I get asked how I’m doing maybe a dozen times a day.
The barista, a coworker passing my desk, the neighbor getting his mail, the friend I’m texting.
“How are you?” “Good — you?”
The whole exchange takes four seconds and means nothing, and I’ve done it so many times that my mouth says “good” before my brain has weighed in.
The problem is that I’m not good. I’m not in a heap on the floor either. I’m somewhere in the wide middle that the word “good” was never built to hold, and at 38, that middle has gotten crowded.
For most of my life, I didn’t think twice about it. Lately, I’ve started to dread it — the small, friendly question I can see coming, and the small lie I’m about to tell to get past it.
It’s an odd thing to brace against a kindness, but that’s where I’ve gotten: a familiar face turning toward me with those three words, and something in me going tight. I keep wondering why the true answer is so unwelcome that I’ve simply agreed to stop giving it. But it is. So I say good, and I keep moving.
The real answer doesn’t fit in four seconds
If I told the truth, it would go something like this.
I’m tired in a way sleep doesn’t fix. My dad is getting older in a way I can see now, year over year, and I haven’t worked out what that’s going to ask of me. My job is fine and covers the bills and is nowhere near the thing I thought I’d be doing by now, and I’ve mostly made peace with that, except on the days I haven’t. My body has started sending small notices — a knee, a slower morning, a number at the doctor’s that wants watching.
Some friendships have disappeared without a fight, just distance and full calendars, and I miss people I haven’t called. There’s an anxiety under most days that I’d describe, if pressed, as is this it — not despair, more a question I never have a spare hour to sit with.
And threaded right through all of it: my kid who said something hilarious this morning, my marriage steadier than it’s ever been, a Tuesday that was, against the odds, lovely.
That’s the real answer. It takes a while. It contradicts itself. It ends, if I’m being straight about it, somewhere around “but I’m okay, mostly,” — which is true, and also took a long time to reach.
Nobody has room for that answer while they’re holding a coffee and walking into a meeting. I don’t have room to give them when I’m doing the same.
The real answer isn’t a sentence; it’s a sprawl, and the question only leaves a slot the size of a word.
Most of the time, the lie is the kind thing to do
I’ve made peace with the mechanics of it. “How are you” was never a question — it’s a greeting, the sound two people make to acknowledge each other, the spoken version of a nod. Answering it with the truth is a little like answering “what’s up” with a list.
So I say I’m fine. I say good, can’t complain, hanging in there.
Most of the time, that’s the right call, because the true answer isn’t only long — it’s heavy, and handing it to someone who asked out of reflex makes them carry a weight they never agreed to pick up. The neighbor wanted to be friendly on his way to the mailbox. He did not want my father’s health, and my career doubts dropped on his lawn.
There’s a kindness in the lie, too. The people I see all day — the barista, the coworker, the acquaintance at school pickup — would be alarmed if I told them the truth.
So the lie isn’t even a lie, I tell myself. It’s a courtesy — the social contract working exactly as designed, a small shared fiction that lets a hundred low-stakes moments stay pleasant and brief.
More Bolde Stories
What I didn’t expect was what the lie would do to me
If the cost were only loneliness, I could name it and move on. It’s not that.
I’ve said “good” so many thousands of times that it’s stopped being a choice. It fires before I’ve checked anything.
Someone asks, and the word is out of my mouth while the real answer is still somewhere behind me, not yet looked at. The lie has gotten faster than the truth.
And the reflex doesn’t stay in its lane. It shows up where I’d want the truth — with the friend who asks “no, how are you really,” leaning in, meaning it. Even then, I hear myself reach for “good, you know, busy,” the same autopilot, before I can catch it. I’ve trained a muscle to skip the real answer, and the muscle doesn’t know which rooms are safe.
The worst of it is what it’s done to my own reading of myself.
When the answer to “how are you” is automatic for everyone else, it starts being automatic for me too. I’ll get all the way to the end of a day having told people I’m fine, and realize I never once put the question to myself and answered it straight. The performance has slowly become the only version I rehearse.
That’s the dread. I don’t dread “how are you” because the answer is hard to say. I dread it because it’s a small, daily request to find how I am — and I’ve spent years getting very good at not finding it. The question knocks, and what it turns up is that I’ve misplaced the answer.
What I’m trying to keep, even now
I’m not going to start telling the barista the truth. The small lie is fine; it’s load-bearing for ordinary life, and most days I don’t begrudge it.
What I’m after is smaller and more private.
I want to keep two or three people who get the long answer — the ones who ask and then wait, who don’t flinch when it isn’t “good.” And I want, on my own, to answer the question straight at least once a day, even if it’s only in the car, even if the answer is a mess. Not for anyone else. Just so the real version doesn’t drift somewhere I can’t reach it.
Because the lie was never the problem, a little social fiction is the grease that keeps a day moving. The problem is forgetting it’s a fiction — letting “good” stand in so completely that I lose track of what it’s standing in for.
I can keep saying good to everyone I pass. I just need to stop saying it to myself.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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