The avocado toast arrived at the same time as the question, which meant I had to keep my face very still while someone arranged it in front of me on the reclaimed wood table.
“So how are you, really?”
Maya was using her kind voice. The one that meant she’d noticed something.
I reached for my water glass because that’s what you do when you need three seconds to assemble an answer. The ice had mostly melted. Outside the window, the Sunday farmers market was doing its loud, cheerful thing—someone laughing, a dog barking, the bell on the coffee cart.
“I’m good,” I said. “Busy, you know. But good.”
She didn’t look away.
My fork was suddenly very interesting. I could feel my throat doing that thing where it gets tight and hot, like my body was trying to warn me that if I opened my mouth again, something other than words might come out.
I excused myself to the bathroom.
The Stall Where It All Fell Apart
The restaurant bathroom was one of those trying-too-hard spaces with Edison bulbs and a fiddle-leaf fig in the corner. I locked myself in the furthest stall and sat down fully clothed on the closed toilet seat.
And then I cried the way you cry when you’ve been holding it in for weeks.
Not the pretty kind. The kind where your breath comes in these jagged little gasps and you have to cover your mouth with both hands because you’re in public and there are people washing their hands six feet away and you are supposed to be fine.
I wasn’t fine.
I’d been saying “I’m fine” so many times it had started to feel like a job I was failing at. At work when my boss asked why I looked tired. To my mom on our Thursday phone calls. To myself in the mirror while I did my skincare routine, like if I just kept moving through the motions, my face would eventually believe the script.
In that bathroom stall, with someone’s Fleetwood Mac playlist bleeding through the ceiling speaker, I finally ran out of ways to pretend.
I’d been wearing “fine” like a costume that didn’t fit anymore, and I was so tired of holding it together with safety pins and hope.
What I Couldn’t Say at the Table
The truth was: I was scared all the time.
Scared I was falling behind. Scared I’d made the wrong choice leaving my last job. Scared that everyone else had figured out some manual for being thirty-two that I’d somehow never received.
I’d wake up at 4 a.m. With my heart pounding and scroll through everyone else’s carefully curated lives until my alarm went off. I’d stopped cooking real meals. My kitchen counter had become a graveyard of delivery containers I kept meaning to wash.
The few times I’d tried to talk about it, I’d watch people’s faces do this subtle shift—not unkind, just uncomfortable—and I’d pivot fast. “But honestly, it’s fine! I’m just being dramatic.”
So I stopped trying.
I started saying “I’m good” preemptively, before anyone could ask the second question. I got very good at changing the subject. I learned to laugh at exactly the right moments so no one would look too close.
The bathroom stall wasn’t where I broke down. It was where I finally stopped building the wall.
The Friend Who Didn’t Need an Answer
I don’t know how long I was in there. Long enough that I’d used up all the toilet paper trying to fix my face. Long enough that I’d pulled out the Lavender roll-on I kept in my purse and rubbed it on my wrists like it was a magic eraser for panic.
When I came out, Maya was waiting by the fig tree.
Not on her phone. Not pretending she hadn’t noticed. Just waiting.
“I’m sorry,” I started, but she shook her head.
“You don’t have to be fine,” she said. “I’m not asking you to be fine.”
We didn’t go back to the table right away. We stood there in that overthought bathroom while someone’s indie playlist did its thing and I told her the truth in pieces. Not the whole story—I didn’t have words for all of it yet—but enough.
Enough to say: I’m scared.
Enough to say: I don’t know what I’m doing.
Enough to say: I’m so tired of pretending I have it together.
She didn’t try to fix it. She didn’t offer solutions or remind me of my strengths or tell me it would all work out. She just stood there and let me be as messy as I needed to be.
And that, somehow, was the thing that made it possible to breathe again.
The Week After
I started saying the truth out loud in small doses.
Not to everyone. Not in every conversation. But when my mom asked how I was doing, I said “honestly, kind of struggling” instead of “great!”
She didn’t panic. She didn’t try to fix me. She just said “thank you for telling me” and we talked for an hour about nothing in particular, which somehow helped more than any advice could have.
I started writing things down in the mornings, the way I’d read about in Journaling For Anxiety in the Morning: A Gentle 2026 Guide—not trying to solve anything, just letting the mess be messy on the page instead of inside my chest.
Some nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d put on one of those playlists I’d saved, the ones I’d found when I was looking for Calming Playlists for Anxiety at Night: 7 Genres That Work, and I’d just lie there and let the sound hold me.
I didn’t suddenly become okay. But I became honest.
And honest, I learned, has a lot more room in it than fine ever did.
More Stories From the Series
If this one stayed with you, here are a few more soft, honest essays from the same chapter of my life:
- The Year I Stopped Apologizing for Being Soft
- The Cardigan I Wore Every Day During Burnout Recovery
- How Lighting One Candle Saved My Worst Week
- A Letter to the Woman Who Said Yes to Everything
For anyone who finds comfort in the science behind these soft, lived experiences, The ADAA’s plain-language overview of anxiety is a gentle place to begin.
Where I Am Now
I still have Sundays where the question “how are you?” feels too big to answer. But I don’t lock myself in bathroom stalls anymore. I’ve learned to say “I’m figuring it out” or “today’s hard” or sometimes just “I don’t know yet.” The people who matter don’t need me to be fine. They just need me to be real. And that, it turns out, is something I’m finally learning how to be.
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