Are you stuck in the 'fine' trap?

Why I believe 'fine' is too high a cost to settle for...

How are you coping with the summer holidays, lovely you? I had a week of poorly youngest, for his first week off school. You couldn’t write it! Four nights of him in my bed, waking up soaked because he was sweating so profusely, watching him ache and being able to do nothing about it.

I knew he was better on Friday when I’d woken up every hour on Thursday night worried about him, to find him still sleeping through. Friday morning he told me he loved me, pulled one of his excellent and weird faces at me, and went off to find his Nintendo switch.

Oh the relief.

However, it now means that the drink this week as we chat is strong coffee for me, and I’m writing this to you on Sunday morning rather than being ahead of the curve by a day or three!

So. Coffee. Seat. Let’s talk.

Photo by chaisiri tiewsirichaisakul on Unsplash

How do you feel about ‘fine’? It’s something that we use on autopilot isn’t it…

“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Work’s fine.”
“Everything’s fine”

Fine is socially acceptable. It doesn’t raise any awkward questions. It means we can move on to what we wanted to get to without getting bogged down in potential uncomfortable details. It tells others not to worry about us.

I know I use it to avoid looking at how I’m really feeling sometimes too.

But here’s what might surprise you. ‘Fine’ was partly responsible for my need to end my marriage.

Here’s the truth about fine.
Fine is often where dreams go to die.

Fine is safe, yes. Predictable. But it’s also numbing. And over time, fine becomes a kind of fog. You can forget what you want, who you are, what you’re capable of.

You can have ‘fine’, but what are you giving up in return? Fine is, after all, ‘fine’, it’s harmless and comfortable and doesn’t incite the sort of internal riot that leads to change. It’s inoffensive. It doesn’t rock the boat.

But it doesn’t light you up either. And that low-grade “meh” can sap your energy, erode your confidence, and leave you with a sense of maybe this is all there is.

Why is ‘fine’ responsible for my divorce? Let me tell you…