THE SKELETON KEY TO DOUBTING CASTLE

I am 100 percent sure you know this feeling.

Your only thought is "What should I do?" Or "How should I do it?". You feel like confined in a tight space, in the dark, frozen. Like a prisoner in a hostile dungeon.

If you are in such a dire strait, welcome to the point of perhaps return. Readers of Les Misérables may recognize this place as the Toulon Penal Colony, while readers of The Pilgrim's Progress refer to it as Doubting Castle.

But worse than the cold and the dark and the confinement is the warden, AKA Javert, AKA Despair. He is a tall and broad-shouldered gentleman with piercing eyes, who does not care for his prisoners and seeks to make their stay as dire as possible.

However, the warden may be defeated: One Jean Valjean succeeded in fleeing the Toulon Penal Colony, and pilgrims imprisoned in Doubting Castle did not only escape successfully, but have also proved to slay Despair.

Even though there are keys to the dungeon and swords to kill the warden, some prisoners prefer to stay within the dark and cold walls of doubt, menaced by their captor, as if they were tied together with the knots of Stockholm syndrome.

My own inner Javert/Despair is "whether others can be trusted or deceive me". I am so naive and socially challenged that I can't tell a truth from a verbal prank from a lie. Often I wish that I was a "living lie detector", like the hero of Lie to Me. I wonder where one can receive courses in lie detecting training. And this attitude leads obviously to fear of asking.
But, of course, it's far cozier to get back to my usual isolation and be completely self-reliant, fear of asking and all. To be reluctant to change one's ways. And this has nowadays become a pain in the neck to me.