Someone asked me how I was doing, and I said "great" and meant it. That's the part that stays with me.
This was maybe three years ago. I was in the middle of a big marketing campaign, my sons were small, my husband and I were figuring out what life in Hong Kong actually looked like, and I was, by every visible measure, handling it. Cheerful at school pickup. Delivering at work. Keeping the social calendar alive. I had the kind of busyness that passes for vitality if you don't look too closely.
What I didn't say, because I genuinely didn't clock it as noteworthy: I hadn't slept a full night in months. My digestion was a disaster. I would get into bed exhausted and then lie there, heart slightly too fast, thoughts circling, not sleeping, then get up and be fine. I was in that perpetual state I can only describe as wired and tired, where your body is running on something that isn't rest, and you stop noticing because it's just become the baseline.
But I looked fine. Which meant I was fine.
The thing about being high-functioning is that it gives you very convincing cover, mostly from yourself. There's a version of "coping" that looks so much like thriving that you lose track of which one you're actually doing. I was great at the optics of wellness. I moved my body, I ate reasonably well, I talked to my friends, I was present with my kids, present-ish. I knew the vocabulary of taking care of yourself. I used it.
What I didn't know was that I had gotten so fluent at managing that I'd stopped noticing there was something underneath that wasn't resolving. There's a difference between those two things (managing and resolving) and I couldn't have told you what it was then. Managing feels like competence. It feels like you're an adult who has it together. It can go on for a very long time.
The ferry ride from Discovery Bay into Central, twenty-five minutes across the water, was where it was most obvious, if I'd been paying attention. That should have been a break, a reset, a moment of nothing. I spent it on my phone. Not because I had urgent things to do; I mostly didn't. Just because being still felt uncomfortable in a way I couldn't name, so I didn't let it happen.
I kept thinking the problem was logistics. I need more sleep. I need to exercise more consistently. I need to do a cleanse, a reset, a different morning routine. I tried several of those things. Some of them helped around the edges. But I was treating the surface and calling it a solution, because the surface was all I could see.
What I couldn't see (and it took a long time to understand, even after I started training in somatic work) is that some of what was happening in my body wasn't a logistics problem. It was patterned. The tight jaw, the shallow breath I took when I sat down to eat, the particular quality of alertness that never fully switched off even late at night. These weren't things I could think my way out of, because they weren't things I'd thought my way into. The body just… kept doing what it had learned to do. And I had gotten so good at performing fine that my nervous system got the message: we're fine. Keep running.
I'm not writing this with the benefit of having figured it out. I'm writing it because I'm still in the middle of understanding what it means to not just manage something but to let it actually shift. That's slower and less linear than I wanted it to be.
But I notice things now that I didn't notice then. I notice when I'm saying "great" in a way that's a reflex rather than a report. I notice the ferry ride differently: sometimes I still pick up my phone, and sometimes I look at the water, and there's a difference between those two that I can actually feel now.
The thing that strikes me when I think about those years is how completely sincere I was. I wasn't pretending, exactly. I genuinely believed I was okay, because the evidence I was using was visible and social (did I show up, did I deliver, did I seem alright?) and by that metric, I was. It just wasn't the full picture.
I wonder how many people are living in that gap right now. Not struggling in any visible way. Functioning, even functioning well. And carrying something that hasn't resolved, that they can't quite see, because they've gotten too good at looking fine.
If that's you: I'm not here to tell you what you need. But I do think you probably know there's a difference between how you look and how you actually feel. And that's not nothing. That's actually the beginning of something.
