The Problem With Being Fine

June 13, 2026

“And I hope I’m not the only one out here that’s fighting tears.” ~ Wade Forster, Fighting Tears

June is Men’s Mental Health Month.

I sat down this week intending to write an article about mental health. Instead, I ended up writing about connection.

Over the past few years, I’ve learned that the problem with being “fine” isn’t that you’re fooling everyone else. The problem is that eventually you start believing your own answer.

If you’ve spent much time around men, you’ve probably heard that answer a thousand times. How’s work? Fine. How’s the marriage? Fine. How are the kids? Fine. How are you doing? Fine.

For a lot of us, “fine” isn’t really an answer at all. It’s a defense mechanism. It’s what we say when we don’t want to burden somebody else with what we’re carrying. It’s what we say when we don’t really know how to explain what’s going on ourselves. It’s what we say when we’re hoping that if we just keep moving forward long enough, things will eventually sort themselves out.

I know because I spent a lot of years saying it.

When I look back at the period when I was struggling the most, the word that comes to mind isn’t sadness. It’s confusion. From the outside, things looked pretty good. I had leadership roles, career opportunities, financial success, and a life that most people would have assumed was headed in the right direction. But deep down inside, I knew something wasn’t right.

The hardest part wasn’t that I was struggling. The hardest part was feeling like a failure because I couldn’t figure out why.

Most of my life I had been rewarded for solving problems. If something was broken, you fixed it. If there was uncertainty, you gathered more information. If there was a challenge, you worked harder. That approach served me well as a principal, CTO, executive, and CEO.

What I eventually learned is that some things don’t respond to the same playbook.

The more time I spent inside my own head trying to solve everything by myself, the heavier life became. I slept worse. I gained weight. I lost interest in things that had always brought me joy. I found myself getting frustrated more easily. Looking back, those were warning signs. At the time, I just thought I was stressed and needed to push through it.

The truth is that what I was dealing with wasn’t just stress.

For a long time, that’s what I told myself it was. I was busy. I was leading teams. I was traveling. I was navigating challenges at work and challenges at home. Like a lot of men, I convinced myself that if I could just work harder, think harder, or push through it a little longer, things would eventually get better.

Instead, everything started feeling heavy.

Every conversation was heavy. Every decision was heavy. Every relationship was heavy. I found myself overanalyzing everything people said. I was constantly trying to figure out what was wrong, how to fix it, and what I was missing.

The scary part is that when you’re living in that state long enough, it starts to feel normal.

You stop asking whether you’re okay because surviving the day becomes the goal.

You stop talking about what’s really going on because you’ve convinced yourself nobody else can help anyway.

And eventually, you start believing your own answer.

Looking back now, I don’t think I fully appreciated how close to the edge I had gotten. There were moments when I felt trapped. There were moments when I couldn’t see a path forward. There were moments when I genuinely wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep carrying everything I was carrying.

That’s hard to admit. But I think it’s important. Because somebody reading this right now may be in that exact same place.

If that’s you, please hear this: there are people who care. There are people who will listen. There are people who want to help. No matter how dark things feel, there is a path forward.

One of the best decisions I ever made was taking my mental health seriously. I found a counselor. I read books. I had difficult conversations. I made some really hard decisions. None of those things fixed everything overnight, but they gave me something I desperately needed.

Hope. And once you have hope, you can start moving again.

Today, when friends tell me I seem different, the word that comes to mind is lighter. Not because life is easier. Life is still life. I still have stress. I still worry about my kids. I still have financial obligations. I still work hard. I still make mistakes.

The difference is that I don’t feel like I’m pretending anymore. For a long time, I was playing the role of who I thought I was supposed to be. Somewhere along the way, I lost sight of who I actually was.

What I’ve discovered over the last few years is that a lot of healing comes from reconnecting with the things that make you feel like yourself again.

For me, that’s Texas. It’s being outside. It’s sitting on a tractor. It’s watching a sunset over a pasture. It’s writing these newsletters on Saturday mornings. It’s spending time with friends and the boys. It’s getting a puppy (Meet Sully) and being reminded that sometimes joy can be pretty simple.

Most of all, it’s having people around me who know the real version of me and not the version I’ve created for everyone else.

I can just be Chad.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that there is no price tag for your mental health. No amount of money, no job title, no business opportunity, and no circumstance that makes it worth sacrificing.

At the end of the day, what your parents want, what your children want, what your friends want, and what the people who care about you want most is pretty simple.

They want a healthy version of you.

If you’re carrying something heavy, don’t carry it alone.

Sometimes the strongest thing you can do is let someone help carry it with you. And if you need someone, I’m here.