i don't even know why I'm writing this down you know like it’s just something that's been… percolating for a while and it's getting kinda intense now it's like a constant low-level hum of cognitive dissonance that's really starting to wear me down if that makes sense it all kinda came to a head last week i was reviewing some new hominin fossil data for a paper like looking at the dental morphology of *Australopithecus afarensis* and the isotopic analysis from a site in Ethiopia and it was just… so clear the implications you know the timelines the gradual changes the undeniable evidence of millions of years of evolutionary adaptation and then my phone buzzed and it was a text from someone asking if I was coming to the weekly family dinner and it was like a record scratch in my brain because for as long as i can remember someone has always talked about that thing about how the world was made in six literal days and that everything we see was created exactly as it is now and like i used to just nod along right just compartmentalize it you do what you have to do to keep the peace and just keep your head down especially when you're younger you don't wanna rock the boat you know but now it's… different i remember this one time when i was a kid like probably six or seven someone was reading from a picture book about genesis and i asked like "so the dinosaurs were on the ark too?" and they kinda laughed and said "oh honey there weren't dinosaurs on the ark" and i was so confused even then like WHERE did they go if they weren’t on the ark what happened and someone just kinda shushed me and said "we don't ask those kinds of questions" and i guess that stuck with me it's not even about proving someone wrong or anything like that it's more about this feeling of… disassociation when i’m in one setting compared to another when i’m at work it's all about empirical data peer-reviewed journals reproducible results the scientific method is like the bedrock of everything we do you know it's how you get grants it's how you get published it's how you advance your career and then i go home or to certain family gatherings and it's like i have to switch off a part of my brain and it’s not like i’m some kind of rebel or anything i’m pretty good at playing the game at work too i know how to navigate the office politics how to present my findings in a way that gets buy-in but this feels different this feels like a fundamental disconnect like i'm living two parallel realities and they're starting to collide in a way that’s really unsettling i was trying to explain it to someone recently not *that* someone obviously but like a friend from grad school and they just kinda looked at me blankly like "why does it matter so much now?"