Welcome to unfuck your brain. I'm your host Kara Lowentile, master-certified coach, and founder of the School of New Feminist Thub. I'm here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence, and create a life on your own terms, one that you're truly excited to live. Let's go.

Hello, my friends. I want to start today with one word, and it's a word you've probably said

five times already today, and I bet you didn't even notice you're saying it even once.

The word is fine. Someone asks how you're doing and you say, fine, before they've even

finished the question. Or maybe you say, I'm good, but it really means the same thing. It's just

automatic. Maybe you really are fine, or maybe you're furious or completely strung out,

or quietly heartbroken, but that word comes out anyway, because fine is the word that keeps the conversation

moving and keeps you from becoming somebody else's problem. Most of us have said fine, so many

thousands of times that we genuinely don't even hear ourselves do it anymore. That's why today I

want to talk about everything that's hiding inside that one small word, why women learn to say it so often,

and what it costs you to keep saying it for 30 or 40 or 60 years instead of telling the

truth. Let's start with the fact that fine is almost never just one word doing one job.

It's a misleadingly small tip of the iceberg that is hiding so much more underneath.

There's a straight up white lie. No, really, it's fine. Delivered in a fight with your partner when it's clear to anyone watching, including your partner, that you are not fine. There's the minimization. I mean, it's fine. It's not a big deal. What you say about things that are, in fact, kind of a big deal to you. And there's the deflection when

someone asks how you're doing and you say, fine, quickly, and jump right back into asking

about them to avoid the vulnerability or awkwardness of talking about how you really feel right now.

All of these are tools for the same job, which is to get through the moment without putting

your actual emotional state on the

table where it might feel awkward or inconvenient someone. There are actually two different layers

to this, and one is deeper than the other. The deeper layer is that a lot of the time, you genuinely

don't know how you feel. If someone stops you and asks, the most specific answer a lot of us can produce is

tired or stressed or find just busy. Those have basically become your three settings for some of you,

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