It has been months since the Epstein files were released. And still — no one in positions of power has been held accountable. I have sat with that reality for a long time now, and I keep returning to one question: not why did this happen, but why are we still pretending it didn't?
This month, the collective energy I'm reading is one we need to name clearly: cognitive dissonance wrapped in the armor of denial. It is alive on the left. It is alive on the right. It does not discriminate by party line.
What Cognitive Dissonance Actually Does
Cognitive dissonance is not stupidity. It is not willful evil. It is the mind doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect the self from information it cannot yet integrate. When two truths cannot coexist — "I believe in this system" and "this system has done monstrous things" — the mind makes a choice. And more often than not, it chooses the belief that keeps its world intact.
Denial keeps us safe in the short term. Consciousness keeps us free in the long one.
Identity Is the Real Wound
Our political identity is often not a position we hold — it is a community we belong to. It is family dinners and Sunday conversations. It is who we thought we were. When the political party or system is threatened, the nervous system reads it as a threat to the self.
A threatened nervous system will do anything — rationalize, minimize, deflect, attack — before it will say those four terrifying words: I was wrong about this.
An Invitation, Not an Accusation
I am not writing this to tell you what to believe. I am asking you to be conscious and present with the part of yourself that refuses to acknowledge the sins of who you once admired. That refusal is not weakness. It is a wound.
I was duped too — not by the same things, not in the same ways, but I know the specific grief of learning that something I trusted was not what it appeared to be.
The collective energy this month is asking us to do something radical: to grieve the loss of the story — and to stay anyway. To remain human in the discomfort of not having clean answers.
You are allowed to have been wrong. You are allowed to feel shattered by what is being revealed. That not-knowing is not the end. It is the beginning of something more honest than what we had before.
The unseen self — the part of you that watches without flinching — already knows the truth. The only question is whether you are ready to sit with her.