You have several. There is the two word one for the school gate. There is the slightly longer one for the neighbour, with a joke in it so nobody has to feel anything. And there is the true one, which almost nobody gets, and which you have possibly not said out loud this year.

You can usually tell within a syllable which is wanted. There is a particular stillness that comes over a face when the answer runs longer than expected.

Here is the thing I want to say about that, and it is less bleak than you might expect.

Most of the people asking are not asking. In English, how are you is a greeting. It is the verbal equivalent of a handshake, and it carries about as much information. The man in the post office is not requesting a summary of your inflammatory markers. He is saying hello using four words instead of one.

That sounds like a complaint about modern life. It is not. It is good news, because you can stop treating every instance as a test you might fail. You can answer a handshake with a handshake. Fine, thanks, and you. Nobody is deceived, because nobody was asking.

The energy goes somewhere else, and that is the part worth noticing. The cost is not the answer itself. It is the editing. The scan of their face, the calculation of how much they can take, the decision to cut the bad fortnight down to a wry sentence, and then the small cheerful coda so they do not have to sit with it. That is the work. You have been doing it several times a day for years, on top of everything else, and nobody has noticed.

Then there is the smaller category, the ones who ask properly and then visibly hope it is brief. Your sister, who asks, and who changes the subject at the second sentence. The friend who asks by text, which is easier to manage from both ends.

I do not think they are cowards, mostly. Some of them are frightened for you and have nowhere to put it. Some feel useless, and useless is intolerable, so they move the conversation somewhere they can be of use. And some have a sick parent of their own and only so much capacity. None of that is about your worth. All of it is about their limits.

What you are allowed to do is match the answer to the asker. Not out of bitterness. Out of arithmetic. There are two or three people in your life who can hear the true answer without flinching, and they are the ones who get it. Everyone else gets the handshake, and they are not being cheated, because the handshake is what they offered.

One thing, though. If you go through the list and cannot find anyone in the first category, that is worth taking seriously, and worth saying to your doctor or therapist rather than absorbing. There are also groups of people with the same condition who will listen to the long version without strain, because they want to tell you theirs.

And if someone can take it, consider telling them this weekend. Not the summary. The version with the fortnight in it.

Come Home

Five lines, and none of them require you to be honest with everybody.

One act for today, if you want one. Pick someone who can hear it, and tell them one true thing you have been editing out.

You are not being dishonest when you say you are fine. You are answering the question that was asked.

P.S. On Monday, a question worth sitting with. Who exactly are you still performing wellness for, and when did that start?