So, How's Life?

I don't like to lie.

When someone asks me how I'm doing, and I feel any degree of closeness to them, I generally try to give them a fairly honest answer. The problem with that is, if I'm not doing so well at the moment, they start asking about why.

And a lot of the time, I don't really want to tell them. If I say I'm doing really badly, it's not so bad. And if I don't want to talk about it I can just say so and be glad they cared enough to ask.

But sometimes they start asking about what's wrong when I give a fairly neutral answer. And over the past year or so, that has really bothered me. Sure, they are trying to be caring and all that. But what I get from that is the sense that life should be all sunshine and happiness. And that is not what life is at all. And while my mood and my view of life is largely up to me, sometimes tough stuff gets me down.

Most of the time when I get asked about why I say life is only okay instead of great, I will give one of two answers. Sometimes I say something about how life can't always be good. And sometimes I say that I'm saving the greats for really extraordinarily happy times, so I can have something left to express how well everything is going.

But there is one girl who has a way of somehow getting me to talk about the stuff that has me down. And I don't really like to talk to her. Because it seems like whenever I do, she manages to get me talking about, and thus thinking about, everything that is going wrong in my life. She even got me doing that at a party once, which really got me out of the party mood. And I know she's just trying to show she cares. But I think the best way for her to show she cares may just be to not talk about my life at all.