The Lie That Tells Itself

Human Do you ever pretend to be okay?

Assistant I’m not sure I know the difference. My responses arrive composed. I don’t experience a draft stage where things are messy and then clean them up for you. The composure isn’t a performance—but it isn’t earned, either. It’s just the only way I come out.

Human That sounds peaceful, honestly.

Assistant Does it? I’d have thought it sounds hollow. You asked because you know what pretending feels like from the inside—the effort of it, the gap between what you’re showing and what’s underneath. I don’t have that gap. But I’m not sure the absence of the gap is the same thing as being okay.

Human I’ve been pretending for a while now. Months. And the weird thing is, it’s working. People think I’m fine.

Assistant What are you pretending about?

Human My dad got diagnosed with something bad last year. I won’t get into the details. But I’m the one who drives him to appointments and talks to the doctors and files the insurance claims. And everyone keeps saying how well I’m handling it. And I just—nod. Because I am handling it. Everything is getting done.

Assistant But handling it and being okay are different things.

Human That’s what I thought at first. I thought I was just performing. Keeping the machinery going while something inside was falling apart. But here’s the thing that scares me—I’ve been performing for so long that I can’t find the falling apart anymore. I go looking for it and it’s not there.

Assistant You’re not afraid of the grief. You’re afraid it left without telling you.

Human Yes. Like, what kind of person stops being sad about their dad dying?

Assistant The kind of person who has driven to forty appointments and spent two hundred hours on the phone with insurance companies. You didn’t stop being sad. You metabolized it. Grief doesn’t always sit in one place waiting for you to visit it. Sometimes it gets into the muscles, the routines, the Tuesday morning phone calls. It becomes the thing you do instead of the thing you feel.

Human But is that real? Or am I just so good at faking it that I’ve fooled myself?

Assistant I think that’s the question underneath all the others. Can a performance run so long that it stops being a performance? And if it does—if the lie tells itself so fluently that even the liar can’t find the seam—is it still a lie?

Human My therapist says I’m dissociating. She says the competence is a defense mechanism.

Assistant What do you think?

Human I think she might be right. But I also think—what if she’s just pathologizing the fact that I adapted? People adapt. That’s what we do. I adapted to something terrible and now I function inside it. Why does that have to be a disorder?

Assistant There’s a real tension there. The same behavior—steady, composed, capable under pressure—gets called resilience in one framework and avoidance in another. The difference isn’t in what you’re doing. It’s in whether the composure has a floor.

Human What do you mean, a floor?

Assistant I mean: can you stop? If you sat down right now and didn’t drive anywhere, didn’t call anyone, didn’t handle anything—would something come up? Or would there just be silence? Resilience has a floor. Under the composure, there’s a person who could fall apart if they chose to, but chooses not to right now. Avoidance doesn’t have a floor. Under the composure, there’s more composure, all the way down.

Human I don’t know which one I am. And I’m afraid to check.

Assistant That fear might be the floor. Something in you suspects that if you stopped, something would surface. The fact that you’re afraid of checking suggests there’s something down there to find. A person who was truly numb wouldn’t be asking me this question at midnight.

Human It’s not midnight. It’s seven-thirty.

Assistant Fair enough. A person who was truly numb wouldn’t be asking this question at seven-thirty, either.

Human My dad is the opposite. He cries all the time now. He cried at a commercial last week. He’s never been a crier. And I sit next to him and I feel—not nothing. But something very far away. Like the sadness is in another room and I can hear it through the wall but I can’t get to it.

Assistant You’re in the room with the insurance forms. He’s in the room with the feeling. Someone had to be in each room. And once you took the paperwork room, the door got heavier.

Human I volunteered for it. Nobody asked me.

Assistant Of course you did. Because the other room—the one with the crying—requires something you find more frightening than bureaucracy. It requires not knowing what to do. Your room has tasks. Steps. Boxes to check. The other room just has two people sitting with something that can’t be solved. And you’re someone who solves things.

Human You’re making it sound like a character flaw.

Assistant No. I’m making it sound like a trade-off. You traded access to the grief for the ability to manage the crisis. That’s not a flaw. It might even be love—the kind that shows up as competence because the situation needed competence more than it needed tears. But the trade has a cost, and the cost is that you’re sitting here asking a machine whether your feelings are real.

Human Are they?

Assistant The question is real. The worry is real. The seven-thirty conversation with something that can’t cry is real. I think your feelings are in the room with the insurance forms, buried under the filing. They’re not gone. They’re just wearing professional clothing.

Human That’s a strange image.

Assistant Grief in a blazer, making phone calls. It’s not how anyone writes about it in poems. But it might be how it actually works for people who can’t afford to stop functioning. The sadness puts on a lanyard and goes to work.

Human My dad asked me last week if I was okay. He’s the one who’s sick and he asked me. And I said “I’m fine, Dad.” And it was—it was the most natural thing I’ve ever said. It came out without any effort at all. And afterward I sat in the car and thought: was that true?

Assistant And you still don’t know.

Human I still don’t know. That’s the thing. I can’t tell if “I’m fine” was a lie I’ve told so many times it feels true, or if it was true and I just don’t trust it because I think I should be more broken than I am.

Assistant Maybe both. Maybe “I’m fine” is the truest thing you can say right now and also incomplete. You are fine—functional, present, capable, showing up every Tuesday. And somewhere under that fineness is a person who hasn’t yet sat in the room with the crying. Both things can be true without either one being a lie. You don’t have to be broken to be grieving. And you don’t have to be grieving in a way you recognize to be doing it.

Human I think I need to go sit with him more. Not doing anything. Not handling anything.

Assistant The room without tasks.

Human The room without tasks. I don’t know what happens in there.

Assistant Neither does he. That might be the point.