In life, we're bound to discover things we'd rather not.
Maybe it's the ingredients, mysterious and impossible to pronounce, in your comforting fast food order. Perhaps you overhear a partner's private conversation with a friend after you've argued. A 23andMe DNA test reveals a long-hidden family secret, and, actually, Grandpa is also Grandma’s first cousin.
For the next day, or maybe forever, you find yourself thinking, "Life was better when I didn't know this."
Difficult truths are difficult to hold, and it's even more complex when you're not really certain if what you've learned is honest. That fast food "evidence" came from a vague social media post claiming that one of those hard-to-read ingredients is derived from a material that the company will never confirm. Unless your entire family submits, the DNA testing company guesses which parts of your DNA come from which side of the family and could incorrectly attribute segments to the wrong side.
You were certain you overheard your partner say something awful and insulting, but they were in a different room, and the TV was on, and you were trying to give them space but, ultimately, you were straining to hear, and the blood rushed through your ears until everything was fuzzy and distorted. So, you ask them, and they tell you that you're wrong—they wouldn't say that, and they didn't say that.
So, now you have a choice. Do you trust yourself? Or do you trust this person who has repeatedly and unflinchingly told you that you are wrong and that you have every reason to trust them?
Sometimes, reality isn't material and undeniable. Sometimes, reality is what you decide it is.
I didn't grow up hoping to become an investigator or researcher. For Christmas, when I was 11, my parents bought me a "Spy Kit" that I only used to fingerprint door knobs in hopes of catching my sister stealing my shit. I lost the energy for it and moved on in a blissful lack of awareness.
I occasionally wonder if that path, moving forward without a deep knowing, was the key to a simple and quiet existence. Like, if I could never prove that my sister was stealing my belts and shirts from Le Château, maybe she wasn't, and maybe we'd never get in a bitch slapping fight, and maybe, 20 years later, we wouldn't have to occasionally get into it over wine. The less you know, and all that.
Sometimes, at Bullshit Hunting, we get the question, "How do you stay grounded?"
And inside the long answer is the truth that sometimes, we don't.
Sometimes, we book emergency therapy sessions or defer a task to take a nap. Sometimes, we do hours of research and take meetings and work—unpaid—to find solutions that feel better than "Well, this thing got fucked up, so fucked up it shall remain." Sometimes, we dig to see if we can't expose the root of some systemic corruption or failure, and sometimes, we get there, and the only answer is that anyone who has the power to create change is complicit. So, we try anyway, and it's sort of like trying to dig your way out of a well only to be rewarded with ten broken fingers and nails.
When I first joined the world of intelligence, I was quickly disillusioned by this barrage of information about our governments, justice and global systems. It's destabilizing to learn that we don't even need conspiracy theories.
The real story is right there—messy, public, often sort of boring. Paper trails, shell companies, policy loopholes, profit off death and illness, PR campaigns, and algorithms quietly sorting the world into categories no one voted on. You don't need to invent a secret cabal when the known mechanisms already fail people in plain sight.
There's no catharsis, no climactic twist. Just a slow realization that the systems work exactly as they were designed to, and they weren't designed for you. So, what now?
I've written about this in different shades and ultimately find my own conclusions unsatisfying—"Focus on what you can control." Sure, it helps in theory. But in practice, it feels like being told to take a magic eraser to your walls when inside, they're rotting. The phrase doesn't acknowledge the grief, the rage, the weight. Knowing something—but not enough to act with full certainty. Not enough to feel justified. Not enough to not have to wonder if really, you're just crazy.
Knowing enough to be changed by it but not enough to change it.
You don't need to make peace with uncertainty. But you do need to live with it.
It doesn't always look like confidence. It doesn't always feel good. Sometimes, it looks like ritual. Like saving articles you might never read again, but knowing they're there. Like writing a 26-page exposé that lives on your desktop. Like verifying a tiny fact just because it means something to you. Like refusing to repeat something just because it's popular, or pleasing, or easy. Like listening closely and carefully to someone you trust when they try to tell you, "That's not what I meant."
And yes, sometimes it looks like choosing to believe the version of reality that leaves the most room for connection, for repair, for forward motion. Not because you're naive but because you've seen what happens when people give up or give over.
In life, we're bound to discover things we'd rather not.
And knowing changes you. Not always for the worse.
The real work isn't to stay calm or certain, or to not be angry, or to buy a book or a meditation mat—because if we're paying attention and feeling disenchanted, we also realize this is the lie of capitalism. The work is to stay present. Not to wall off your awareness but to shape it into something useful, something that holds you upright in this interaction, here, today.
I could strive for an ending more satisfying, but I think the point is we don't have to.