The "I'm Fine" Era Is Over. What Happens When You Finally Stop Pretending?
- Michaela Kozlik
- 7 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
Something is shifting. Women are done performing that we're okay. But nobody tells us what comes after we stop saying we're fine, and it's a lot harder than the TikTok version makes it look.
By Michaela Kozlik, LCPC · Therapist specializing in women's mental health & trauma, Illinois
You've said it thousands of times.
At work, when someone asked how you were holding up after a brutal week. At home, when your partner noticed you are more quiet or tense. To your mother, your friends, your doctor. To yourself, in the car on the way home, before you walked through the door and became the version of you that everyone needed.
I'm fine.
Two words, said so many times they stopped meaning anything, and started meaning everything. Because fine doesn't mean fine. It means: I'm managing, don't worry about me, I have this under control even though I absolutely don't have this under control.
And something is changing. Culturally, collectively, personally. Women are done with fine.
The question is what comes next?
The cultural moment we're in
It's impossible to miss. In the last few years, something has cracked open in the way women talk about not being okay.
It's in the books about burnout, about leaving the whole carefully constructed life and starting over. It's in the podcasts where women talk openly about anxiety and the years they spent pretending. In the conversations happening in group chats that never used to happen.
Something is shifting. We are beginning to say out loud what's real.
But here's what the cultural conversation doesn't always get to: admitting you're not fine is only the beginning. What comes after is the harder and less Instagram-able part.
Why "I'm fine" worked for so long
Before we talk about what comes next, it's worth understanding why fine worked in the first place.
Most of the women I work with learned early that falling apart was not an option. That the way to be loved and to be valued, was to be capable and steady and low-maintenance. To handle things and not need too much.
So they got very, very good at it. They became the woman who solved problems and made it look easy.
Managing everything while quietly running on empty
Being the first person everyone else calls — and the last person anyone thinks to check on
Feeling proud of how much you can handle, and exhausted by it at the same time
Saying yes when every cell in your body is screaming no
Performing okay so convincingly that even you start to believe it
Collapsing privately
Fine was the armor, and armor works until it doesn't. Until the weight of it becomes the thing that's hurting you.
What happens in your nervous system when you've been fine for too long
Here's something that sometimes gets missed in the conversations around women and burnout: this is not only emotional, but also physiological.
When you spend years disconnecting from and overriding your basic needs, your nervous system adapts. It learns to stay in a state of low-grade activation, always ready, always on.
And eventually, that state becomes your baseline. You normalized the anxiety that doesn't have a specific cause and the feeling like something is always slightly wrong even when nothing is technically wrong.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU
The exhaustion you're feeling the accumulated cost of years of overriding your own needs. Your nervous system has been working in overdrive for a very long time, and it needs more than a vacation or a self-care to actually recover. This is real, it's physiological, and it's healable. But it requires a different kind of attention than you've been giving it.
The gap between saying it and feeling it
Here's the part the culture gets wrong about the shift away from fine.
It frames the recognition as the end of the suffering. Like naming it is the same as healing it.
And sometimes there is a relief in that. But then the next morning comes, and you still feel the same. And now you've admitted it, which means you can't use the performance of fine to get through the day anymore. Which means you're running without the armor, and you don't quite know what to do with that.
This is the gap between stopping the pretending and actually feeling different. That gap is real, and it can be disorienting, and it is exactly where real healing begins.
Saying you're not fine is the first brave thing. Staying in that truth long enough for something to actually change, that's the work.
What actually comes next
So what does come after fine? What does it actually look like to stop pretending and start healing?
In my experience working with women — especially women in midlife and perimenopause, who are often navigating this reckoning while their bodies are also changing — it tends to move through a few different phases. Not linearly. Not neatly. But recognizably.
First, the crash. When you stop white-knuckling it, the exhaustion you've been outrunning catches up. This can look like crying at things that wouldn't have touched you before. Feeling suddenly, overwhelmingly sad without a specific reason.
Then, the anger. Often right underneath the exhaustion is rage. At the ways you were taught to override yourself and the people and systems that benefited from your fine-ness. This anger is information. It is not something to apologize for.
Then, slowly, the questions. Who am I when I'm not holding everything together? What do I actually want, separate from what everyone else needs from me? What parts of my life were built for the performing version of me and don't fit anymore? These questions can be scary. They're also the beginning of something honest.
And eventually, something that feels like yourself. A woman who knows what she needs. Who can feel what she feels without being destroyed by it. Who has a nervous system that is not constantly braced for impact.
That's what's on the other side of fine. It takes time and support. And it is completely worth it.
Why insight alone doesn't get you there
One thing I see constantly with the women I work with: they are smart. They know they're burned out. They know they have anxiety. They know their patterns go back to childhood.
And they are still stuck.
Because knowing is not the same as healing. Understanding why you do something doesn't automatically change the fact that you do it. Your nervous system doesn't care about your insights. It responds to experience of what it has lived through, what it has learned to expect, what it has been shown is safe.
Healing at the level of your body, in your automatic responses, in your nervous system requires more than understanding. It requires direct work with the body. Somatic therapy. Nervous system regulation. Sustained, spacious attention to the parts of you that developed the armor in the first place.
You don't have to be fine here.
If you're reading this and something in it recognized you, if fine has been your default for longer than you can remember, if you've started to sense that something needs to change but you don't quite know what or how — I want you to know that what you're feeling is real.
My practice is built for exactly this. For the woman who is done with fine.
I work virtually with women throughout Illinois — Chicago, the suburbs, and statewide. You don't have to go anywhere. You just have to show up honestly, and we'll take it from there.
If you're ready to stop pretending and start doing the work that actually changes things, I'd love to talk. I offer a free so you can get a sense of what working together might feel like.
KEEP READING
Frequently asked questions
I've been "fine" for so long I don't even know what I actually feel anymore. Is that normal?
Yes and it's more common than you'd think. When you spend years overriding your own feelings in order to stay functional, you disconnect from your own feelings. Your emotional signals have been suppressed for so long that they've gotten faint. Part of what good therapy does is help you reconnect to those signals at a pace that works for you.
I've tried therapy before and it didn't really help. Why would this be different?
It depends on what kind of therapy you tried and what you were working on. A lot of women find that talk therapy alone has limits. The work I do goes deeper than insight. We work at the nervous system level, with the body, with the patterns that live below conscious awareness. If you've hit the ceiling of understanding-based therapy, somatic and nervous-system-focused work is often what moves things that nothing else has been able to move.
What if I start therapy and things get harder before they get better?
That can happen, and it's worth knowing about in advance. When you stop the performance of fine, the feelings you've been managing can surface more intensely for a while. Good therapy doesn't push you faster than your nervous system can handle. We go at your pace. And the temporary harder is almost always in service of something that is genuinely better on the other side.
I'm in perimenopause and I wonder if that's making everything feel more intense. Could it be connected?
Almost certainly. Perimenopause intensifies emotional experience in real, physiological ways since the hormonal shifts affect brain chemistry, nervous system reactivity, sleep, and mood. Many women find that the coping strategies that got them through their thirties stop working in perimenopause, and the feelings they've been managing for years become unmanageable. This is one of the most common things I see in my practice. The good news is that addressing both the nervous system piece and the perimenopause transition together can lead real, lasting change.
Do you work with women outside Chicago?
Yes — my practice is 100% virtual, and I work with women throughout all of Illinois. That includes Chicago and the surrounding suburbs — Evanston, Oak Park, Naperville, Wilmette, Hinsdale, Glenview, Barrington, Lake Forest, Highland Park — as well as women in Rockford, Peoria, Springfield, Champaign, and anywhere else in the state. We meet wherever you are.
What's the difference between individual therapy and a therapy intensive?
Weekly therapy gives you one hour at a time valuable, but limited in pace. A therapy intensive is an extended session of several hours or a full day, which allows your nervous system time to actually shift rather than activating, touching something real, and then stopping before anything resolves. For women who have been fine for a very long time and are ready to do serious work, intensives can create change that would take months of weekly sessions to reach. I'd love to talk through whether that format might be right for you.
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