The subtle act of not giving a fuck

eyewitness testimony isn’t necessarily taken seriously in court cases
—but our brain functions in a horribly biased way.
How so? Well, our brain is always trying to make sense of our
current situation based on what we already believe and have already
experienced. Every new piece of information is measured against the
values and conclusions we already have. As a result, our brain is
always biased toward what we feel to be true in that moment. So
when we have a great relationship with our sister, we’ll interpret most
of our memories about her in a positive light. But when the
relationship sours, we’ll often come to see those exact same memories
differently, reinventing them in such a way as to explain our presentday
anger toward her. That sweet gift she gave us last Christmas is
now remembered as patronizing and condescending. That time she
forgot to invite us to her lake house is now seen not as an innocent
mistake but as horrible negligence.
Meredith’s fake abuse story makes far more sense when we
understand the values in which her beliefs arose. First of all, Meredith
had had a strained and difficult relationship with her father throughout
most of her life. Second, Meredith had had a series of failed intimate
relationships with men, including a failed marriage.
So already, in terms of her values, “ close relationships with men”
weren’t doing so hot.
Then, in the early 1980s, Meredith became a radical feminist and
began doing research into child abuse. She was confronted with
horrific story after horrific story of abuse, and she dealt with incest
survivors—usually little girls—for years on end. She also reported
extensively on a number of inaccurate studies that came out around
that time—studies that it later turned out grossly overestimated the
prevalence of child molestation. (The most famous study reported that
a third of adult women had been sexually molested as children, a