Almost a year ago I subscribed to Suleika Jaouad’s “The Isolation Journals”. Over the year I have received many writing prompts, which included short essays about the author, as well as background on the prompt. My life became very busy again so unfortunately many of those email remain unopened. But, during the spring break last month I had some free time and began writing.
Then, April started and I needed to prepare for a live-streaming church service for Easter morning. The closer that got, the more I found out that I needed to do for the service, and once again my daily life became consumed with that preparation and the stress of not being sure what was going to happen. To my surprise, it all turned out fine, and I felt better after playing the service than I had in a long, long time. And now, I can write again.
I intend to follow through with Suleika’s most recent challenge of writing every day for 30 days. To catch up I’ll have to write twice each day.
The first prompt to write about is to tell when we answered “fine” to a question, just because we didn’t want to be honest, and why. So, over the years, that has been a standard answer of mine when people asked how I was doing. Often “fine” was the only way I could answer without breaking into tears. After my husband died from a brain tumour, when I was very obviously grieving, people would ask “how are you?”?? How was I supposed to answer that?
When I was in high school, the mother of one of my classmates and friends from church would answer honestly when greeted with “how are you today?” I remember my own mom thinking that was quite odd, and socially not really acceptable in our culture. What would happen if we all answered honestly?
Today I am fine, so that would be an honest answer. Two days ago I was so stressed about that upcoming church gig that my skin broke out in rashes from stressed related eczema. My answer then should have “paralyzed with fear”, or “crappy”, or “wishing I had said “no” to the request.
Most likely I will continue to let people know that I am fine, at least until I meet a friend who really wants to know the honest answer.
Reflections 