I said “good, busy” for about four years.
It wasn’t really a lie. I was busy. Good was the part I made up, and I said it so many times it stopped feeling made up. It just felt like being polite.
If you’ve gone looking for how to stop performing for other people, you’ve already found the lists. Set boundaries. Be vulnerable. Show up as your authentic self. I read a lot of those the year my life fell apart, and not one of them said the thing that keeps the act going, which is that the act works.
Pretending isn’t a character flaw
Nobody starts out lying about how they are. You start because it fixes something, usually something small, and then it keeps fixing it.
Say “fine” and the conversation moves on. Nobody has to carry anything. Say “actually, no” at 8:40 in the morning and now it’s a whole thing. You’ve made somebody late. You have to watch their face change. And they’ll ask you about it next week, so you’ll either say it all again or take it back.
So you say fine. That isn’t weak. It’s just easier, and for a long time easier wins.
Then it builds up on you. Every time it works it gets a bit more automatic, and the space between the you that people talk to and the you that drives home in silence gets a bit wider. Nobody picks that. You just look up one day and see how long you’ve been living in it.
What it costs
Not in a big philosophical way. Here’s what I could actually name, once I stopped dodging it.
- The people who love you end up knowing about as much as your coworkers do. They know your schedule. They don’t know your year.
- Help can’t find you. People offer help to people who look like they need it. Look fine long enough and the offers stop, and then that starts to feel like proof that nobody cares.
- You stop being able to tell. After a few years I honestly couldn’t answer “how are you” in my own head, never mind out loud. It’s the same muscle, and I’d spent years telling it to be quiet.
- You’re worn out and you can’t point at why. Nothing happened. You did nothing. You’re wrecked anyway.
What people say out loud and what they’re carrying around are almost never the same thing. That gap is where most of us are struggling on our own.
Nobody stops all at once
This is the bit the lists get wrong. They make it sound like a decision you make once, and then you’re an honest person now. It doesn’t go like that. What actually happens is smaller, and a lot less impressive.
For me it was one person and one sentence. Not a confession. Not the whole thing. Just not rounding up. “Honestly, it’s been a rough month,” instead of “good, busy.” No details. Nothing asked for.
Then I sat there while it was awkward. It was awkward. Neither of us died.
What got me was how often the other person went second. Not always. But enough that I stopped thinking I was the only one doing this.
What actually helped
I don’t love writing this part, because a tidy list of habits is exactly the sort of thing this show exists to push back on. So take it as me telling you what happened to me, not a plan for you.
I stopped answering a question nobody asked. “How are you” isn’t a request for everything. There’s a lot of room between “fine” and everything, and pretty much all the good stuff is in there.
I picked people, not moments. Waiting for the right moment meant waiting forever. Two people who’d earned it, and being straighter with those two. That worked.
I let the first go be clumsy. My early honest sentences came out at bad times and went on too long. Nobody minded half as much as I thought they would. What I said mattered more than how neatly I said it.
I stopped treating “I don’t know” as a cop-out. Sometimes the true answer to how you are is that you can’t tell yet. People take that fine.
None of that’s a method. It took a long time, I did it badly, and I still catch myself saying good, busy to people who deserve better than that from me.
If what you came here for was permission
I think that’s what most of us are really after when we type this into a search bar. Not a technique. Permission.
So here it is. You’re allowed to stop. You’re allowed to be someone who isn’t fine on a Tuesday, out loud, to somebody who can hear it. It won’t cost you what you’re scared it’s going to cost you. Mostly it costs about nine seconds of feeling uncomfortable, and mostly the other person is just relieved that somebody went first.
That’s the offline version, with the people who are actually in the room. There’s also the version where the audience is a number instead of a face, and that one follows you around more than you’d expect.
That’s the whole reason I’m making this show. I couldn’t find that conversation anywhere, so I’m recording it, with ordinary people who’ll answer the questions the rest of us duck.
If there’s something you’ve never said out loud, the guest chair is open. If you’d rather just listen for now, the list hears every episode before the feed does.