When Others Hurt You: Why One Betrayal Doesn't Cancel Every Trust

More than two hundred years ago, William Blake wrote two poems under the same title, The Chimney Sweeper. Both are about children sent up chimneys to clean them.

In the first, one boy is crying. His head has been shaved so that his hair will not fill with soot. Another boy tries to comfort him.

That night, the crying boy dreams. He sees thousands of young chimney sweeps trapped inside black coffins. Then an angel arrives with a bright key and opens them.

The boys pour out.

“Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run,

And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.”

He wakes before dawn. The morning is cold, but he feels happy and warm.

In the second poem, snow covers the ground. Against all that white stands what Blake calls “a little black thing”: another child, covered in soot.

His parents are at church. Because he still sings, they believe he is happy. They sent him into the chimneys, then took his smile as proof that they had done him no harm.

When we read the poems together, the first one changes.

The dream that seemed beautiful now feels dangerous. It helps the boy endure a life no child should have to endure. It also lets the adults around him look at his smile and tell themselves he is fine.

We wonder whether the dream itself was a lie.

Many of us read our own lives in the same way.

At first, we trust. We fall in love. We believe promises. We get excited about people, places and possibilities. This is innocence.

Then something happens.

Someone lies to us. A friend betrays us. Someone we thought we knew turns out to be a stranger. We return to the place where we played as children, but it no longer belongs to us.

After that, we become more careful. We trust people less. Maybe we become a little cynical.

Some of this is wisdom. We see dangers we could not see as children.

But then we can make another mistake. Because we now see the danger, we decide that our earlier trust and delight were foolish. We remember how easily we trusted, how excited we became, how much we hoped. We feel embarrassed by it all.

So we hold back our trust, lower our hopes and grow suspicious of delight.

We call it growing up.

But look again at Blake’s children.

The adults failed them. The church failed them. Their world sent children into black chimneys to breathe soot.

But the green field did not fail the boy who dreamed of it.

The sunlight was not the lie.

The joy he felt in his dream was not the lie.

The lie was that suffering could be harmless so long as the child still sang and smiled.

When someone hurts us, we should learn from it. We should notice danger sooner, leave when we need to, protect ourselves, and call cruelty what it is.

But we do not have to let cruelty keep taking from us.

We do not have to let one betrayal make every kindness suspicious.

We do not have to let one lie make every promise sound false.

We do not have to lose the ability to stand in a green field and feel glad.

Then we pay twice.

First, we bear the pain they caused. Years later, we may pay again, in the friendships we keep at a distance, the love we hold back, and the good moments we search for hidden danger.

Cynicism can feel like wisdom because it comes after experience.

Experience teaches us we cannot trust some people. It does not teach us to distrust everything.

Blake gives us both poems. Innocence does not cancel experience, and experience does not cancel innocence.

Perhaps growing older asks the same of us.

We cannot become innocent again. We know too much.

But what hurt us is one thing we know. It is not the only thing.

The green field was never the lie. The chimney was real too.

The mistake is to see half the world and call it the whole. The boy’s parents saw his smile but not the soot. The cynic sees the soot but not the field.

We can see the chimney and still see the green field.

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