Somebody asks how you're doing.
You say fine.
You're not fine. They know you're not fine. You know they know. But there's no good way to say I have been staring at the same email for forty minutes and I cried in my car at lunch in a hallway, so you say fine, and everybody moves on, and you carry it home.
I made a candle about that.
The honest answer
It's called Surviving. It smells like pistachio and caramel, which is warm and a little sweet and nothing like the feeling it's named after, and I did that on purpose. The whole point is that you get something good while you're in the hard part.
When I was recovering from the injury that ended my police career, somebody would ask how I was and I'd run the math in my head. Did I wash my hair today? Did I walk the dogs? Did I get out of bed for a reason other than the dogs?
Some days the answer was yes to all three and I'd think — okay. Thriving. Look at me.
Most days the answer was one out of three. And "fine" felt like a lie and "I'm a disaster" felt like too much to hand someone in a parking lot. So I landed on surviving, and it turned out to be the most useful word I own.
Surviving isn't failure. Surviving is the thing that has to happen before anything else can. You don't get to thriving without going through it.
What surviving actually looked like
I want to be specific, because "I went through a hard time" is a sentence that means nothing.
It looked like my house going into night mode at 11 a.m. — shades down, doors locked, takeout ordered, me horizontal until something forced me vertical.
It looked like teaching myself to write left-handed, badly, in a journal, and some days the entry was just scribbles pressed hard into the page because my head was too loud for words.
It looked like calling four people to ask if anyone could come open a can of tuna, and getting four versions of sorry, I'm busy, and then sitting down and working out how to do it myself.
It looked like a doctor telling me, "You still have legs. Go move them." And me going to the gym to do absolutely nothing impressive, just to be somewhere that wasn't my couch.
None of that is inspirational. That's the part nobody puts on a graphic. It's just slow, unglamorous, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other getting through.
Why I stopped saying "fine"
Because "fine" keeps people out, and I needed people in.
The first time I said something real publicly — that I didn't want to become another law enforcement statistic — my phone did not stop. Women I'd never met told me their departments had done the same thing to them. People told me about who they'd lost. People told me they were in it right now.
Every time I've been honest, someone has said me too. Not once has anyone said "wow, that was unprofessional."
When you're quiet, everybody assumes you're okay. That's the trap. Silence looks identical to fine from the outside, and the people who'd help you can't tell the difference.
Small things you can actually control
When I couldn't control anything — not my hand, not my career, not the lawsuit, not the doctors, not what people in my department said about me — I got very interested in the short list of things that were still mine.
Here's what was on it:
- Light a candle
- Do ten minutes of yoga, badly, one-handed
- Put the eye gels on
- Put the face mask on
- Use the ice roller
- Walk the dogs
That's it. That's the whole ritual. It is not a treatment plan and I'm not pretending it is. But every night I did it, I had proof that I'd decided something and then done it, and when your entire life is being decided for you by other people, that proof matters more than it sounds like it should.
That ritual is why I make what I make. Not because a candle fixes anything. Because lighting one is a small decision you get to make on purpose, and those add up.
If today's a surviving day
Then it's a surviving day. You don't have to upgrade it. You don't have to find the lesson in it yet. You don't owe anybody a silver lining before dinner.
Feel the whole thing. Feel the grief, feel the anger, feel the unfairness of it. And then know that you're going to get back up, because you are, even if it's not today.
Light the candle. Tell one person the true answer. That's the whole assignment.
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If you're in crisis, call or text 988 — the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US. Free, 24/7, and staffed by people who want you here.