The Stages of Waking Up: How Grief and Truth Go Hand in Hand

You don’t just wake up one day and see the truth

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You don’t just wake up one day and see the truth. It doesn’t happen in an instant. It happens in stages. And if you’ve been through it, you already know — it feels exactly like grief.

Because that’s what it is.

You’re not just learning something new. You’re losing something. The version of the world you thought was real? Gone. And just like grief, you don’t get to skip to the end. You have to go through it.

Stage one: shock

“Everything I thought I knew just collapsed.”

You don’t wake up because you want to. You wake up because you have to. Maybe it was a lie so blatant it couldn’t be ignored. Maybe it was something you saw firsthand that didn’t match the official story. Maybe it was just too many coincidences, too many times. But once it happens, there’s no undoing it.

You try to grab onto something — anything — to make it make sense. But nothing works. Because if this one thing was a lie … What else was?

And just like that, you’re in freefall.

Stage two: denial