okay /əʊˈkeɪ/ adjective. satisfactory but not especially good. there is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being fine. not falling apart. not thriving. just okay. and somehow that feels like the hardest place to be. because okay doesn't ask for anything. it doesn't earn you a duvet day or a phone call from a worried friend. it doesn't give you permission to cry in the shower or cancel plans or finally say i'm not doing well out loud. okay is too functional for any of that. okay is still showing up, still replying to messages, still making eye contact and saying the right things at the right times. okay is the friend who holds everyone else together and never once asks to be held. it just keeps going, quietly, with its coat buttoned up. moving through days that look fine from the outside, the kind of days that wouldn't worry anyone, the kind you couldn't even explain if someone asked. and that is the cruelest part of okay. it is invisible. it leaves no evidence. it looks, from every angle, exactly like being fine. but underneath the coat, okay is exhausted. okay has been pretending for longer than it can remember. okay is tired in a way that sleep doesn't fix, carrying something heavy that has no name and therefore no place to put it down. i have been okay for a while now. the bills are paid. nothing is on fire. and yet there is something sitting heavy in my chest that i cannot quite name. something that arrives on ordinary tuesday afternoons and stays through the night, uninvited and unexplained. something that feels too small to mention and too heavy to carry alone. i think we underestimate how much it takes to hold everything together when everything is not actually together. the performance of fine. the smile that arrives just in time. the i'm good, honestly that you say so many times it almost starts to feel true. but okay is heavy. heavier than it looks from the outside. nobody writes about this part. we write about rock bottom because there is a story there, a before and after, something to wrap up neatly at the end. and we write about joy because it is beautiful and people want to feel it. but okay just sits quietly in the middle, unacknowledged, carrying more weight than anyone gives it credit for. if you are in the middle right now, not broken, not healed, just quietly getting through it, i want you to know that i see you. i know how much it costs to keep showing up when you are running on empty. i know how strange it feels to struggle without a reason good enough to say out loud. you don't need a reason. the weight is real even when nobody else can see it. okay is enough. and so are you, exactly as you are, in the middle of all of it. with love, kia p.s. the fact that you're still here, still trying. that counts for something. it counts for everything.