Emotions, Moods and Reactions

Story · all 20 words

How Are You?

For about a week in the autumn I could not answer the simplest question in the language. People said “how are you?” and I stood there like somebody being asked to do mental arithmetic.

Nothing bad had happened. That was the confusing part. I was not miserable and I was certainly not depressed – I have seen what that looks like in other people and this was not it. I was overwhelmed, which is a completely different thing, and which I did not have the word for at the time.

There were four things happening at once, and not one of them was a disaster. A deadline that had moved twice. A sick relative two hours away. A flat with a problem the landlord would not deal with. And a course I had signed up for in a moment of confidence in July and was now supposed to be studying for. Any one of those is a Tuesday. All four together is something else.

I got frustrated at things that did not deserve it. I lost my temper with a machine in a car park, out loud, in front of a family. I was anxious in the mornings in a way I had not been since I was nineteen, about nothing I could name.

And I managed to hide all of it, extremely competently, for six days.

What ended it was my sister, who telephoned on the Sunday and asked how I was, and then – when I said fine – simply did not say anything. She left about nine seconds of silence on the line. I have thought since that this is the most useful thing anybody has ever done for me, and it cost her nothing.

So I admitted it. Badly, in the wrong order, and at some length. She did not try to solve anything, which I had been dreading. She did not tell me to calm down, which would have made me furious. She just reassured me that four things at once is genuinely a lot, and that I was not failing at something other people find easy.

Then she said the thing I actually needed: “You do not have to cope with all of it this week.”

We made a list on the phone. Two of the four could wait until November and one of them was not even mine to solve. That took about eleven minutes and I had been carrying it for a month and a half.

I was astonished at how quickly the feeling lifted once it had a shape. Not gone – it took another fortnight to properly get over – but manageable. My mood was better by the Wednesday. I stopped being fed up with myself, which had been half the problem.

A friend took me out on the Friday specifically to cheer me up, and I was reluctant to go and went anyway and stayed four hours.

The course was the thing I nearly dropped. I did not, and I finished it in March, and my mother was so thrilled that she told the neighbours. I am quietly proud of it – not of the certificate, but of the fact that the version of me from that October did not quit.

I am not content all the time. Nobody is, whatever they post. But I have learned the difference between a bad week and a bad life, and I have learned that nine seconds of silence from somebody who loves you is worth more than any advice.