Ask me how I’m doing. Go ahead.

I’ll show you a magic trick.

“I’m good.”

See that?

Didn’t even think about it. The words left my mouth before my brain got a vote.

I could be three days behind on sleep, two weeks behind on grief, and one missed call away from falling apart, and I will still hit you with “I’m good” like it’s a reflex.

Because it is.

I been training for that answer my whole life.

Let me tell you how I learned the trick.

I met my last girl doing audio pages.

If you don’t know what that is, congratulations on your healthy relationship with the internet. I was making explicit audio. Grown folks content. That’s how she found me. That’s literally the door she walked through to get to me.

You know what she asked me to do once we got together?

Stop making explicit audio.

You know what I did?

I stopped making explicit audio.

She asked. I agreed.

That part matters.

The thing that brought her to me became the thing she needed gone, and I deleted it like it was nothing.

Then I made us a couples account.

Took the platform that was mine and made it ours. Took the voice that was mine and made it ours. I adjusted everything. The content, the schedule, the boundaries, the man.

By the end, I was doing what she wanted on a page built from what I used to want, and I called that love.

It wasn’t the first time.

My marriage was seven years of the same trick with different props.

Adjust here. Bend there. Pay this bill. Carry that weight. Become so necessary that leaving me would be a logistics problem.

I didn’t ask, “Do you love me?”

I asked, “What do you need me to be?”

Then I became it fast, before anybody could notice I was somebody else first.

I thought I was being a good man.

A provider.

Flexible.

Easy to love.

I was auditioning.

And the cruel part about auditioning is that even when you get picked, you still don’t feel chosen.

Here’s where my father comes in, because you knew he was coming.

He left.

That’s the short version, and honestly, the long version isn’t much longer.

He left, and a little boy in Omaha did the math that little boys do when fathers leave.

The math goes like this:

If he left, something about me wasn’t enough to stay for.

That math is wrong.

Every therapist, every book, every grown version of me knows that math is wrong. But you can’t logic your way out of an equation you solved at an age when you still believed in the tooth fairy.

So I built a system on top of the bad math.

The system had three rules.

Rule one: be whatever shape they need.A shape that fits don’t get left.

Rule two: be indispensable.Pay the bills. Solve the problems. Carry the load. Make leaving you expensive.

Rule three: never, ever need anything.Needy people get left. Be the one who has it figured out. Be the rescuer, never the rescued.

When they ask how you’re doing, you know the answer.

I’m good.

I ran that system for decades.

Ran it in my marriage.

Ran it in church, where I found a whole institution happy to take a young man who would bend into any shape and call his bending “servanthood.”

Seventeen years I gave them.

Ran it in friendships where I was everybody’s strong friend, a job title with no benefits and no backup.

And here’s the part that took me thirty-seven years to see.

The system doesn’t work.

Not “the system is unhealthy but effective.”

No.

It does not work.

Every relationship where I performed myself into the right shape ended anyway.

The marriage ended.

The girl from the audio pages, gone.

The church, gone, and I’m the one who left that one, but only after it nearly took everything.

I bent into every shape I thought would keep me safe, and people still left.

Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about shapeshifting:

People can’t stay with you if you never showed up.

They were never with me.

They were with the shape.

And you can’t be loved in a costume.

You can only be tolerated in one.

A woman told me recently, “Josh, don’t play with me.”

I had asked her about going to church with her.

Me.

The deconstructed agnostic with the Substack literally called Amen. Aśe. And All That S**t.

Asked about church like maybe I could fit into that shape too. Like maybe pew-shaped Josh could get this one to stay.

She saw it immediately.

Called it out in five words.

Don’t play with me.

I first heard it as rejection.

Later, I understood it as a gift.

Because what she was actually saying was:

I don’t want the shape. Where’s the man?

I been thinking about that question ever since.

And here’s the part that still surprises me: the more honest I am about what I want, the less dramatic everything gets.

I thought honesty would make women disappear.

Turns out, a lot of women respect it.

Some even prefer it.

Not because they want every single thing I want, but because at least they know where the man is standing.

Here’s what I know now.

Or at least what I’m practicing knowing, because knowing and practicing are different sports.

Performing okayness was supposed to protect me from being left.

All it did was guarantee I’d be alone, even in rooms full of people.

Even in a marriage.

Even in a church of hundreds who knew my name and not one true thing about me.

But when I drop the performance, something happens that the system never predicted.

I become human.

Visible.

People get to see the actual me, mess and all, and make a real decision.

Some of them will leave.

That’s the terrifying part.

But their leaving becomes information instead of injury.

It filters.

The ones who can’t handle the unfine parts of me clear out, and what’s left is people who chose me with their eyes open.

My actual people.

Not fans of a shape.

People.

And the wildest part is this: when I stop saying “I’m good” by reflex, I can finally say what’s true.

Which means I can finally ask for what I need.

Which means help becomes possible for the first time in my life.

You can’t hand a drowning man a rope if he keeps yelling that he’s just swimming.

I been just swimming for thirty-seven years, y’all.

My father left, and I made it mean I had to earn staying.

Every relationship since has been me working that job.

Clocking in.

Performing okayness.

Sending the wage of myself to people who never asked for the whole check.

I’m not healed.

Let’s be clear.

Last week I caught myself rearranging my whole personality for a woman I’d known for four days.

The reflex is still in my hands.

I’ll probably say “I’m good” to somebody tomorrow and mean none of it.

But now I see the trick while I’m doing it.

The magician watching his own hands.

That’s not the same as free.

It’s the door, though.

And I’m standing in it.

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