honest answer, three months later

Three months isn’t a very long time.

Except when it is.

Three months ago, I wrote a song called honest answer because I had become tired of answering a very ordinary question with a lie.

How are you?

I'm fine.

I wasn't.

I knew I wasn't when I wrote the song. That was the entire reason for writing it.

I was exhausted in ways sleep didn't fix. My mind rarely stopped moving. I was struggling to keep up while somehow continuing to show up. And because I was still functioning — still working, still laughing, still doing the things expected of me — it was remarkably easy for the world to believe the person standing in front of it was okay.

I had gotten very good at performing okay.

So honest answer was an attempt to stop performing.

It said, essentially: if you're actually asking me how I am, and if I believe you really want to know, then this is what the truth sounds like.

At the time, that felt enormously vulnerable.

Three months later, I realized I still hadn't told the whole truth. Not because I'd been dishonest, but because I didn't know it yet.

There is an important difference, and I have become increasingly interested in that difference.

We tend to think of truth as something fixed. Either we told it or we didn't. Either we understood ourselves or we didn't. Either the story we told about our lives was accurate or it wasn't.

I'm beginning to think that's an unfair expectation to place on ourselves.

Sometimes we tell the absolute truth with every piece of understanding available to us at the time.

And then we live a little longer. Something happens. A memory connects to another memory. A conversation opens a door. Therapy gives something a name. Your body reacts to something before your mind understands why.

And suddenly a truth you thought you understood becomes larger.

The earlier truth wasn't wrong… you just know more now.

That's what happened to honest answer.

I returned to it three months later because I had begun understanding something about myself that changed the meaning of some of the words I'd written.

For much of my life, I have thought of myself as someone who tolerates pain well.

I've said it almost proudly.

I don't complain much. I can endure things. I can keep functioning through pain. I can compartmentalize. I can do what needs to be done and deal with how I feel about it later.

There is a version of that story in which those things are strengths.

Some of them probably are.

But there is another version I had never really considered.

What if I didn't learn to tolerate pain? What if I learned not to show it?

That question landed differently.

Because there are things the body learns long before we have sophisticated language for them.

When I was young, there were circumstances in which reacting to pain could make things worse.

Crying could make things worse.

Pulling away could make things worse.

Resistance could make things worse.

So what does a child learn?

Take it.

Don't react.

Don't make this worse.

Be still.

Be quiet.

Eventually nobody has to tell you anymore.

Your body remembers the instructions.

And years later, you can call the result pain tolerance.

You can call it strength.

You can call it resilience.

Other people might even admire it.

That doesn't mean those words are entirely wrong.

But they may not tell the whole story.

That realization forced me to reconsider something else I have often treated as strength: silence.

I know how to go quiet.

I know how to keep something inside while presenting something entirely different outside.

I know how to walk into a room carrying far more than anyone in that room realizes and still function.

I know how to say I'm okay convincingly enough that people stop asking.

For years, I thought there was something stoic about that.

Now I wonder how much of it was learned.

How much of what I called strength was actually an extraordinarily effective survival strategy?

And perhaps the more uncomfortable question:

What happens when a survival strategy outlives the circumstances that created it?

That's where this new version of the song began.

Not with the idea that honest answer had been wrong, but with the realization that I finally understood something the person who wrote it couldn't yet see.

So I didn't want to write a sequel. I didn't want honest answer, part two. And I absolutely didn't want to rewrite the original as though three months of additional understanding somehow invalidated what I had felt before.

That person deserves better than that.

He told the truth.

He told as much of it as he knew.

So I went back to the song instead.

The new recording begins recognizably close to the original. That's deliberate.

For a while, you're standing in the same place. Then things begin to shift. The music starts moving somewhere else. The familiar structure becomes less familiar.

And by the time the lyrics themselves begin revealing what has changed, you're no longer listening to quite the same song.

I love that.

Because that's much closer to how change actually feels to me. There usually isn't a dramatic moment when one version of ourselves exits and another enters.

We carry the old understanding forward. We walk around in it.

Then one day we notice that something fits differently. A sentence means something it didn't mean before. A memory has acquired context. Something we once admired about ourselves begins asking to be examined.

The landscape hasn't necessarily changed. We have.

There is grief in that.

I don't want to romanticize it.

Discovering that something you considered a strength may have originated as a survival response doesn't magically make the response disappear.

Understanding why I go quiet doesn't mean I will never go quiet again.

Recognizing that my body learned not to resist doesn't erase what taught it that lesson.

Knowing that I'm fine can be a performance doesn't mean I will never say it when I'm not.

Healing, at least as I am experiencing it, is much less tidy than that.

Sometimes healing is simply noticing.

I'm doing that thing again.

And then, perhaps:

I understand why.

And eventually:

Do I still need to?

That last question is the one I'm learning to ask.

Not with judgment.

That's important to me.

I spent enough years judging earlier versions of myself for choices they made with information, circumstances and survival skills I can only fully understand in retrospect.

I don't want healing to become another courtroom. I don't need to prosecute the person I used to be in order to become someone different.

If silence kept him safe, then I can be grateful for the silence.

If disappearing inside himself helped him endure something, then I can understand why he disappeared.

If pretending to be fine got him through another day, then perhaps I'm fine wasn't always a lie.

Maybe sometimes it was a life raft.

But you aren't supposed to live forever on a life raft.

Eventually, if you're fortunate, you reach somewhere safer.

And then comes the difficult part.

You have to learn that the things that kept you alive aren't necessarily the things that will teach you how to live.

That may be the real difference between these two recordings.

Three months ago, honest answer was about finally admitting:

I'm not okay.

Three months later, the question underneath it has become:

Why did I believe I had to hide that in the first place?

I don't have every answer.

I'm becoming increasingly suspicious of songs that pretend I do.

But I know this much:

Silence can look like strength from the outside.

So can endurance.

So can competence.

So can smiling while you're hurting.

Sometimes they genuinely are strengths.

And sometimes they're scars that became useful.

Maybe they can be both.

What matters to me now is having enough compassion for myself to ask which is which.

That's why I wanted this song to carry a timestamp.

three months later.

Not revised.

Not corrected.

Not the real honest answer.

Three months later.

Because I want to leave room for the possibility that three months from now, I'll understand something else.

I hope I do.

I hope there are songs I write today that I'll eventually outgrow — not because they were failures, but because I kept living.

Maybe that is one of the gifts of writing these songs while I'm still inside the journey rather than waiting until I can explain it neatly from the other side.

They become timestamps.

Evidence of what I understood then.

And when understanding changes, I don't have to erase the evidence.

I can return to it with compassion.

I can sit beside the person who wrote those words and tell him:

You weren't wrong. You just didn't know this yet.

Three months ago, I stopped pretending I was fine.

Three months later, I'm learning to stop pretending my silence was strength.

Both answers are honest.

This is simply what the truth sounds like now.