Fine.
That is what I will say. That is what I always say, the word worn smooth from so much use, a stone I keep in my pocket for exactly this moment, this moment when someone tilts their head at just the right angle and asks.
But you said really.
You said, “Do I really want to know?” So I am going to stand here for a moment in the doorway of that question and decide if I trust you with the actual answer.
Here is the actual answer.
I am tired in a way that sleep does not touch.
I am tired in the bones, in the part of the body that decides whether to keep going, and that part has been running on the fumes of sheer stubbornness for longer than I can tell you without crying, and I am not going to cry here because I have learned that crying in certain rooms becomes the story instead of the thing that made me cry.
I feel like a building that has been condemned and is still being used.
I feel like I have been practicing wellness for so long that I have forgotten what unwellness is allowed to look like, what it sounds like when it is not managed, not reframed, not turned into a lesson, a research question, or a blog post that makes it mean something.
Sometimes it does not mean anything. Sometimes it is just a woman sitting in a parking lot before walking in, because she needs two more minutes not to perform.
I feel like I have given a nineteen-year gift to an institution that keeps the gift and forgets the giver.
I feel like I have been reasonable for an unreasonable amount of time.
I feel like every time I found the language for my pain, someone handed me a framework and said have you tried reframing?
I have reframed. I have reframed the picture until it hung perfectly straight on a wall that was on fire.
I feel like grief that does not know what it is grieving.
The career I was promised if I worked hard enough. The version of myself that believed that. The mornings I spent building something that someone else is now living in.
I feel like I am standing in the exact place where my life was supposed to begin, and being told the beginning has been postponed indefinitely.
I feel invisible in rooms that need my labour to function.
I feel loud in rooms where they need me to be quiet.
I feel the particular exhaustion of a woman who has smiled through things that deserved a reckoning.
I feel the specific loneliness of being surrounded by people and known by none of them, not really, not in the place where the actual story lives.
I feel like I have swallowed so many words I am full of them, heavy with things I was too professional to say, too careful to say, too afraid of the consequence to say, and they sit in me like stones, and I carry them to every meeting, every class, every cheerful email I send at eleven at night.
How do I feel?
I feel like that.
I feel like the question almost never gets asked, and when it does, I almost never answer it, because the answer is not a conversation; it is an excavation, and most people who ask are not dressed for that kind of work.
But you asked.
You said really.
So now you know what lies behind the word “fine”.
In Spanish I learned another version of the same armor. Bien. One syllable, smooth as a stone, and just as portable. Estoy bien. I am fine. Even there, even in the language I was returning to, the word arrived already practised.
Now you know what I carry into every room I am not quite allowed to belong to.
Now you know what it costs to keep showing up in a system that keeps calculating whether I am worth the space I already occupy.
That is how I feel.
That is the real answer, the one that lives underneath the managed one, the one I have never read aloud in a meeting, the one I write at midnight and do not send.
You asked.
I am still here, which means I have not given up on being asked.
Aquí estoy. Y esto es lo que cargo. And this is what I carry.
The Real Answer Lives Behind the Word Fine
Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026
Artist Statement: A mug I found in a shop, photographed because it made me laugh out loud.
Translation Note: Spanish phrases in this poem were assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.
