On Alternative Facts

My Truth, Your Truth, and Other Modern Hallucinations

Somewhere between 2010 and the Great Linguistic Collapse, someone decided that truth was no longer a fixed point but a personal accessory — like a tote bag or a mood ring. Thus was born the phrase “my truth,” and ever since, I’ve been quietly (and sometimes loudly) losing my mind.

I remember the first seismic ripple… Kellyanne Conway, when she defended false statements from the White House about the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd. She said they weren’t lies — they were “alternative facts.”

Then came “My truth.” It sounds noble, enlightened, even therapeutic — but every time I have ever heard it, I’ve felt like someone’s slipping a hand into my pocket and stealing language itself. Truth used to mean something shared — heavy, stable, verifiable. You could test it, measure it, agree upon it. Now it’s been sliced into bite-size emotional packets that dissolve on contact with reality.

Both phrases perform the same linguistic sleight of hand — they blur the line between perspective and reality.

“My truth” is the therapy-world version: it sentimentalizes subjectivity. “Alternative facts” is the propaganda-world version: it weaponizes subjectivity.

Both say, in essence, “reality is negotiable if it feels right to me.”

Take that therapist’s favorite riddle: “The system can’t hold two emotional truths at once.” Excuse me? Two truths? How did we end up living in a universe so fragile it must be padded in quotation marks? What they mean, of course, is “two perspectives,” “two emotional experiences.” But that’s not how they say it. They say “two truths,” as if fact itself is now an emotional state.

This kind of language — soft, evasive, narcotic — drives me nuts. It’s the linguistic equivalent of a participation trophy. It lets everyone be right, and therefore no one is accountable. You can set a house on fire and still get to say, “Well, that’s your truth.”

I get the therapeutic intent. It’s about coexistence, not contradiction. About saying: both people in a conflict have emotional realities worth acknowledging. Fine. I can live with that. But when we start calling feelings “truth,” we’re no longer communicating — we’re hallucinating in chorus.

Two truths can’t exist. There’s only one reality, shared and often disputed. Within that, there are perspectives — wildly divergent, sure, but still orbiting the same planet. Once we start pretending there’s a separate galaxy for each person’s truth, we lose the gravitational pull that keeps meaning intact.

So yes, I despise the phrase. It’s not just semantic sloppiness; it’s moral laziness disguised as empathy. It’s how people absolve themselves from the messy work of discernment — deciding what’s fair, what’s real, what actually happened.

Truth, singular, still matters. And I’ll defend that hill even if the rest of the world is busy planting flags for “their truth.”

One love.