learn how to peel them back.

But my rationale only worsened this past December when my mother passed away. Since then, my trust issues have only been exacerbated. To be fully transparent, my psyche has been morphed to: “If I could lose the sole person in my life that I felt was a ‘forever thing’, then why the hell would I trust that literally anyone else isn’t just as temporary she was?” It’s more than likely the root of my communication woes lately. I’ve pulled back from all my loved ones as I try to fully rationalize how I’m supposed let love in again, when I know it could be ripped away from me like the most important person in my life was.

Then I started listening to some Cleo Sol.

I swear that this correlates, bare with me.

If you’re unfamiliar, Cleo Sol is an R&B/Soul singer from the UK that makes some of the best music I’ve ever heard in my life. Not only are her harmonies amazing and her in-house production some of the best in the business, but her pen as a writer is simply phenomenal. Like many, I was introduced to her through her debut album ‘Rose in the Dark’. In the midst of her very relaxing love songs, she’s always managed to work in some lines or a verse that mattered more than just for the purpose of singing along. 

Like on “Why Don’t You”, she sings in the first verse “You wanna help your friends, but trust me baby, you don’t owe them. Don’t take on people’s problems.” Sure she’s basically singing to her partner in the song, but the advice hits us listeners nonetheless and feels very pure & true. She has a similar effect on “Butterfly”, where she pens:

“I see you, body full of hate

Crying out for someone to save the day

I tell you God makes no mistakes

Your time will come, have faith

You watchin’ others so hard

So much so you forgot to pray to the Lord

You’re so phased by the outside world

Don’t forget, your peace lives within”

“Butterfly” – Cleo Sol (2020)

Though Cleo is likely singing to someone specifically, it feels like “if the shoe fits, where it.” And I’m the furthest thing from a religious man, but if the message is to be patient and have faith that good is coming to you as it has for others, then that’s a sentiment that transcends belief for me. 

Now I don’t bring up Cleo Sol’s writing ability out of random appreciation, its because her album “Mother” has been instrumental in my process of healing & growth in the face of my personal adversity; particularly when it comes to trust.

At first it was track 11, “Know That You Are Loved.” The song is practically a lullaby, as she sings the lines “Know that you are loved, even when you don’t love yourself.” It’s ever so simple, but with her soft yet powerful voice and the soothing melody of the piano to accompany it, the song truly cracks open the floodgates of my tear ducts when I need it. I’ve struggled with the concept of self-love and my lack thereof for years now, but this has directly helped my heavy moments of low spirits countless of times now. I’ve practically added those lines as a mantra to help me get by.

Then there’s “Don’t Let It Go To Your Head”, another song I’ve learned to cherish. Singing about killing your own ego and managing self doubt, she just has a healing energy in her voice that is truly refreshing. With the perfect touch of guitar high notes in the background, we hear:

“Don’t let it go to your head, life ain’t all that it seems /

You are never alone, even when nobody can see /

You’ve gotta wait your turn, to set yourself free /

I know that you got burnt, but nothing’s stopping you”

“Don’t Let It Go To Your Head” – Cleo Sol (2021)

Though the project came out last year, it wasn’t until a few months ago that all her music truly began connecting with my soul (as corny as that may sound), giving me messages I so desperately needed to hear in my life. Though it’s the opening track on this album, “Don’t Let Me Fall”, that has hit me in a time that I’ve needed it the most. 

She sings about someone who lost their mother at a (likely) young age, how that person built up all these walls around them to survive, and she’s trying to convince them to finally let love in again. Its almost as if the song were made directly for me & my situation. At first I thought it was these lines in the second verse that were almost too poignant, “The train never stopped / Never had time to unpack your trauma / Keep fighting the world, that’s how you get love, mama”. But it ended up being this portion of the bridge that has hit me to my core:

“Love is a sacrifice, I know that you’re hurting /

Nothing replaces a mother’s love,

It’s irreplaceable, oh /

If there’s no one to love, you can never lose /

‘Cause the only one you care about is you /

You can stay in the dark, but you gotta choose”

“Don’t Let Me Fall” – Cleo Sol (2021)

From top to bottom, these lines & this song are saying all of the things that I don’t want but absolutely need to hear. Despite all my best efforts in leaning on the women in my family, nothing comes close to the love my mom had for me. I’ve truly been living by that mindset of “If there’s no one to love, you can never lose”. It’s entirely flawed, yet even so, operating this way the past few months has kept me safe. I can’t get hurt if there’s nothing here to hurt me.

But as much as I hate to accept it, love is truly a sacrifice. I have to come to grips with the fact that I can never have real relationships with family and friends if I never truly let anyone in. Though I can’t replace my mom, I can surely try to embrace the love around me. To really bear my soul & finally feel understood by those that I love, maybe that’s worth the possibility of it all falling apart. Trusting people is hard, but I guess that’s just life.

In the face of all my sad & melancholy playlists, it’s quite funny to me that a Cleo Sol album of all things is what’s really been helping me evolve my mindset. I’m just trying to learn how to be vulnerable, and maybe writing weird pieces like this is the beginning of me achieving just that. I just know that I want to be 100% of my authentic self with people some day. Hopefully sooner than later.