Why You Shouldn’t Be OK
Do we know what we ask for and what our words mean?
“Are you OK?”
I’m sure you’ve heard that question a million times.
We hear it so often that we stop hearing it at all. Familiarity doesn’t deepen understanding — it dulls it. What do we even mean by OK? Quite frankly, I don’t know. Do you?
“Say hello to Mum.”
“OK. I’ll pass your regards.”
In that case, OK means agreement. An action accepted, a task completed.
But “Are you OK?”
OK — satisfactory, not especially good?
No.
That is not how you want to be.
That is not what you were born for.
So why do we even say it? Habitual questions, habitual answers. The conversation equivalent of sleepwalking.
We don’t really want to know if someone is “OK.”
We want to know:
— Is your mind at peace?
— Is your heart intact?
— Are things flowing for you, or is it rather a bumpy ride?
We don’t ask that.
It’s too risky. Too intimate.
So we settle for OK.
But settling is dangerous.
Kay, massa, you just leave me, me sit here, great fish jump up into da canoe, here he be, massa, fine fish, massa; me den very grad; den me sit very still, until another great fish jump into de canoe; but me fall asleep…
Smyth, J. F. D. (1784). A Tour in the United States of America.
‘Key’ was used here in 1784. There are earlier appearances of the word for OK, but I found this one interesting.
Sitting still. Waiting. Falling asleep.
Life doesn’t visit the ones who sleep through it.
Refuse to be just OK.
Choose to be fully alive instead — to risk embarrassment (well, what’s embarrassment anyway? “You should feel embarrassed” should be questioned next…) by telling the truth, risk connection by asking better questions, and risk joy by admitting you want more.
It’s awake. It’s real.
The deepest joys? They rise relentlessly through what hurts us, like wildflowers stubbornly forcing their way through cracks in concrete.
You do not get to laugh unabashedly with your whole chest unless you have once helplessly lost your breath crying.
“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked,” Gibran says.
Sorrow wears a mask because the world tells it to be private. Because there are economies that run smoother, conversations that stay lighter, rooms that feel safer — when sorrow is hidden away.
We are taught, almost ceremoniously, that private anguish is more polite than public grief.
And so sorrow learns to shrink itself. To slip unnoticed through crowds.
But if sorrow is always veiled, smothered beneath rehearsed smiles and hurried assurances, it cannot become anything else.
It remains trapped — fermenting quietly into bitterness, loneliness, and silence.
Only when sorrow dares to step into the light, acknowledged and unashamed, can it complete its hidden work. It is the beginning of being seen at all.
Only then can it soften into compassion.
Transform into understanding.
Ripen into joy.
Not the cheap, sugary kind.
Joy is not the absence of sorrow.
It is sorrow that has survived itself.
When you laugh after everything — that is the real miracle.
When you notice something beautiful, even though you know it will pass — that is courage.
This is why you shouldn’t aim to be “OK.”
OK has no face.
At least, not a human face.
