April 6
The Reliable Answer
We attend regularly and know plenty of people. Asked how we are doing, we offer the same cheerful answer. It saves time and keeps the conversation easy. After a while we may resent that nobody seems to know how hard things have become. They see the version we keep presenting, and we feel unseen by people to whom we have offered very little chance of seeing us.
There are good reasons to choose carefully whom we trust. We do not owe every acquaintance an account of our private troubles. Yet emotional isolation can continue in a busy social life if no trusted person ever hears a different answer. A plain admission that we are having a difficult week might open a conversation we have been waiting for someone else to begin. We need not tell everything at once to stop pretending that there is nothing to tell.
Who has a chance to know how I actually am?
An honest answer would give us somewhere to begin.
For the A.A. nerds: Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, Step Five.