Why the Person You’re Checking On Can’t Answer You
I would be fine, and then I would be furious with my kids over something that did not come close to deserving it, and I could not have told you what happened in between. Not fine as in performing it, either. Actually fine. An hour later something small would land wrong and I'd be somewhere else entirely, and afterward I'd go looking for the trigger and come back with nothing. It took me a long time to stop being frightened by that, by the idea that something could move through me and take an entire afternoon with it and leave nothing behind that explained itself.
That was the woman people were asking how she was doing.
What I gave them was the lawsuit. There were filings and deadlines and dates that existed on a calendar, so I could tell somebody exactly where things stood with the civil case and every word of it would be true. It had a beginning and an end and a place to put it, which was more than the rest of my life could say, so it became the thing I handed people. I wasn't hiding anything. I was giving a status report on the one piece of my life that still had a status.
Why couldn't I answer a question that simple?
Because answering would have meant choosing one of those versions of the day and calling it the truth, and I didn't have a version of myself that held still long enough for that. It was too big and too heavy besides. Even if I had found the words, I wasn't going to unload all of it onto someone who had asked me a kind question on their way somewhere else. So they got the case, and if it was a bad day, they got a lot less than that.
Does a short answer mean the person wants you to leave them alone?
It usually doesn't, and I think that misreading is what makes good people stop trying. When my case went to trial, my friend Anne asked what I needed from her. We'd known each other about six months at that point, and I gave her an answer that committed to nothing, because I honestly did not know what I needed from anyone. She decided on her own to come, and she has said that showing up for that trial was one of the most important things she has ever done. Had she treated my answer as a signal, she would have stayed home, and I would not have been able to tell her she'd read it wrong.
Most of the time a flat answer means the person hasn't found the language yet, or doesn't have the energy to go looking for it, or would rather not fall apart in front of you on a Tuesday. Sometimes it means they've already had that conversation four times this week and cannot do a fifth. None of that is a request for you to go away.
What actually helps when you're not getting anything back?
Smaller questions, mostly. "How are you" is an enormous thing to hand someone, where "how did the meeting go" or "did you sleep at all last night" is a question I could actually answer, and answering the small one sometimes cracked open the bigger one on its own. Specifics helped more than offers did, because "I'm bringing dinner Thursday, is six okay" asks almost nothing of the person receiving it, while "let me know if you need anything" quietly hands the job of naming a need back to someone who cannot name anything at the moment. And some of the best company I had asked me nothing whatsoever and just sat there with me.
You should also expect to be doing this longer than feels normal, because the people around a crisis tend to check in hard for a few weeks and then thin out right about the time the person is coming out of shock and beginning to feel any of it. Nobody is being callous when that happens. The calendar just moves faster than a person does.
What does this look like when it isn't a crisis?
The same thing plays out at work, and it's easier to miss there because everyone is being professional about it. Someone comes back from a leave, or a divorce, or a diagnosis they haven't told anybody about, and you ask how they're doing and get "good, thanks," and you take that at face value because taking it at face value is polite and also convenient. But you already know what "good, thanks" is worth in a hallway. It's the toll you pay to get down the hallway.
I'm not suggesting you interrogate anyone. What I'd ask is that you stop reading a short answer as a closed door and quietly filing that person under “handled”, because a lot of people get filed there while they're still in it.
I could not tell anyone how I was doing for a long time, and the people who stayed in it with me did not get better answers out of me for their trouble. They just kept asking.
Jessi Bixler is an entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and the author of The Story We Share (Next Thing Press, 2025), a memoir about the ripple effects of sexual assault through a family and the systems that respond to harm. She speaks to leadership audiences and advocacy organizations on what people carry and how it shapes how we lead.
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