Zenfull Heart | September 18, 2026
I was listening to parts of the book I have been writing, when one sentence stopped me: Behind every “I’m fine” was a girl holding back tears. Something about hearing those words out loud in my own voice hit me hard today. When I look back over my life, I realize how many times I lied. People would ask me, “How are you?” and I would answer, “I’m fine,” “I’m good,” or “I’m okay.” Most of the time, I was not.
It was not only those little answers either. If I am completely truthful with myself now, I probably lied and manipulated situations in some way throughout much of my life. It happened in relationships, friendships, with adults, teachers, people I loved, even with people I was afraid of, and with all the people I desperately wanted to love me. That is difficult to admit because words like lying and manipulating carry so much shame with them, but I understand something now that I could not understand then. A lot of the time, I was trying to survive.
I learned how to read the room, when to stay quiet, and how to become unnoticed. I learned what could be said and what absolutely could, and I learned how to make things look okay when they were nowhere near okay. Those were skills I developed because somewhere along the way, staying quiet and keeping all those things hidden felt safer than letting the truth be seen.
There were times I stayed silent because I loved the person I was protecting. I did not want anyone to know what was happening because I did not want them to think differently about someone I loved nor could I have them taken away from me. And other times, I did not want the questions because I knew I was not ready for the answers. I did not want advice. I did not want to hear what I should do, and I did not want somebody telling me something I already knew somewhere deep inside but was not ready to face. So I smiled, said I was fine changed the subject, protected them, and protected the story. Somewhere in all of that, I stopped protecting me.
There were probably thousands of tiny moments that nobody else would ever remember. Moments when I swallowed tears while my body was screaming and my mouth said everything was okay. Moments when staying quiet seemed safer than telling the truth. Those moments did not disappear simply because I survived them. Some of them became pain that I carried forward with me, and some of that pain I am still uncovering today.
What strikes me now is that healing has required me to look differently at that girl. I do not see her as a liar or as someone who should have handled things differently. I see someone who became incredibly skilled at navigating the life she was living with the tools she had at the time. She knew how to disappear when disappearing felt necessary, how to protect people she loved even when protecting them cost her, and how to say, “I’m fine,” while holding back tears.
Now, maybe part of healing is finally giving her permission to tell the truth.
