I Stopped Giving the Armored Answer

Somebody asked me how I was doing this week.

I gave the answer I always give.

Good. Busy. Can't complain.

Three words, a shrug, and a subject change. I have said that sentence so many times it comes out before I have checked whether it is true.

That answer is armor. I know exactly where I picked it up.

When you spend years where every word you say can be used against you, you learn to say nothing that can be picked up and carried off. You learn to answer without answering. You get good at it. You get so good at it that you keep doing it long after the room stops being dangerous.

Then one day you are standing in your own kitchen giving the armored answer to somebody who just loves you and asked a simple question.

Here is the part I am still working on.

The opposite of armor is not spilling everything. I do not owe anybody the whole file. Some things stay off the record and they are going to stay there.

The opposite of armor is a true short answer.

Tired but steady.

Better than last month.

Rough morning, decent afternoon.

Those take about as long to say as good, busy, can't complain. They cost me nothing I need to keep. And they are actually true, which means the person asking gets to be a person in my life instead of somebody standing outside a wall.

I have noticed my kids do not accept the armored answer anyway. Kids read tone. You can say fine in a voice that means anything but fine and a child hears the voice, not the word. So I am not fooling anybody at home. I am just teaching them that this is how a man answers a question about himself.

That is not what I want to teach them.

So I am practicing. Not therapy talk. Not a speech. Just one honest clause instead of one defensive one.

Somebody asks how I am doing, and I take the half second to actually check before I open my mouth.

Half the time the true answer is better than the armored one. I am doing all right. The work is moving. The house is loud in the good way.

The other half it is not better, and I say a short version of that too, and the sky does not fall.

Peace is not the absence of hard things. Peace is not having to run a filter on every sentence about your own life.

I am not all the way there. I still catch the armored answer halfway out of my mouth some days.

But I catch it now. That is new. And catching it is the whole difference between a habit and a life sentence.

If you have been giving the armored answer for a while, you probably did not choose it either. Something taught it to you. Worth asking yourself what, and whether that place still exists.

Mine does not. I keep forgetting to tell my mouth.