The Shape of What Happened

For the first month of the new job that I started in January, I ended every night feeling as if I’d been hit by a train. It wasn’t about the work itself, which wasn’t brutal; I’d been running my own business at twenty hours a week and suddenly I was back to forty, and apparently that recalibration takes everything you’ve got. By February the fog started to lift. By March I felt like myself again — maybe even more than myself, which is a thing I didn’t expect (and I’ll write more on later).

I won’t say much about the job, because my work life and my online life need to stay in separate lanes. What I will say is this: I do investigative work for a large employer. That sounds more glamorous than it is. I am not a fed. The cases I work are far drier than whatever you’re picturing. But they’re interesting in a way I didn’t anticipate when I took the job, because it turns out I walked right back into my favorite subject: story.

Only now I’m doing something different with it.

For years, my work was about helping people construct their stories — excavating memory, sitting with painful material, helping someone find the shape of what happened to them and make meaning from it. I asked probing questions, but the questions were in service of going deeper into their version of events. The truth of their experience was never in question. That was sacred ground.

Now I deconstruct.

Someone comes to me with their account of what happened, and my job is to walk around it. Poke at it. Test how much water it holds. Then I go to the other people involved and collect their accounts, and I compare them. Sometimes the stories line up. More often they don’t — not because anyone is necessarily lying, but because memory is strange and human perception is stranger.

One person remembers every detail. Another remembers only a single expression on someone’s face. A third remembers mostly what came after, but their after-memory marks the event just as clearly. Words get misheard. The same words get heard correctly but mean different things to different people. You end up with something less like a coherent account and more like a prism… the same incident refracted into a dozen different angles of light.

And then I, as the investigator, have to decide what happened.

Doing this work with story long enough, I’ve landed on something uncomfortable, something I don’t really like but increasingly appears to be true: I don’t think there’s an ultimate truth to any incident. Not really. I think there’s what people experienced, and what they remember, and how those two things have already shifted by the time they’re sitting across from me. Truth might be a lot more subjective than I would like to think.

And yet we can’t operate that way. We can’t just shrug and say everyone’s version is equally valid and walk away. There have to be agreements about our shared reality, about what’s acceptable, about what constitutes a violation, about what the standard of evidence is. So we as investigators look for corroboration. We weigh credibility. We ask whether enough accounts, enough evidence, lines up to support the complainant’s version of events. If it does, we find it substantiated. If it doesn’t, we find it inconclusive. We make a call, knowing full well that we are not arriving at the truth. We’re arriving at the most defensible version of the truth given what we have.

What I see in miniature in my cases, I also see writ large in the world. I’ve written a lot about narrative warfare here in this substack, which is the use of narrative against a people or a country with the intention of distorting the way they see the world. Given our news, our chaos loops, I’ve long had the sense that Truth with a capital T is fracturing, that we can’t see the truth of any matter because so many nations, bad actors, even marketers are clamoring to bend it to their desires. In miniature, each case I work on might have one or ten incidents, but there is usually some agreement on the general events, something to center around. With world events, the kind of events for which we get three or more different versions… what are we supposed to make of that?

But maybe the mistake isn’t the fracturing of truth, but in believing in the first place that there is one truth.

Interested in learning how to work with me? Learn more here.

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