During the past few years I found myself doubting what I knew I knew. Not the small things you forget, but the settled things. The things you learn by living a life, by doing the work, by watching how people actually behave. That kind of knowing used to feel like solid ground. Then in about five years ago it suddenly didn’t, and I started second-guessing my own memory, my own judgment, and my own eyes.
I blame myself for part of it. I let the noise get too loud. I listened too long to people who spoke with absolute certainty but were entirely unaware, I scrolled too far, I argued in places where no one was even listening. When you hear something repeated enough times, even when you know better, a little crack forms. I stopped checking what I knew against what I had lived, and started checking it against what everyone else seemed to be saying. That was a mistake.
I don’t only blame myself. I blame the people who learned how to make that crack wider. The ones who discovered that if you can make a man doubt his own lived experience, you can sell him anything — a fear, a product, an enemy, an identity. They didn’t have to convince me I was wrong; they only had to convince me that I couldn’t be sure I was right. That confusion is profitable, and plenty of people have built a whole business model out of it.
By the way, I didn’t take it; I never would. I’m not that ill-informed or unaware and I didn’t fall for it. It was a ridiculous time. I’m finding my way back now from the farce that was a so-called “pandemic,” not to blind certainty, but to a better kind of trust. I trust what I have seen over time more than what I am told in the moment. I trust the people who have shown up in my actual life more than the voices who only show up on a screen or from time-to-time to validate what they did. I still get it wrong sometimes, but I no longer apologize for knowing what I know. And I never will again.
“If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” – Vincent Van Gogh
Being About The Journey 