Trust Is a Mountain Made of Pebbles
Every lie removes one. Every truth places one. You do the math.
Note: The Burn Blog picks up what's burning. This week it's trust - how it's built, how it breaks, how we rebuild. These are reflections, not confessions. I'm good. Just thinking out loud. That's what fire is for.
Sometimes the people you carry the most pebbles for are the ones who kick the mountain over.
Not strangers. Not enemies. The ones you showed up for. The ones you defended when they weren’t in the room. The ones you protected before they even knew they needed it.
That’s the strange arithmetic of trust. Care can get rewritten as control. Loyalty can get reframed as interference. And the person who was quietly building - pebble by pebble - suddenly finds themselves standing in rubble they didn’t cause.
It doesn’t take a betrayal. Sometimes it just takes a different story being told about the same events.
Trust is not a decision. Trust is a sediment.
It builds the way a mountain builds. Not in a day. Not in a declaration. One pebble at a time. Each pebble is a moment where what someone said and what they did were the same thing. Where expectation and reality matched. Where the words and the actions lived in the same house.
A thousand pebbles make a hill. Ten thousand make a mountain. And the mountain doesn’t need to announce itself. You just look up one day and it’s there. Solid. Undeniable. Built so slowly you didn’t notice it forming.
You can’t fake a mountain. You can’t build one overnight. You can’t argue one into existence. And you can’t destroy one with a single storm.
Trust is the compound interest of consistency. Every kept promise is a deposit. Every aligned expectation is a stone. Every honest conversation, even the hard ones, especially the hard ones, adds another layer.
But here’s where it gets complicated.
Two things are true at the same time.
A mountain built pebble by pebble can withstand storms. Rain hits. Some pebbles fall. The mass holds. One bad day, one argument, one mistake, one misunderstanding. The mountain absorbs it. That’s real trust. It bends without breaking.
But there are things that aren’t storms. They’re earthquakes.
And an earthquake doesn’t remove pebbles from the surface. It cracks the mountain from underneath. Betrayal. Deception. Lies. The moment you discover that the pebbles were hollow. That what you thought was stone was painted foam.
That changes everything. Not because one thing went wrong. But because it rewrites every pebble that came before it. Suddenly you look back at the mountain and think: was any of this real?
That’s the duality of trust.
It’s the most resilient thing in the world against surface damage. A thousand small disappointments won’t kill it if the foundation is honest. You can argue. You can disagree. You can have terrible days. You can fail each other in small ways and repair it. The mountain holds.
And it’s the most fragile thing in the world against foundation damage. One foundational lie can kill it, even if every pebble on top was real. Because the lie doesn’t just break trust in that moment. It makes you question every moment that came before.
That’s why trust isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being true at the base.
You don’t need to never make mistakes. You need to never fake the foundation. The surface can weather anything. The base can’t be rebuilt once it cracks.
And distrust? Distrust is often someone who saw their own mountain crack and now assumes every mountain is hollow. They’re not lying. They’re projecting their fracture onto your foundation.
When someone tells you not to trust a person you’ve built a mountain with, ask yourself: are they seeing your mountain, or remembering their own?
Their cracks are real. But they’re theirs.
Your mountain is yours. You know what’s at the base. You put the pebbles there yourself. One by one. In the dark. In the hard conversations. In the moments nobody else saw.
Trust me.
🔻 Author’s Note
I write to remember. To walk through silence. To burn through the noise.
I also make music under three personas: Naimor (stillness), Nova Rai (fire), and Charlie C (shadow). And I built a framework called Technomysticism for staying human in the age of AI.
The Burn Blog is where I burn. Technomystic.ai is where I build. Both are the same practice: showing up, feeling what’s real, and not looking away.
🎵 Naimor / Nova Rai / Charlie C.
If you feel it, it’s real.