Someone asked how I was doing last week, and I said I had back-to-back meetings until four and then a thing in the evening that was going to run late.
She waited. I waited. Neither of us seemed sure what had just happened.
She’d asked how I was. I’d told her what I was doing. These aren’t the same thing, and somewhere between the question and my answer, I’d lost track of that.
I’ve been noticing it since. Not just with her—with everyone. How are you? The answer I give every time is a calendar update. I have a flight on Thursday. The deadline has been moved again. The thing I’m trying to clear off my plate so I can think. I report my schedule the way you’d give a status update on a project, and the project is me, and apparently, I have no idea how the project is actually going.
The schedule is an answer, just not to that question
What I give when someone asks how I am is technically information. It’s accurate. It accounts for my time in a way that could tell someone something about me. The meetings are real. The deadlines are real. The thing Thursday is real.
But when someone asks how I am, they’re asking something the calendar can’t answer.
I don’t experience it as deflecting. I experience it as answering. The schedule comes up, and it feels like I’ve given an account of myself, like the question has been addressed. It’s only looking back at the exchange that I can see the gap. What I gave was a map of my time. What they were asking about was how I’m doing inside it.
The substitution happened gradually. I was busy, so I reported the busyness. The busyness was the most accurate summary of my life available, so it became the answer. The answer became automatic. And at some point, the calendar wasn’t just describing my life—it was my life, at least in terms of what I could report about it.
The tricky part is that the schedule answer doesn’t feel evasive. It feels honest. It is honest. I just gave her the one part of myself I have the clearest view of. I didn’t know until she waited that the clearest view I have of myself is a list of where I have to be.
The real answer would require knowing things I’ve stopped tracking
If you asked me right now what I have on this week, I could tell you without checking. I know the shape of it, the places it’s going to be hard, the one window on Friday that might breathe. I have a precise map of my time for the next fourteen days.
Ask me how I’m doing, and I genuinely don’t know.
Not in a dramatic way. Not in a way that suggests I’m in crisis. Just in the quiet way of someone who stopped monitoring one thing while getting very good at monitoring another. The schedule is tracked to the minute. The internal weather—how I actually feel, what I need, what’s sitting heavy underneath the busyness—I’ve been less consistent about checking.
I know I’ve been tired. That I can say. But tired is different from why I’m tired, which is different from what the tired is trying to tell me. That kind of information requires more than a glance at the calendar to locate. It requires stopping, which is not something I’ve been building into the calendar.
The schedule got bigger at the same rate my access to myself got smaller. I didn’t notice either one moving. I just noticed last Tuesday, in a pause that lasted maybe four seconds, that the most honest thing I had available to give someone who asked how I was was a meeting schedule. And that the meeting schedule, while accurate, said nothing about what it’s like to be me right now.
It’s the container. It doesn’t say anything about what’s inside.
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The people asking deserved better than a calendar update
My brother asked how I was about two months ago, and I gave him the usual answer—something about travel coming up, a project taking longer than expected—and he said, no, I mean how are you.
I thought I had answered that.
He said it again. How are you? And I remember the specific blankness I felt—not defensiveness, not evasion, but genuine blankness. Like he’d asked a question in a language I used to speak.
I said fine. I think that was the most honest thing I had available. He didn’t push, and I didn’t offer more, and we moved on. I forgot about it until last week when the same thing happened with someone else. And then I started thinking about how many times this has happened—how many people have asked the real question and gotten a logistics update, have followed up and gotten a slightly more specific logistics update, have eventually stopped following up.
The people who care about me have been trying to reach me through this conversation for a while. I’ve been handing them an itinerary. Not because I was protecting myself from the question—or not only—but because I didn’t have a better answer ready, and the schedule was right there, and it felt like something.
It wasn’t nothing. But it wasn’t what they were asking for.
I’ve started trying to answer before I check the calendar
What I’ve started doing this week is pausing before I answer. Just long enough to notice what I reach for automatically—the schedule—and ask myself whether that’s what they were actually asking about.
The first few times I tried to answer differently, I said something vague and slightly wrong. Fine. Good, I think. Tired but in a way that feels more chosen than it did. These are better than a calendar readout, but they’re not right either. They’re the beginning of an answer rather than the answer itself.
What I notice when I try to answer honestly is that I don’t know in that moment. There’s a lag. The real answer is somewhere underneath the schedule, and it takes longer than a passing exchange to locate. The schedule I can give in real time. The actual state of myself requires a different kind of attention than I’ve been paying.
In some conversations this week, I answered the question. Not completely, not well. But the answer was about me and not about Thursday, and the people I was talking to seemed to register something different in it. Something that landed in a way that the calendar update never did.
It turns out people don’t actually want to know about Thursday. They want to know if I’m okay. I’ve been so busy telling them about Thursday that I missed that entirely.
The honest answer is still coming
I don’t have a clean resolution. I noticed the thing last week, and I’ve been sitting with it since, which is already more sitting than I’ve been doing lately.
I think part of what made it land was the pause. She waited. She didn’t fill the silence for me. And in that silence, I heard myself give the calendar answer and understood, for the first time in a while, that it wasn’t what she’d asked.
What I know is that my schedule isn’t the same as me. That knowing what I have on Thursday says nothing about whether I’m okay. That when people ask how I am, they’re asking something worth trying to answer, and I’ve been getting away with not trying for longer than I’d like to admit.
The attempt is new. The answer—the real one, the one that’s actually about how I’m doing and where I am inside all of this—is still coming. I’m working on having better access to it. On checking in with myself often enough that when someone asks, I have something true to give them.
I still reach for the schedule first. I probably will for a while. But I’m starting to notice when I’m doing it. Last week, I noticed four seconds too late. This week, I’ve noticed before I started talking. That’s further along than I was. The honest answer is still coming. It feels closer than it did.
Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our “As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy. .
