Last fall, someone asked how I was, and I said busy, and something about the way it came out stopped me. I hadn’t thought about it. I hadn’t checked. The word was just there before I’d even opened my mouth.
I had been saying it for almost twenty years.
Not always falsely—but always. To my mother, to colleagues, to people I’d just met. And standing there with that word still in the air, I started to wonder what I’d actually been saying. Because busy wasn’t the whole truth. The whole truth was closer to: I’m not ready to answer the real question. Which was whether any of the life I was building still felt like mine.
“Busy” stopped being an answer and became a wall
In the beginning, it was accurate. There were years in my late twenties when busy was the most honest thing I could say about myself. I was building something—a career, a life that looked like it had a plan—and the building required most of what I had. Busy was just the weather report.
I can’t say exactly when it changed.
At some point, busy stopped being a description and started being a door I was quietly closing. It’s not that I was lying. It’s that I understood, somewhere below the surface of the word, that “busy” had a particular power: it sounded good, and it ended questions. Nobody follows up on busy the way they’d follow up on “I’m not sure” or “honestly, I don’t really know right now.” Busy implies forward motion. It implies you’re fine, just occupied. It implies there’s nothing here worth stopping for.
And I used that. Without ever consciously deciding to, I used it every time.
The thing about a wall is that it works in both directions. I wasn’t just keeping other people out. I was keeping myself in—in the motion, in the momentum, in the version of my life that required no examination because there was always something else due, always something else to move toward. A wall you build around yourself also builds around you.
I’d lost track of what I actually felt
The strange thing isn’t that I stopped knowing how I was. The strange thing is how long it took me to notice I didn’t know.
Feelings got filed under “later” until there was no later left in the day, then no later left in the week, and eventually I stopped making the appointment at all. I got good at the surface of things. I answered emails, showed up, and held conversations that felt real. The inner weather became background noise—the way you stop checking a forecast for a city you’re not going to.
I remember sitting with a therapist’s question once—something simple, like “what are you actually enjoying right now”—and coming up completely blank. Not sad-blank. Just blank. The kind of blank that’s been blank long enough, it’s stopped noticing.
I thought about it later that night. I tried to locate any feeling attached to the things I’d done that week—good things, things I’d pulled off—and found mostly a flat kind of satisfaction. The feeling of completing a task that needed completing. Nothing warm. Nothing that felt like mine.
That was several years before last fall. I didn’t recognize it as something to pay attention to. I filed it under busy and moved on.
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Saying busy meant nobody had to go further
When I said busy, I was giving the other person permission to stay on the surface with me. And most people take that permission—not because they don’t care, but because “busy” signals that no real answer is coming, and nobody wants to push past a door that’s already closing. The conversation moves on. We talk about work, about plans, about something that asks nothing from either of us. Everyone leaves feeling like they connected without having actually connected.
I was comfortable with that for a long time.
I remember a dinner with close friends—people who genuinely knew me—where I gave a full accounting of everything I was working on and didn’t once say how I felt about any of it. They asked good questions. I gave polished answers. We hugged at the end of the night, and I drove home feeling fine. That’s the word I remember: fine. Like a box that had been checked.
What I couldn’t see yet was how lonely that was. I could have hundreds of conversations a year that felt warm and real and never say a true thing to anyone. I could be liked, genuinely present—at every dinner, responsive to every message—and still be completely unreachable. “Busy” was my hiding spot. Socially acceptable, even admired. It didn’t look like hiding. It looked like living.
I was living a life I’d never actually chosen
I had the job I’d worked toward, the apartment, the friends, the routines that looked like someone who had figured it out. Every piece had been chosen deliberately—one sensible decision at a time—and yet when I stood in the middle of it, something felt off in a way I couldn’t name. Not unhappy. Not in crisis. Just not quite mine. Like I’d spent years carefully decorating someone else’s house and gotten very good at it.
The choosing got away from me while I was optimizing. When every decision was about what was smart, what was next, what looked like the right kind of progress, I stopped asking what I wanted it to add up to. I hadn’t asked that question directly in years. Maybe ever. I’d just kept building, assumed the building would eventually feel like arriving.
It didn’t.
I kept waiting for a future version of life to feel like mine—a better job, a less-cluttered apartment, a version of myself who’d finished becoming whatever I was becoming—and that version kept receding. Not dramatically. Just always slightly ahead, always just around a corner I hadn’t turned yet.
One afternoon, I finally asked myself the real question
It was October.
I had three things due. Instead of doing any of them, I just sat.
I’m not someone who sits. That was the first sign.
I thought: if someone asked me right now—not how are you, but whether any of this still feels like mine—what would I say? I let the question stay in the room without rushing to answer it. What came up wasn’t grief. More like recognition. The sensation of having been holding my breath for a long time, and only just noticing the tightness.
I thought about a trip I’d taken two years earlier—something I’d planned carefully, looked forward to on paper—and realized I couldn’t remember feeling much while I was there. I remembered the logistics. I remembered the photos I took. I didn’t remember being glad to be alive in any of it.
The life was mine in the technical sense. I’d made every choice that led here. But somewhere between twenty-five and that October afternoon, I had stopped checking in with myself between decisions. Stopped asking whether what I was building was something I’d actually want to live in, or just something I could feel finished by. Those aren’t the same question. I had been answering one in place of the other for a long time.
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I’m still figuring out the answer
I don’t have a clean ending for this.
I haven’t overhauled anything. I haven’t quit or moved or had some large reckoning that reorganized everything. What I have is a new hesitation before the word, a half-second where I check whether I’m reaching for an answer or reaching for a door.
Sometimes I really am busy. That hasn’t changed.
But sometimes I catch myself about to say it, and I stop. I find something more specific, even if the more specific thing is “it’s been a strange few months” or “I’m okay, I just don’t totally know what I want right now.” Those answers feel exposed in a way that busy never did. People respond differently—sometimes they lean in, sometimes there’s a pause—but either way, something passes between us that’s actually true.
That October afternoon didn’t give me answers. It gave me permission to stop pretending I had them. That sounds small. It didn’t feel small.
I’m still working out which parts of this life are mine and which parts I’m carrying by habit, by inertia, by the long momentum of a plan I made when I was someone slightly different. That work is slow. Most days, it doesn’t look like progress.
But I haven’t said busy once without meaning it since October.
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.
