I'm Just Okay

In Zambia a normal response to, "How are you?" is, "I'm just okay." At first I thought this implied something was wrong. I'd get a confused look when I asked, "Why, what has happened?" But it's not negative, it just means I'm okay.

I met a woman once who responded to banal 'how are you' questions with extreme cheeriness. Her day had been fantastic. Had she won the lotto? No. Had she got the all clear on an STD test? No. Just your average, wonderful day. She told me she was really happy for me when I said that my day had been fine. When I told her where I worked and she marveled that that was ‘amazing’. I looked at her crossly. I hoped she was being sarcastic. She wasn't. She was, in fact, the most positive person in the world. Despite her unfortunate, massive teeth and her glasses being held together with sellotape, everything was brilliant. I didn't like her.

Tommy Tiernan said in an interview that he used to snort a load of coke before going on stage, scream and laugh for two hours and then recoil into a depression off stage. I wondered if this girl went home at night, squeezed dry of happiness and encouragement, crawled into her black-painted bedroom and cried herself to sleep. I thought about her happy head a lot and whether her joy was real and if real, was it sustainable.

Over Christmas I began to realise that all my answers were gloomy. The room was a bit small, the food wasn't great, I was too tired, I don't like that overjoyed girl with the teeth. When I subsequently overheard a few conversations in which people described colleagues as being really negative and I worried that that’s what people think about me. My cynicism about life in Zambia has been a running joke alright, but general drag was not what I wanted to be.  

I told my friend Jess in January that for 2013 I wanted to A) Cut The Daily Mail out of my life and B) try to be a bit more positive. "No one will like you anymore!" she laughed. It's true - my cynical, sneering, sarcastic attitude is a big part of who I am. Shortly after she told me that one of the things she wanted to do this year is print out photos instead of just having them on her computer.

"And what are you going to do with them all, leave them in piles on a desk?" I asked.

"That's not very positive," she scolded me. 

Ten minutes in, over a lovely lunch with a lovely friend - in a happy place if you will - I had been negative. This positivity thing was going to be exhausting. But I was still going to try. Then I came back to Zambia. My car broke down in the middle of the road in the rain. The electricity went off for two days. There was no bank machines working within a fifteen mile radius. Twenty four nappies cost thirty euro. There were two hundred cockroaches in the kitchen. And a tiny stickman starting jumping up and down in my chest, kicking his legs and flailing his arms, raging, raging, raging. That was when I realised that I just...couldn't...do it. Not here.

I concluded that to me sincerity is more important than cheeriness. It doesn't mean that I'm not going to try to be more positive. I'm just going to try not to be so negative. So don't expect me to turn around and tell you that I'm brilliant (unless I preface it with a sarcastic "fucking") with heart. All you can expect is for me to say, "I'm just okay." And that's not negative, apparently.