For years, if you asked me how I was doing, I said fine. Automatically. The word came out before the question even finished.
And I had a whole system behind it. Being needed was my justification. A father has to provide. Clients need me. The work matters. People depend on me. That’s what I told myself every time I put myself last, which was every day.
That’s the thing about fine. It doesn’t just hide your feelings. It hides your priorities. I made myself the lowest priority in my own life, then called it responsibility.
Here’s what it actually looked like, in case you’re wondering whether this is you too.
I was working a lot of hours. Long days, taking care of clients, taking care of everybody’s world. And the money didn’t match the hours. That was one of the wake-up calls, honestly. You can lie to yourself with feelings, but the bank statement is harder to argue with. All those hours, and it just wasn’t reflected. It was overwhelming, and I kept telling myself it would settle down.
It doesn’t settle down. That’s not how this works. You don’t run yourself into the ground at the bottom of your own list for years, then get a quiet month to recover. The busier I got taking care of everyone else, the less I had, and the more the people I loved paid for it.
And they told me. Not in words. The way kids always tell you: a kid acting out, asking for attention in the loudest negative way, because negative attention was the only kind left over by the time I got home. I was so busy taking care of the world that my own kids were pulling me in from the negative instead of me coming to them from the positive. If you’re a parent, you know exactly the difference between those two things. It’s the difference between raising a kid and firefighting one.
And my body kept the books on all of it.
Weight creeping on. Winded on the stairs. No bounce in my step, just dragging through the day. Extra coffees to buy back an hour of energy. Edgy, running hot, not really feeling like myself.
Soreness. Tight hips from all the hours of sitting. My back going stiff. The body doesn’t get depressed or philosophical about it, it just keeps a very honest ledger. Every hour I spent making myself nonexistent, it wrote down the number. And one day I climbed the stairs like an old man and understood that I was reading the bill.
I want to be careful here, because this isn’t a story about how I fixed everything and now I have bounce in my step and perfect balance. I’m still working on it. The difference is that now I know the fine was the lie that made it all possible.
Fine was the word that let me keep a system that was failing me. As long as I said fine, I didn’t have to change anything. Nobody had to worry. I could keep being needed, which is its own kind of addiction, and keep disappearing, and call the whole thing purpose.
The crack wasn’t a moment. It was an accumulation. Money not flowing. Kids pulling negative. Body slowing down. All of it saying the same sentence in three different languages: this isn’t working. And at some point, I finally stopped saying “fine” long enough to hear it.
So I want to ask you something, and I’m asking because I’m still in the middle of it myself.
Where are you the lowest priority in your own life? And what word do you use to justify it?
Needed. Responsible. The strong one. Fine.
I’ll go first: my word was fine, and my justification was that I was needed. The years I said it the most were the years when everything I cared about was quietly running out. Money, energy, my kids’ patience, my own body.
Hit reply and tell me yours. I read every response myself. Or leave it in the comments, out loud, so someone else knows they’re not the only one running on empty and calling it purpose.
Either way, tell yourself the truth about it today.
That’s where everything starts.