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.
Recent Comments