Knowing

What I know is that not enough people know.

Knowing has never been simple for me. Or, when it was, I probably shouldn’t have thought I knew it. Thinking I knew everything got me into a lot of trouble.

For me, knowing is not a neat stack of facts I memorized in school; it is a whole-body sense of “this is how the world works” that lives in my memories, my nervous system, my relationships, my stories. I grew up with certain things I was supposed to know: that people deserve basic dignity and due process, that uniforms mean safety, that pulpits and classrooms mean moral clarity and care. Those weren’t just ideas; they were the backdrop of reality. And then life, in its usual rude way, kept handing me scenes that did not fit those promises at all.

Lately, watching ICE occupy neighborhoods in Minnesota has been one of those brutal reality checks. There is the part of me that still wants to believe authority is here to protect, that “law and order” is about fairness, that the people with microphones and collars and flags will stand with the vulnerable. And then there is the part of me that sees early-morning raids, hears about families terrified in their own homes, and notices the way entire communities are treated as disposable.

In recent years, especially after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, many of us have had our idea of what, who, and how our authorities are serving and protecting upended. Now, seeing officers caught between citizens and ICE agents has made things even more confusing. Those versions of “what I know” cannot be comfortably true, and my system feels that mismatch like static under my skin. That clash is not just political; it is epistemic and emotional at the same time—my map of the world arguing with what is right in front of me.

I just wrote about dialectics—how to things that seem to contradict each other can be true at the same time. They can still apply here on a micro level. Sure, an ICE agent might be a lovely human being when they’re at home and making a large order of Girl Scout Cookies. AND, on a macro level, that same ICE agent might go to work and be told to drag the parents of some of those Girl Scouts out of their homes after breaking down their front door. We all have to grapple with the disconnects that our political system is foisting on us. We all have to wrestle with all the things we know about people and why they work the jobs they work, who is in charge, what they’re told to do—and how some of them want to be doing it. We all have to agonize over how some people somehow know that other people deserve to have their homes broken into and be dragged out of their cars in order to get the “bad guys.”

I also just wrote about how our some of our leaders are lying to us. So, dialectics and knowing might also be in the trash because credibility is out the window. And we’re all victims in that respect.

Knowing as a Living Map

The more I learn about how brains work, the more “knowing” feels like a living map my nervous system has been drawing for years. Every repeated pattern etched routes and landmarks into that map. Emotional intensity acts like a highlighter; what scared me, thrilled me, or broke my heart got etched deeper than anything I just read in a textbook.

Over time, that map became my sense of obviousness: of course this is how people behave, of course this is what uniforms mean, of course this is how justice works. When reality contradicts it, it is not a small correction; it is an earthquake that sends prediction-error signals through my brain and body, insisting that the model needs updating. And, often, I can roll with a mini-quake and adjust my thinking. Because I’ve put in a lot of work to be able to do that and be flexible. To have a growth mindset instead of a rigid one.

Feeling, Thinking, Believing, Knowing

When I talk about “knowing” here, I am not just talking about having a thought. Feeling, thinking, believing, and knowing are doing different jobs inside me.

Feeling is the body’s first language: sensations and emotions that announce “this matters” before I have words for it—tight chest, buzzing skin, the weird hollow in my gut. Thinking is the part that spins stories and explanations, trying to connect dots: maybe it means this, what if it’s that, here’s why I’m probably overreacting, here’s why I’m not. Believing is when some of those thoughts harden into a settled stance, especially when community and identity get wrapped around them: this is just how people are, this is what people like us stand for. And knowing, the way I’m using it, is when belief, experience, and evidence braid together into a lived orientation—something I have tested against reality enough times that my body and brain both move as if it’s true, even when it is inconvenient.

How Emotion Sabotages (and Deepens) Knowing

Emotion sits right at the fault line. When I watch state violence dressed up as “protection,” my body does not stay neutral. There is fear: if they can do this to them, they can do this to anyone. There is rage: you do not get to traumatize children and call it safety. There is grief: the version of America, and of certain spaces, that I was told to trust may never have been real in the first place. Those feelings can sharpen my vision: I can’t unsee what I have seen. Other days they tempt me to soften what I know, to round off the edges just enough that it hurts less, because my nervous system is maxed out.

The hard part is that knowing can be sabotaged from the inside and the outside. When what I’ve been taught to know about “good authorities” slams into what I actually witness, my system generates cognitive dissonance—that horrible, buzzing “these two things cannot both be true” feeling. To get rid of that tension without changing anything, there is a strong pull toward denial, minimization, and rationalization: Maybe it’s exaggerated. Maybe they’re just following the law. Maybe there’s something I don’t understand. These moves are not just moral failures; they are pain-management strategies. If my entire identity has been built around trusting certain uniforms or people—and vilifying others, LIKE NAZIS—acknowledging their role in harm can feel like pulling the bottom brick out of the Jenga tower.

The Social Cost of Updating Knowing

And it isn’t just an internal tug-of-war. My maps were not drawn alone. Family, church, school, media, neighborhood—they all helped script what a “good person” believes about borders, law enforcement, and obedience. In many spaces, questioning those scripts gets you labeled ungrateful, dramatic, disloyal, or dangerous. Updating what someone knows doesn’t just rearrange ideas; it threatens belonging, reputation, and sometimes tangible safety. Under that kind of social pressure, skipping or ignoring knowing can look like the safer move: keep quiet, stay busy, tell yourself it’s “complicated” and stop the thought right there.

Sometimes choosing not to update knowing is due to pure overwhelm. Our nervous systems have limits. For me, the images, stories, and histories stack up, and at some point I can feel myself shutting down—scrolling, overworking, intellectualizing, numbing out. It’s not that I suddenly don’t care; it’s that my body is at capacity. In those moments, my knowing fragments. One part of me is acutely aware of harm; another part slams the door on that awareness so I can answer emails, make dinner, keep moving. That split is its own kind of suffering: living half in the truth, half in a protective fog…which is why I also wrote about compartmentalizing, so we can safely set something aside and come back to it when we have the capacity.

A Neuro‑Biopsychosocial View of Knowing

If you zoom out, it helps me to see knowing through a neuro‑biopsychosocial lens. On the neuro side, knowing lives in patterns of neural firing and prediction—my brain constantly guessing what comes next, then adjusting when it is wrong. Experience and prediction errors literally reshape networks over time, especially when emotion is involved. On the psychological side, knowing sits inside belief systems, self-talk, and meaning-making—my inner narrator explaining events, assigning blame, protecting certain identities. On the social side, knowing is co-authored by culture, power, and relationship—what my communities reward or punish, what counts as “real,” whose stories get believed. All of that means that when I say, “I know this is wrong” about something like ICE operations, I am naming a whole-system configuration: brain, body, story, and social world lining up around a judgment that has been tested against reality and my values.

The Privilege (and Inconvenience) of Self-Awareness

Sometimes I look around and think: if you are working two jobs, raising kids, managing illness, or just trying to keep the lights on, no one is handing you extra hours to sit around asking, “What do I believe? What do I actually know?” Plenty of people are kept so busy by survival that there’s almost no margin to pull back and examine the stories running the show. The system benefits from that—an exhausted, overworked population has less bandwidth to question the beliefs it’s been handed or to update its knowing when reality doesn’t match the brochure. There is a real privilege in having time, space, and psychological safety to turn inward and say, “Wait. Where did this belief come from? Do I still agree with it? Does my lived experience support what I’ve been told to know?”

And yet, for those of us who do have that access, self-awareness can feel less like a luxury and more like an inconvenience. Once we start seeing the gaps between what we were taught and what we’ve lived, many of us can’t unsee them. We notice when our work conflicts with our values, when our community normalizes harm, when our coping strategies betray what we know is true.

Awareness pulls back the curtain and then has the nerve to ask, “So…now what?” That “now what?” is where discomfort lives. Self-awareness complicates relationships, careers, faith communities, and identities that functioned “well enough” when we weren’t looking too closely. It may push us toward changes we don’t feel ready or resourced to make. On paper, being reflective looks virtuous; in practice, it can be exhausting. And so we might just opt out and say stuff like “I’m not political” or “we don’t have all the facts” or some other excuse to get out of dealing with it.

Remapping: Letting Knowing Change Me

When I talk about “remapping,” this is what I mean: the slow, painful, necessary work of letting our knowing actually change us instead of constantly ignoring it. On the brain level, it means letting new associations form—allowing our bodies to register that some uniforms now signal danger rather than safety, that some pulpits now signal harm rather than refuge. In our bodies, it means practicing staying present with the waves of fear, grief, and anger long enough that they don’t automatically push us back into denial or shutdown. Psychologically, it means rewriting our stories about ourselves: We were taught one version of reality, and now we know another, and updating our maps does not make us traitors; it makes us honest. Socially, it means renegotiating who we listen to, who we align with, and what we’re willing to co-sign in silence, even when that costs us comfort or belonging.

None of this feels clean or heroic from the inside. It feels like losing a language, or realizing the map you memorized as a kid left whole neighborhoods off the page. But there is a kind of integrity in it—a slow stitching together of our inner and outer worlds. Knowing, in this sense, is not about having the “right take”; it is about staying in real relationship with what is actually happening, even when authority figures and familiar institutions tell us to look away. It is about noticing all the ways we try to protect ourselves from that relationship, and then gently, persistently choosing to let the map update anyway. We may not be able to fix everything we can now see, but we also can’t keep pretending we don’t see it.

And…the Takeaway

All of this is also teaching me something humbling: I think I understand better now why people can’t suddenly agree with me just because I hand them information, or a story, or a statistic. Just because I say I know…and I’m right. Their knowing lives in their map—shaped by their history, their emotions, their communities, their survival strategies—and that map does not redraw itself overnight. For a lot of folks, something has to touch their own life, their own body, their own people before it crosses the line from “I’ve heard about that” to “I know this in my bones.” I don’t have to like that reality, especially when harm is urgent and ongoing, but I do have to account for it. If knowing is a whole-system shift and not just a new thought, then of course it takes time, friction, and often personal impact before someone can see what I see and recognize it as part of what they know and understand, too.