No. 40 | How are you? No, how are you, really?
On sharing, why I'm struggling to share, and the things I could say instead
Recently, I’ve found myself stumped by a deceptively simple question.
That is: how are you?
No, really. How are you?
Now, I’m usually an open book, and I’m pretty good at navigating tricky questions. My forthcoming memoir isn’t called ASK ME HOW IT WORKS: LOVE IN AN OPEN MARRIAGE for nothing. So I could answer this question a few different ways.
I could tell you what’s been keeping me busy.
Everyone understands busy-ness. I’ve been busy with final corrections for the book before it goes to print. I’ve been busy wrapping my head around the Dutch secondary school system, to help my daughter choose a high school next year. Big decision for a 12 year old! I’ve been busy trying to spring clean my home and edit my photos from America and Cyprus. However, judging from the little piles of clutter all around my house and the 60GB of photos still in my SD card, I’ve been busy at failing at both tasks spectacularly.
I could tell you where I’ve been.
Everyone loves a good travel story. At the start of April, I went on a road trip across the American South to see the solar eclipse with my boyfriend. It was pure adrenaline, racing from Tennessee to Georgia, then across Alabama and Mississippi in a big, bright blue Jeep that we named Reba, with one spectacular night in Elvis’ Memphis before flying back home—all within eight days.
The eclipse, which dazzled us on the shores of a sapphire lake in Arkansas, was nothing short otherworldly. Definitely worth a Substack on its own.
In May, inspired by
’s brilliant novel The Island of Missing Trees, I booked a family holiday to Cyprus. It was the searing jolt of summer I needed after a wet, miserable Dutch spring, but also more than your average beach holiday. Ravages of a history of conflict and recent hard times were everywhere, from the hollowed-out shells of derelict buildings in Paphos, birthplace of Aphrodite, to the surfeit of property developers selling too many one-size-fits-all, white-cube holiday homes to too few prospects.Yet in Cyprus I relished the crunch and bite of a feta-topped Greek salad every day at the beach, and a cool glass of dry Cypriot wine every night at dinner. My daughter taught herself the Greek alphabet by reading road signs on our two-hour drive to the slick tourist enclaves and white sand beaches on the island’s west coast; a cat sanctuary in the mountainside monastery of Agios made me cry and think of my mother.
I could tell you how the book is going.
Everyone wants to hear about the book. It’s the most exciting thing in my life right now, the thing that pulls me into action and gives me joy, purpose and energy. I’ve once written that dreams are like rocket fuel, and that holds true for me now.
Because I’m a total geek, it’s been incredibly satisfying to work with a professional copy editor, then with two superb proofreaders, to nab and scrub every last error from the typeset pages before the book goes into production. It blows my mind that in a matter of weeks, I will get to see and hold my book as a real, physical object when the first set of proofs goes out to “influential readers” this month.
Oh, and we have a publication date! Mark your calendars: March 6th, 2025. Yes, my baby will be a Pisces, a water sign just like its mommy.
I could tell you how I am today, as in right this very moment.
Hey, you’ve asked how I am, not how I’ve been. Today my legs are dead, because it’s my first day of strength training with my friend Fred, a six-foot seven-inch beast of an athlete. Today feels like summer, warm and muggy. Today is a good hair day. Today is easy.
So far, so good. I’ve supplied enough nuggets of information to react to, enough breezy bits to carry us away on a pleasant current of small talk. As an adept conversationalist, I know it’s my turn to ask questions now. Otherwise I risk monopolizing the conversation, which only bores do.
We’ve used how are you as our opening gambit, so I’ll ask about specific things: how was Copenhagen, have you found a new school for the kids, how was the move? Are you settling in nicely into your new place, when’s the housewarming party, any fun plans for the summer?
But you see, all of this is just clever deflection.
Because how I am, how I really am, is a torpedo that would sink our conversation.
It is a cork that stoppers my words, a lump lodged in my throat that I must swallow before I can smile. It is the stone around my neck that I lug to all my calls and coffees, the weight that lies on my hands when I try to write, the jump that makes my heart go bump in the night and keeps me awake until the arrival of morning.
How am I, really? A few quick decisions are in order. How much time have we got? If we’ve bumped into each other on the street—you with a paper-wrapped bouquet of lilies from the market, me holding my child’s hand—it’s best we keep things moving.
What’s the vibe? At a party, wine flowing and tunes pumping, I might prefer to keep things buzzy and light. Am I willing to take on the work of managing your reaction? Because it will have to be managed, and this invisible labor costs me. If I put this on you, I can’t just leave you to flounder. So maybe I’d rather not.
Are we broadcasting or connecting?
I recently finished reading The Success Myth by
, where she describes the value of connection as “finding a way to connect, not broadcast.” I thought that was a great distinction to inquire into why we want to share. When we share something with others, are we simply broadcasting or are we truly connecting?Broadcasting is a one-way delivery of information. Social media influencer culture operates like this. If someone with hundreds of thousands of followers shares something about their life, do they really have the bandwidth to thoughtfully consider and respond to every single reaction?
Broadcasting deals in big numbers, driving metrics like growth, engagement and reach. But none of those have ever been the reasons that compel me to share. When I put something out into the world, it’s because I feel something—and I want to feel that someone on the other side feels it too.
Sharing—whether intimately in conversation, more thoughtfully in writing, or amplified by platforms like Instagram or Substack—is like plucking a string to hear the sound it makes when it resonates. That resonance fills me something deeply satisfying, warm and rich, like a low cello note straight to the heart.
Connection is a flow of stimulus and reaction, a feedback loop. I know you’ll say something back to me, and what we say to each other will make us feel things. But lately I’ve had so many feelings, that I’ve needed help to carry my own feelings and sort them out—and I’m not sure I can handle yours. So for now I’ve chosen a few people I trust to enter into this feedback loop with.
What I want other people to feel, most of all, is my joy. I started my first blog on Blogger when I began dating my husband, because my pure unbelieving delirium at the first flush of love (SOMEONE LOVES ME?! ME?!) simply had to go somewhere.
Even the smallest, most ordinary of joys overflow and need to spill over. When you tell me that you feel the joy I share, you beam it back to me. No artificial intelligence or algorithm can do that.
It’s still true today. When I post on Instagram, it’s usually something that makes me happy. You’ll never see me crying on Instagram, and I post an average of 0.75 or fewer online rants a year. It makes me quite a sunny presence to be around, online and off.
But there’s a catch.
It makes it hard to share things that aren’t joyful. I find it hard to show up as other than how people know me: bubbly, happy, full of energy and light.
Which is why I’m so stumped by the question: how are you, really?
I’m working on it. Literally, there’s a half-finished essay in my laptop that contains the real sh*t. I promise, we’ll get there in the end.
I’ve said a lot about me. Now I would love to hear from you. Especially if you’re new here, and we’ve never spoken before.
How are you?
No, really. How are you?
I love, love, love Elif Shafak’s : The Island of Missing Trees. Did you try to find the tavern? and did you find a place or two to eat all that decadent food she describes in such detail that it made me salivate when I was listening to the audiobook? I may have googled some of the recipes and added them to my list of things to experiment with