This Body is Bullshit

Fine

People ask how I’m doing and I tell them I’m fine.

And mostly I mean it. That’s the complicated part.

But here’s what fine actually looks like on any given day: I wake up sore. Not the kind of sore that goes away after you move around — the kind that’s just there, settled into your joints and your bones like it lives there. Because it does. The fatigue is the same way. Some days it’s manageable and some days I genuinely don’t know how I’m going to function, and then I just do, because that’s what you do. You muster through. You put the smile on. You make sure everyone around you is laughing or at least okay.

And nobody sees any of it because there’s nothing to see. That’s the thing about invisible illness — I can be smiling and genuinely enjoying myself while quietly negotiating with my own body about how much longer I can stand before I need to sit down. Nobody knows that’s happening. Why would they?

I’ve been reading something lately that stopped me cold. It talked about how fine is expected, fine is acceptable, fine is the answer we give on autopilot to everyone from our closest friends to the checkout person at the grocery store. And after a while, fine stops being a little white lie and becomes a wall. A brick wall between you and the people who love you — built not out of deception but out of fear. Fear of looking at your own pain. Fear that if someone sees the truth, it might be all they ever see.

I felt that in my chest when I read it.

Because I’ve done that. I’m a convincing enough actress that sometimes I don’t realize I’ve been performing until something cracks. I’ve had moments — private ones — where I’ve completely fallen apart. Crying, screaming, both. And in those moments I’ve seen just how much I’ve been keeping from people, not to protect them exactly, but because I genuinely don’t know how to let someone look at the hard stuff with me. I never learned that muscle.

There’s also something else I read that hit me differently — about how years of stress and chaos and survival mode don’t just live in your head. They live in your body. Your nervous system gets stuck. It keeps running emergency drills long after the emergency is over. And I think about that a lot, because I’ve been in some version of survival mode for a very long time. The cancer, the surgeries, the grief, the caregiving — but also things that came before all of that. My body has been through it. And I don’t think it’s fully gotten the memo that things are okay now. Maybe that’s part of why the pain and fatigue are so constant. My nervous system is still braced for something.

The strange thing is — and I want to be clear about this — most of the time I actually am fine. I have real joy. I have people I love and who love me back. I laugh constantly. The good genuinely does outweigh the hard most days. Fine isn’t always a lie.

But when I’m not fine, I have no roadmap for saying so.

And I know I’m not alone in that. I know people who wave and smile and insist they don’t need anything — and I can see something else underneath it. I recognize it because I do it too.

Here’s the other side of it though: when someone tells me they’re fine, I believe them. Because if I were truly not okay, I’d eventually say something. I’d reach out. So when people tell me they’re fine or they don’t need anything, I take them at their word. I’m not going to push past what someone’s told me, because I’d want the same respect. And yes, sometimes people are disappointed by that. Sometimes they wanted me to see through it. But I can’t read minds, and I don’t think it’s fair to expect people to read mine.

Maybe that’s just the catch with fine. For some people it’s the truth. For others it’s a shield. For most of us it’s both, depending on the day.

I’m fine.

Mostly.