The Script That Became a Reflex

Someone asks me how I am and I watch myself do it before I can stop it. “Busy,” I say. Or “keeping at it.” Or the one that sounds the most like a complete sentence without actually being one - “can’t complain.”

I know what I’m doing. I’ve known for years. And still, the honest answer - the one that lives somewhere between my chest and my throat - never quite makes it to my mouth.

For a long time, I thought this was a flaw. Something broken in the wiring. A man who can’t answer a simple question about his own interior life. But then I started paying attention to when the script got written. Not adulthood. Not even adolescence. Much earlier than that. Back when the question wasn’t really a question at all.

It was a diagnostic.

When “How Are You?” Was Never Really a Question

Think about this. A boy comes home from school. Someone asks how he is. If he says “fine” or “good” or “busy with homework,” the conversation moves on. The air stays neutral. Nothing gets activated.

But if he says “not great” - if he says “I’m sad” or “something happened” or even just pauses too long before answering - something shifts. The room changes temperature. Suddenly there are follow-up questions. Concerned faces. Plans being made. Phone calls to teachers. A problem being identified that the boy didn’t ask anyone to solve.

He learns something crucial in that moment. Not that his feelings don’t matter. Something more subtle and more lasting: that his feelings, once spoken, no longer belong to him.

A 2019 study published in the Journal of Research in Personality found that boys who experienced high levels of parental “emotion coaching” - where caregivers consistently responded to negative emotions with problem-solving rather than simple acknowledgment - were significantly more likely to develop avoidant emotional expression patterns by adolescence. The researchers called it “anticipated co-regulation” - the child learns that expressing distress automatically activates someone else’s regulatory system, whether they wanted it to or not.

The Boy Didn’t Learn Silence - He Learned Strategy

This is the part people get wrong. They look at a man who says “keeping at it” instead of “I’m struggling” and they see emotional avoidance. Emotional illiteracy. A wall.

But that boy wasn’t avoiding his feelings. He was protecting his autonomy over them.

There’s a difference between a man who doesn’t know what he feels and a man who learned that saying what he feels starts a process he never consented to. The first is disconnection. The second is a boundary that got built so early it looks like personality.

I remember being maybe ten years old. I told my mother I was nervous about something - a test, a game, something that felt enormous at the time. Within an hour, she’d called the school. Spoken to a teacher. Rearranged something. The nervousness wasn’t mine anymore. It had become a family project. And the implicit message wasn’t “we don’t care how you feel.” It was the opposite. It was “your feelings are so important that they require immediate intervention.”

Which sounds loving. And was loving. And also taught me that feelings are emergencies. That an honest answer to “how are you?” pulls a lever I can’t un-pull.

The Safety of Motion Words

“Busy” is the perfect non-answer because it sounds like an answer. It has texture. Direction. It implies engagement with life without revealing anything about the interior experience of that engagement.

“Can’t complain” is even more elegant - it acknowledges that something could be complained about while simultaneously closing the door on whatever that something might be. It’s a full sentence that communicates nothing except that you are conscious and choosing not to elaborate.

Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence often gets cited as evidence that men need to “open up more.” But what’s overlooked in his research is the distinction between emotional awareness and emotional disclosure. A man can be profoundly aware of his sadness, his exhaustion, his quiet joy - and still choose motion words. Not because he can’t name the feeling, but because naming it out loud has historically cost him ownership of it.

A 2022 study in Psychological Science found that men who scored high on alexithymia scales - the clinical term for difficulty identifying and describing emotions - actually performed normally on emotion recognition tasks when the social stakes were removed. In private, anonymous settings, they could name their feelings with precision. It was only in relational contexts - when another person was listening - that the vocabulary disappeared.

The vocabulary didn’t disappear because it was never learned. It disappeared because another person listening had always meant another person intervening.

What a Boy Learns About Emotional Honesty

Here is what a sensitive boy learns between the ages of six and twelve, usually without anyone meaning to teach him:

That saying “I’m fine” keeps the environment stable. That saying “I’m not fine” destabilizes it. That the people around him - usually the people who love him most - cannot simply hear his pain without trying to fix it. And that being fixed, when you didn’t ask for it, feels like being overridden.

So he builds a repertoire. “Good.” “Busy.” “Same old.” “Keeping at it.” “Living the dream.” Each one a small masterpiece of social engineering - just enough warmth to maintain connection, just enough vagueness to maintain autonomy.

This isn’t emotional closure. This is emotional architecture. A structure built by a child who needed to feel things without those feelings becoming public property.

Brene Brown has written extensively about vulnerability as courage, and she’s right. But what often gets lost in that conversation is this: vulnerability requires trust that the other person will simply witness without managing. And many boys never got that experience. They got love. They got concern. They got rapid problem-solving. What they didn’t get was someone who could hear “I’m not okay” and simply say “I hear you” without reaching for solutions.

The Adult Man in the Coffee Shop

I’m forty-six. I sit in coffee shops and someone I know walks by and asks how I am. “Busy,” I say. Every time. Even when I’m not busy. Even when what I actually am is lonely, or content, or grieving something I can’t name, or simply present in a way that doesn’t have a motion word attached to it.

And here’s what I want you to know if you’re the person asking: I’m not shutting you out. I’m not incapable of emotional depth. I’m running a program that was installed before I had any say in it - a program that says honest answers create obligations, that feelings spoken aloud become collaborative projects, that the safest way to stay whole is to stay in motion, even if that motion is only verbal.

A 2021 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology examined what researchers called “protective emotional ambiguity” in men over forty. They found that men who habitually used action-oriented responses to emotional check-ins actually reported higher levels of internal emotional awareness than men who readily disclosed. The non-disclosers weren’t feeling less. They were guarding more carefully because they’d learned the cost of unguarded feeling.

It Was Never About Being Closed

The reframe is this: the man who says “busy” instead of “broken” isn’t emotionally unavailable. He’s emotionally privatized. He built walls not because he has nothing inside them, but because what’s inside them was taken from him too many times by people who meant well.

This doesn’t mean the walls should stay forever. It doesn’t mean he shouldn’t learn, slowly and with people who earn it, to answer honestly. But it means the starting point isn’t “something is wrong with him.” The starting point is “something happened to him.”

Something happened when he was small and someone asked how he was and he told the truth and the truth became a project and the project became everyone’s business and the feeling - his feeling, the private tender thing that belonged only to him - became community property.

Learning to Answer Differently

If you recognize yourself here, I want to say something gently. You are not broken. You are not emotionally stunted. You are a person who learned, reasonably and early, that honest answers had consequences you didn’t choose.

But you’re also allowed to update the program. Slowly. With people who have proven they can hear without fixing. With someone who asks how you are and, when you say something true, simply stays. Doesn’t reach for their phone. Doesn’t suggest solutions. Just stays.

That’s what was missing. Not the question. Not even the willingness to answer. What was missing was someone who could hold the answer without doing anything with it.

You learned “busy” because “busy” kept you safe. And it did keep you safe. It kept you whole in environments where honesty meant losing control of your own narrative.

But you’re not that boy anymore. And the question - the real one, the one underneath all the motion words - is whether you’ve found anyone yet who makes “not great” feel like something you can say without it becoming someone else’s project.

If you haven’t, that’s okay. The fact that you’re reading this means some part of you is already looking.