[There was a video here]

The greatest mystery of our time has been solved, but you might not even realize that it was a mystery in the first place: Contrary to Gawker’s own reporting, Donald Trump did not say “titties” when addressing the Detroit Economic Club yesterday. Sorry to spoil your fun, but it’s for the sake of regaining my sanity.

See, Gawker was far from the only news outlet to report this. Trevor Noah mocked it on last night’s episode of The Daily Show. The New York Post, The New York Daily News, The Huffington Post, New York magazine’s The Cut, Mediaite, Mic, GQ, TheWrap, and The Daily Mail were among the outlets to cover this, generally with the absolute credulity that Gawker initially did. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was convinced that Donald Trump said “and, by the way, into titties, like right here in Detroit.”

I was, meanwhile, incredulous. There was a clear glitch on the word “cities” that clipped all but of a fraction of its initial soft-C sound and resumed at “-ities” to create the illusion of “titties” that was nonetheless quite clearly (to my ears) just that: an illusion. At the very least, the presence of the glitch should have been enough to cause people to question if what they were hearing was actually “titties” instead of the far more logical “cities.” And while I know that Trump has made a career out of misspeaking, it seems that such a slip would at least be acknowledged by its speaker (with the immediate issuing of a correction of the word he attempted to say, for example) or the audience in the room in some way that would signal he had in fact just said a word as hilariously inappropriate as “titties.”

So obvious was this glitch that I wondered if our initial post on the subject was a case of performative mishearing. I brought this up to my colleagues in Gawker’s Slack room and I brought receipts in another medium. Because I find that my senses can sometimes be more sensitive than other people’s (I can’t watch a movie if it’s presented in the wrong aspect ratio and its picture is distorted, for example), I produced a visualization of the waveform on “cities” to show that the sound cut out during the word creating the effect of “titties.” I presented it to my coworkers, who roundly shot me down.

I mentioned my theory (aka the truth) in the comments of Gawker’s original post, and no one seemed to believe me there either, big surprise.

Twitter was exploding over these “titties” and would continue to doing so for hours. Everyone heard “titties.” They all believed in “titties.” There wasn’t even a question. What glitch? All they heard was titties.

It felt like I was witnessing the entire world seeing the dress as white and gold and I was the only one who saw black and blue. I felt crazy—until I talked to my former co-worker Caity Weaver, who agreed with me. Without her support I think I might have had an actual stroke.

I set about debunking this and proving the world wrong. Every live stream of the speech I checked seemed to have the same audio issues, which by the way, found Trump’s mic cutting in and out several times in the minutes leading up to the fake “titties.” I contacted people whose Twitter feeds suggested they were in the room attending the address. One reporter, who didn’t want to be quoted, told me they didn’t hear Trump say “titties” live, but upon watching the clip, seemed to be convinced that he had said it. I wanted to curl up in some real titties (or fake ones—actual titties) and die.

I woke up today still thinking about how to debunk this. I considered contacting sound experts, or rerecording the phrase and then cutting the audio to mimic the glitch to show how this could happen. I Googled “didn’t say titties” multiple times, until I came upon this video via the Young Turks’ YouTube channel:

They discovered that the Detroit Free Press’s stream of the event used a different audio feed that wasn’t plagued with the glitches everyone else’s seemed to have. And that feed confirmed what I always knew in my heart and my ears that you can now know yourself: Donald Trump said “cities,” not “titties.” Of course. It’s fascinating to me that what seems like everyone who was listening all misheard the same thing without acknowledging the glitch that was warping their perception. I think more than anything, people wanted Trump to have said “titties.” But as many aspiring bodybuilders and prepubescent girls can attest, no matter how hard you wish for them, sometimes the titties just aren’t there.

And now, with the story set straight, the truth setting us free, I can exhale shoop shoop. I feel like I have my life back.