The Year Nobody Asked How I Was Really Doing
Freshman year taught me that homesickness doesn't only mean missing home.
Everyone asked how classes were going. Nobody asked how I was doing, not really — and I don't think that's anyone's fault. It's just not usually the question people reach for.
I had pictured freshman year as a kind of arrival. Instead it felt like standing in a room full of people who all seemed to already know each other, even the ones who'd met that same week. I told my parents I was doing great, because I was doing fine on paper — grades were fine, I was going to class, I hadn't cried in front of anyone. That felt like enough to report as "great."
What I didn't say was that I ate most meals alone that semester and told myself it was because I liked the quiet. What I didn't say was that I'd stopped texting my high school friends back because it was easier than explaining that I wasn't having the experience the movies promised.
The lesson
The thing that actually helped wasn't a big moment. It was a girl in my dorm who asked, on a random Tuesday, "Is this actually going okay for you?" — not "how's it going," but is this actually going okay — and something about the specificity of the question made it impossible to give the easy answer.
I told her the truth, badly, in fragments. She didn't fix anything. She just kept asking that same kind of question every few weeks after that, and slowly it got easier to answer honestly, and then easier to be honest without being asked. You don't have to keep performing fine. You're allowed to say it's hard.
The psychology behind it
Vague questions get vague, socially-scripted answers almost automatically — "how's it going" is processed more like a greeting than a genuine inquiry, and "good" comes out before you've even really checked. Specific questions interrupt that script. They require you to actually consult how you're feeling before answering, which is exactly why they're more uncomfortable to ask, and more useful to be asked.
This is also just what loneliness often looks like from the outside: functional, polite, hard to spot unless someone asks a question precise enough to get past the automatic answer.
For your journal
- 1.If someone asked "is this actually going okay for you?", what would your honest answer be?
- 2.Who is someone you could ask that same question this week?
One action for today
Ask one person this week a more specific question than "how are you" — and actually wait for the real answer.