Tragedy and Lies
Tragedies are hard enough; lies make it all so much worse.
I wrote what I need now. I need this perspective. I need to calm down. I need to stop scrolling. I need to make sense of it. I need to learn and understand. I need to have the pleasant AI voice read this to me via the Substack app while I close my eyes and rub my hands with balm that I was given as a gift at Christmas.
But, first, a story. Since I hadn’t yet done any of that yet, my body made me stop and listen to how much it needed me to calm down.
I could tell I was getting a bit lathered up after reading the news feed. I told myself that I’d run one more armload of stuff down to my basement pottery studio before coming up to ground myself with some hand‑balming. So, I did. And somehow, like a hand that can’t help but reach for a fire alarm or drop a cell phone in a toilet, I pretty much threw a jar of pottery glaze down the staircase.
Then my system went berserk before I even reached the jar to turn it right-side-up. I started going through why it happened, how it happened, what I can do about it, how it’s not the end of the world, everything everywhere all at once. Spinning, spinning, spinning.
It showed me that sometimes I don’t need to do that “one last thing” before I take a moment to calm myself.
So, I cleaned things as best I could (thank goodness it’s a gray glaze on a gray carpet…and all water-soluble) and sent myself to my room for a time-out.
The Most Recent Tragedy
On Wednesday, an ICE officer shot and killed a 37‑year‑old woman named Renee Nicole Macklin Good in south Minneapolis, on Portland Avenue between 33rd and 34th, around four blocks from where George Floyd was murdered in 2020. And around forty blocks from where two children where murdered and twenty-one people were wounded in August at the Annunciation Church and School. Renee was a poet, a mother, a neighbor, sitting in a maroon Honda Pilot that was blocking the street during an immigration operation when ICE agents approached her with conflicting commands. As she tried to leave, one agent shot and killed her. Many of us have seen the videos of the execution. And we’re grappling with it. I’m even just grappling with how I described it, wanting to be as factual as possible in my blanket report of it.
Enough of the grappling, here’s what I saw next. By the time many of us even saw her name, there were already split‑screen narratives in circulation. Federal officials and the Trump administration said the officer acted in self‑defense and described her actions as a kind of domestic attack that happened in this made-up scenario that involved pushing vehicles out of nonexistent snow, while state and local leaders openly challenged that account and called for a criminal investigation based on the video and eyewitness reports. Minneapolis Public Schools cancelled classes for the rest of the week, citing “incidents around the city,” as ICE’s presence expanded and protests and vigils grew in the same city that has not yet finished metabolizing everything that followed George Floyd’s killing. Or the mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School. Or, or, or.
For many of us, this news landed like a flashback rather than a fresh story. That’s not melodrama; that’s how layered trauma works.
Our Nervous Systems Remember
At this point in Minnesota, “breaking news” about state violence does not land on a blank slate; it lands on brains that still hold the images of George Floyd pinned beneath a knee and a city on fire under a pandemic sky. Trauma research shows that the amygdala—our threat detector—learns from patterns and context, not just facts; similar streets, sirens, and phrases can trigger the same cascade of fight‑flight‑freeze-fawn, even if we are safe in that exact moment. Can I envision 34th and Portland? Maybe. Can I envision 38th and Chicago? Absolutely.
So when another killing by an official happens less than a mile from the site of a previous global‑headline killing by an official, many of us don’t say, “Ah, another distinct event with its own legal and factual questions.” We say, “Here we go again. We live in a place where this happens.” That’s the neuro part of the neuro-biopsychosocial model: a sensitized alarm system, bodies that tighten and startle more easily after repeated exposures to threat and threat‑adjacent news.
The bio part is the cortisol and adrenaline that flood when we see the headline, the clip, the still frame—whether we’re at a kitchen table or doomscrolling in bed. Over time, repeated surges without adequate rest and repair can shift immune function, sleep, digestion, pain, and fatigue, even if we were never physically at the scene of any of these events. The social part is the way our group chats light up, the school closures, the protests, the unspoken rules about what “good” people are supposed to say or do in the first 24 hours.
Put together, that’s a system—our system—trying to update its map of the world fast enough to keep us safe. And sometimes, like my hand seeming to hurl a jar of glaze down a stairwell before I knew what it was doing, it overshoots. Okay, I should fact-check that, it was more of a bobble. But it felt like a hurl.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
When tragedy strikes again, the inner myths from earlier Fact‑Check Fridays don’t arrive as neat bullet points; they arrive as a chorus in our heads. Or in all the words I’ve linked to past articles:
If we keep scrolling, we’ll feel safer. Or more in control.
This proves the world is collapsing. It’s all falling apart.
If we don’t say something right now, we’re complicit. We should be sure to state our position.
Everyone is talking about this version of events, so it must be true. Whatever the version might be.
From a neuro-biopsychosocial lens, each one is a meaning‑making attempt under pressure. Our brains want closure; they want a coherent story more than they want a perfectly accurate one, especially when our bodies are already in a stress response and the social environment is loud and polarized.
Negative pathways are the easiest for us to access right now, because repetition lays down thicker myelin on the “of course everything is terrible” routes. I learned this from Mary, one of my eating disorder therapists, who told us about how our lizard brains are always scanning for threats, though what counts as threats has changed since the time of cave-dwelling to this era of hyper-connectivity. Still, it was a relief to know that I wasn’t defective by tending to go negative in my immediate thoughts and reactions to, well, most things.
After years of pandemic dread, political vitriol, and violence statistics inching across the screen, pessimistic interpretations are not personal failings; they are well‑worn neural habits reinforced by a media landscape that rewards outrage and fear. We know that doomscrolling during events like this has been linked with more anxiety, low mood, and trauma symptoms, and it especially impacts people who already carry earlier traumatic experiences.
The Cost of the Lies We’re Told
Imagine this (I know we don’t have to…we’ve seen it): someone stands at a podium and tells a story about what happened on a Minneapolis street. We’ve seen the video from multiple angles. We know what the street and block looked like, where unmarked official vehicles were, who was standing and walking where, and what the victim’s vehicle was doing when the shots were fired. We know what happened after. And yet the story coming out of their mouth does not match what all of us can see with our own eyes.
I’m going to refer to all of us as having one nervous system for the purpose of explaining it, but of course we all experience it differently. For the sake of the article, let’s just say that our nervous system does not take these contradictions lightly.
When words and evidence collide, our body tends to read it as a threat or an error message, not just “spin.” The lie isn’t happening in a vacuum; it’s happening in our already‑loaded context—George Floyd, the pandemic, years of hearings and press conferences where reality and language have been in open conflict. So when someone says, “She was using her vehicle as a weapon,” and the video shows her stopped and waving them through; or, “We feared for our lives,” and the footage shows distance and time to move, that mismatch hits our system in neuro-biopsychosocial layers.
First, the stress hits. Heart rate ticks up. Jaw tightens. Shoulders creep toward ears. Maybe we feel hot, wired, nauseated. Part of us is tracking the content, and part of us is locked on the discrepancy: “That is not what I am seeing.” Even if we’re watching from a chair miles away, our body is treating that moment like a social danger—because it is. If people with power can stand in front of us, in front of the world, and describe purple as green while pointing at the same video, what does that mean for our safety, our sanity, our ability to trust anything? And, when this is a core characteristic of this administration well beyond this example and tragedy, how does that affect us?
Then comes the scanning. We replay the clip. We pull up another outlet. We re‑read the quote. We go back to our memory of the street, the intersection, the timeline. We watch their face: Do they look ashamed? Smug? Flat? We are trying to reconcile two realities: the one in the footage and the one in the statement. That costs energy. It’s the mental equivalent of having to correct for bad map directions every few blocks; we can do it, but it wears us down.
Layered on top of that is history. Most of us are not meeting this lie fresh. We’re remembering other press conferences, other “independent reviews,” other times we watched video and then watched the official story bend itself into pretzels to avoid saying what the video showed. Our nervous system pulls those files up automatically. That’s why one more obvious lie can feel like ten lies at once; it’s stacked on a pile.
What Lies Do to Us
Lies are not just “untrue sentences”; they are social and biological stressors. They:
Lies undermine prediction. Our nervous systems rely on patterns to feel safe. When someone lies, especially a person or institution that affects our health, money, or literal safety, it scrambles those patterns and makes the world feel less predictable. Add to that the legion of people who believe—and parrot—those lies, something I hadn’t predicted each time I encounter one of them. Every use of the word “illegals” by someone I know is a slap to my senses. Perhaps I could have predicted some of it, but was in denial and didn’t want to.
Lies strain trust circuits. Each discovered lie nudges our internal settings toward suspicion and hypervigilance. Over time, that doesn’t just apply to the liar; it can generalize, making it harder to trust anyone, which is isolating and exhausting. I feel it when I worry if I’m becoming a conspiracy theorist as I shake my fist at the sky.
Lies prolong activation, thereby closing our windows of tolerance. If we suspect we’re being lied to but can’t prove it, the system often stays “revved”—replaying conversations, catastrophizing, waiting for the other shoe to drop—rather than completing a stress cycle and settling. Emily and Ameilia Nagoski talk about the importance of completing a stress cycle in their book Burnout, which you can see them talk about here. Lies require us to rely on distress tolerance over and over.
From a fact‑checking perspective, this is why accuracy matters so much in crisis moments, and why gaslighting is so corrosive. When we are already activated, deliberate deception or slippery framing doesn’t just mislead us cognitively; it keeps our nervous systems stuck in conflict mode, searching for solid ground that keeps moving. Fact‑checking is one way we try to give ourselves that solid ground back, even if the reality we land on is painful.
The Grind of Being Lied to Repeatedly
Over time, this is where trust and health start to take hits. If people in power keep insisting that what we see is not what happened, our system learns a bitter lesson: “My perception is not going to be honored here.” Some of us respond by doubting ourselves (“Maybe I am missing something”), which is its own kind of nervous‑system wear and tear. Others respond by hardening: “Fine. I won’t believe anything any of you say.” Either way, our baseline shifts toward more vigilance, less ease, more late‑night scrolling and tight‑chested arguments in our own heads.
This is why fact‑checking matters so much in moments like this. It’s not just an intellectual exercise; it is a form of nervous‑system care. Comparing their words to the footage, to the timeline, to other reporting is a way of saying to ourselves, “No, you’re not crazy. What you’re seeing is real. The mismatch is in the story, not in your brain.” When the tape and the talking points don’t line up, fact‑checking helps us locate the lie outside of our own bodies, instead of swallowing it as self‑doubt.
Lies are particularly problematic here not only because they distort the public record, but because they demand that our bodies live in a constant split‑screen: evidence on one side, official narrative on the other, with our nervous system stuck in the middle trying to hold both. Every time we do that, our muscles tighten a little more, our window of tolerance narrows a little, and it gets just a bit harder to feel at home in a world where people can watch the same video and tell two incompatible stories about what happened.
Changing How We Think About It
I get it. “Remapping neural pathways” can sound grand and distant, but in weeks like this it’s as ordinary as what sentence we choose after “Of course.”
“Of course we’re rattled; a woman was killed by ICE down the freeway from us” lands very differently than “Of course we’re overreacting; we should be used to this by now.” The first makes room for our reaction; the second quietly cuts it down.
“Of course we want to read everything; our brains are trying to make sense of chaos” is not the same as “Of course we can’t put our phones down; we’re addicted to tragedy (or fill-in-the-blank).” One names a survival strategy that might need a boundary; the other turns it into a character flaw.
Here, fact‑checking isn’t about talking ourselves into serenity or forcing a meaning like “everything happens for a reason.” It’s about setting the story next to what our bodies and the facts are actually telling us.
Our hearts are pounding and our jaws are clenched; that shows our systems are on high alert, not that the world is literally ending right now. Officials are openly contradicting one another; that tells us the story isn’t settled yet and any certainty we feel might be premature.
Honesty sounds like: “We live in a country where a federal agent just killed a woman in her car near where George Floyd was murdered and where a mass shooting happened at a school and church; that tells us something real about power and risk here.” Honesty also sounds like: “We also live in a place where people are gathering to grieve, demand accountability, bring food, hold signs, write articles, and try again to make this less likely, even if it feels futile sometimes.”
Neither cancels the other out. Both belong on our map. And it’s all about living the dialectics, where two things can exist at the same time though they seem to contradict each other. Because they do, and we need to be able to carry on.
Remapping to Carry On
The neighbors who instinctively run toward the sound to help instead of away. The teachers who sit with teenagers whose classes were cancelled and help them name what they’re feeling instead of just what they’re reading. The families in Minneapolis who are bringing groceries to people who don’t feel safe leaving their homes. The part of me that decides, after the glaze explodes and my heart rate spikes, to go rub balm into my hands and listen to a calm voice instead of refreshing the live feed.
Those aren’t toxic‑positivity moves; they’re micro‑acts of remapping—of pairing a frightening context with a slightly kinder narrative and a regulating behavior. Distress tolerance.
We clearly (and unfortunately) need to continue with our lives during times of turmoil. The world isn’t stopping to let us sort this out. And the absurdity of “business as usual” is that our nervous systems don’t actually go back to usual; they adapt. Some of that adaptation is harmful—hypervigilance, numbness, cynicism, compassion fatigue. Some of it can be quietly protective, if we participate in it on purpose:
We can set a limit on violent video replays and choose one or two written sources to follow, even when we’re tempted to check them every five minutes.
We canlet our systems complete stress cycles—walking, crying, shaking, kneading clay, washing gray glaze out of a gray carpet—rather than locking all that activation behind our eyes.
We can name, out loud or in a journal, the story our brains are telling (“This proves nothing will ever get better”) and ask, “Is that 100 percent accurate, or just 100 percent loud right now?”
And sometimes, “carrying on” means doing exactly what I will do. When I hit “publish,” I’m sending myself to my room again, putting balm on my hands, closing my eyes, and letting a calm voice read me something I wrote for myself and for whoever else needs it.
That’s not checking out. That’s one small, stubborn act of remapping in a city, and a world, that keeps giving our nervous systems new reasons to spin.
The Impact of Truth
I don’t want to ignore the importance of truth—not just the absence of lies—to being able to carry on. It seems like it should be obvious, but I don’t think it is. The more we hear the truth, the better we’ll feel. It’s not all sunshine and daisies, no, but it’s crucial.
When truth lands in our bodies, it can feel like both a punch and a deep breath. Hard truths about violence and racism can spike distress in the short term—more intrusive thoughts, anger, grief, tight chests, buzzing nerves—especially when they confirm patterns we already feel in our bones. At the same time, finally being able to name what is happening, instead of being gaslit or told we’re “overreacting,” can ease a different kind of strain: the exhausting work of constantly doubting our own perception. Truth asks our nervous systems to stop pretending, which hurts, but it brings what we see, feel, and know into alignment, and bodies generally do better with painful coherence than with ongoing contradiction.
For me, as a white woman about 40 minutes away from where this happened, that truth lands differently than it does for the people most at risk. I can feel outraged, heartsick, activated; I can lose sleep, cry, write, pace, and it will still be true that my race and zip code buffer me in key ways. That truth can shake my worldview, call me to responsibility, and push me toward action and solidarity, but it usually doesn’t change whether I go for a walk after dark, whether I call 911, or whether I am read as “dangerous” or “deportable” when I drive past what might be a federal vehicle.
For people who more closely fit the target of this kind of violence—whether visually and racially profiled, immigrant, undocumented or perceived‑as‑undocumented neighbors—the same truth sits in a different part of the body. It confirms a chronic, embodied fear: this really is how power operates here, and it really could be me or someone I love next. Each confirmed incident adds to a cumulative load of racial and state‑based trauma and further erodes any remaining trust in systems that claim to protect them. Truth does not democratize impact; it reveals it.
In a neuro-biopsychosocial sense, some of us use truth mainly to adjust our perspectives and politics, while others have to use it to renegotiate, over and over, how to stay alive.
The truth is, I have the privilege to be safe and angry. To throw glaze down the stairs and go rub my hands with balm as I calm down and rock in my chair. To sleep, knowing I’m okay.
And I guess I’ll have to cover the guilt that just rose in my chest in an upcoming article.