The Lie You Tell Every Time Someone Asks How You Are

Someone asks how you are and your mouth says fine before your brain even catches up. The word is out before you can consider saying anything else. The fine is automatic. Fine is the answer people want and it’s easier than the truth.

The truth would be complicated, require explanation, or it would make things uncomfortable, so fine works. Fine is simple. Fine closes the conversation. Fine is the answer that lets people move on without having to actually care about the answer.

You are not sure when fine became your default. It happened gradually until the habit was so deep that saying anything else feels like oversharing. Saying anything else feels like burdening someone with information they didn’t ask for. Saying anything else feels wrong somehow even though the fine is a lie.

The lie is small so it doesn’t feel like much. One word can’t hurt anything. One word doesn’t matter. But you say it every day to multiple people and the accumulation of the lies starts to add up. You are lying constantly and getting good at it. You are training yourself to not tell the truth about how you actually are.

What happens is that after a while nobody actually knows how you are. They know the fine version. They know the performing version. They don’t know the version that’s struggling or scared or overwhelmed. They know the version that has it together and that becomes who you are to them because that’s all they ever see.

The fine protects you from having to be vulnerable with people. The fine keeps people from worrying about you. The fine keeps things uncomplicated. But the fine also keeps you isolated because nobody really knows the actual you. Nobody knows what’s really going on underneath the fine.

You could try saying something true instead of fine. You could say I’m not okay or I’m tired or Things are hard right now. But the truth takes more energy than the lie. The truth requires vulnerability. The truth might make people uncomfortable or make them think less of you. So you say fine and you stay isolated in your own struggle.

The lie has become so automatic that you might not even recognize it as a lie anymore. The fine feels like the truth because you’ve said it so many times. The fine feels like who you are because you’ve performed it so consistently, but underneath the fine is something else and that something else is getting lonelier every time you say fine instead of saying what’s actually true.

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