It had started as a defense. A way to move through conversations quickly. He was fine. Everything was fine. He was very good at being fine.
Somewhere along the way the fine had stopped being a reassurance he gave other people and had become the only answer he could access when he checked in with himself. He would ask: how am I actually doing? And the answer that came back, automatically, was fine.
He mentioned this to someone who asked carefully how he was doing and really meant it. He said fine and then stopped. He said: actually I don’t know. He wasn’t sure he could remember the last time he’d answered anything else.
The answer fine is often not a lie. It’s a habit. A groove worn so deep that nothing else comes out anymore. We give it when someone asks. We give it to ourselves. We stop having access to the more accurate answer because the habit of fine has stood in front of it for so long that we’ve lost the path back.
I’ve done this. Given fine until I believed it. Until the question of how I actually was had become uncomfortable because it required dismantling an answer I had been using for years.
He said: actually I don’t know. That was the most honest thing he’d said in a long time.
What would he find if he actually looked?
Fine is sometimes protection. Fine says: I do not require anything from you right now. Fine is efficient. Fine keeps things moving. The cost is the loss of the people who would have actually answered the question, if only you’d let them.
He stopped mid-sentence and said he didn’t know. The person he was talking to waited. He found, slowly, an answer that was not fine.
It was the beginning of a different kind of conversation.
Some things worth sitting with:
- When someone asks how you are, what do you actually say? Is that the true answer?
- When you check in with yourself, are you getting an honest response or a habit?
- Is there someone in your life who would wait to hear a real answer if you gave one?
If this stayed with you, He Thought the Feeling Would Pass. It Had Been Three Years. moves through similar territory.
Inspired by a real story shared anonymously online.