The Woman Everyone Can Count On

by agenna | Aug 7, 2026 | Coaching, Identity, Remembering What's Hidden

A Coaching Essay

The Woman Everyone Can Count On

She is not hiding. She is just never asked.

You know her. You might be her.

She’s the one who remembers the birthday before anyone else remembers to buy the card. Who knows what everyone in the house needs before they think to mention it. Who notices the fridge is getting low before anyone else opens it. Who handles the thing before it becomes a problem anyone has to ask about.

Ask the people around her to describe her and you’ll hear the same words every time.

Strong. Dependable. Capable. The one who holds it all together.

Those are good words. True ones, even. And that’s exactly what makes the question underneath them so easy to miss.

The Noticing Goes One Direction

She notices everything—the mood shift at dinner, the unspoken request, the small thing someone needs before they’ve asked for it. That kind of attention is real. It’s a skill, honestly, and often a hard-won one.

But attention pointed outward that consistently, for that long, tends to develop a blind spot exactly where it started: pointed at herself.

Not because she doesn’t matter to the people around her. When you’re the person everyone counts on, people often stop thinking to check on you. Not because they don’t care. Because you seem capable. You seem steady. You’re usually the one noticing what everyone else needs.

And eventually, you can begin making the same assumption about yourself.

Strength and Slowly Losing Touch Can Look the Same

This is the part that’s hard to say out loud, because it sounds like ingratitude for something that took years to build.

Being deeply capable and slowly losing touch with yourself can look remarkably similar from the outside. Nothing looks wrong. She’s still remembering the birthdays. Still keeping everyone moving. Still the one you’d call first.

From the inside, something has been shifting for a long time—and it happened so gradually that even she might not be able to name when it started.

A Question Worth Sitting With

If you recognized her in the first paragraph—if some part of you thought, oh, that’s me—this question is for you. Not as an accusation. As an honest one.

Can you become so good at noticing everyone else that you stop noticing yourself?

You don’t have to answer it today. But it’s worth carrying with you, the way you’d carry any question that lands somewhere true.

I’ve known women like this my whole life. I’ve coached them. I’ve loved them. In Remembering What’s Hidden, I finally wrote one of them. Her name is Ruth. I think you may recognize her.

The Most Expensive Word in the English Language: “Fine”

by agenna | Aug 5, 2026 | Uncategorized

A Coaching Essay

It costs nothing to say. It costs everything to keep saying.

Someone asks how you are.

You do not check. You do not pause. You do not run a quick inventory of your body, your week, your marriage, your own name on your own to-do list. You answer before the question has finished landing.

"Fine."

It is not a lie, exactly. That is the part that took me years to understand, both in my own life and in the lives of the women I coach. "Fine" usually starts out true. Somewhere along the way it stops being an answer and becomes a reflex—something the mouth produces so the rest of you does not have to be examined.

At some point, "fine" can become less of an answer and more of a reflex. Not a decision. Not even really a feeling. Just a well-worn groove, so automatic it bypasses the one step that would actually help—the step where you ask yourself the question before you answer it for someone else.

Who Reaches for It Most

In my work as a coach, the women who say "fine" the fastest are rarely in crisis. That is what makes the word so slippery. They are capable. Responsible. Loved, often, by people who would absolutely show up if they knew there was something to show up for.

That is exactly the problem. Nothing about their lives is dramatic enough to interrupt the reflex. There is no single event that would make "fine" obviously false. There is only the slow accumulation of a hundred small honest answers that never got given, because no one—including the woman herself—ever stopped long enough to ask twice.

Functioning is not the same as flourishing. You can run an entire household, an entire calendar, an entire family’s emotional weather system, and still realize you have somehow stopped showing up in your own. You can be the person everyone counts on and still not be able to say, with any real certainty, what you want.

The Cost, Compounding

Here is what makes "fine" expensive rather than merely inaccurate: it does not just misrepresent the moment. It teaches everyone around you, including you, that there is nothing here worth asking about. Ask again, and you will likely get the same answer, delivered with the same ease. The people who love you learn to take you at your word. Why wouldn’t they? You have become very convincing.

Meanwhile, the actual answer—the one underneath the reflex—does not go anywhere. It waits. It compounds. It shows up later as exhaustion with no clear cause, or irritability that seems disproportionate to whatever set it off, or a strange flatness on a day that should have felt good.

What if "fine" isn’t a lie so much as a word we’ve used for so long that we’ve forgotten to ask what’s underneath it?

A Different First Question

I am not suggesting you announce your inner weather to every cashier and coworker who asks how you are. "Fine" is often the right social answer. The reflex is the problem, not the word itself.

What I am suggesting is smaller and, I think, more useful: before you answer, ask yourself first. Not a full accounting. Just a beat—one honest breath—where you actually check. Some days the true answer really will be fine. Other days it will not be, and that single pause may be the first moment in a very long time that you have included yourself in the count.

That is where change often begins. Not with a crisis. Not with some dramatic before-and-after. Just one slightly more honest breath before the automatic answer comes out.

I’ve been sitting with this question for a long time: What happens when a woman who is very good at noticing everyone else stops noticing herself? Eventually, that question became a novel. Remembering What’s Hidden is a story about what can happen when she begins, quietly, to look again.