The Real Cost of Saying "I'm Fine"

"I'm fine." Two words. You say them a dozen times a day. They cost you more than anything else you will spend all week.

You say them to the colleague who catches you staring past your screen. To the friend who asks how you are really doing. To your partner, your kids, the woman in the mirror at 6am who already knows better. Fine. Handling it. All good. And every time you say it, you pay.

The tax you pay to not be a burden

Not in money. In distance. A little more space between what is happening inside you and what you let anyone see. A little more of you, sealed off where no one ~ including you ~ has to deal with it.

I want to name what "fine" actually is, because no one told me for years: it is not a feeling. It is a performance. A tax you pay for the privilege of not being a burden, not being asked follow-up questions, not making the room heavier by telling the truth. And you are so well trained to pay it.

Be positive. Be grateful. Do not make it about you. Keep the weather good, because the people around you have come to rely on your forecast staying sunny. So you keep the smile up and the difficulty down, and you call the whole exhausting arrangement fine.

The cost no one adds up

Here is the cost no one adds up. When you spend years insisting you are fine, you do not just hide the truth from other people. You lose the thread of it yourself. You get so practiced at overriding what you feel that eventually you cannot quite find it anymore. Someone asks what you need and the honest answer is: I do not know. I stopped tracking a long time ago.

That is the real expense. Not the tiredness. The self-abandonment underneath it.

The one place the performance has to end

I am not going to tell you to stop saying fine to everyone. Some rooms have not earned your truth, and discernment is its own kind of self-respect. But there is one place the performance has to end, or nothing else can begin. You have to stop saying it to yourself.

Before you decide what to do about it. Before you know if anyone can help. Just let the truth be true in your own body first: this is harder than I have been letting on. I am not fine. And that is allowed. That sentence does not cost you anything. It is the first thing in years that gives something back.

If you are tired of being fine alone, The Reclaim Room is a place built for the sentence underneath it. The conversation continues inside Unapologetic Menopause.