Truth Lasagna: What to say when someone asks how work is going and the answer is loaded

My sweet southern grandmother used to say: “You can't tell everything you know.”

She said it plainly, the way she said most things — not as advice, just as fact.

I've been thinking about that sentence for years, and I've been teaching a concept built around it for almost as long as I've been coaching.

I call it Truth Lasagna.

If you've ever frozen when someone asked you a seemingly simple question about your work, your life, or what you've been up to lately — and you’ve walked away from that conversation feeling vaguely gross, like you either said too much or not enough — this one is for you.

The question that sometimes lands like a grenade when you least expect it to

Picture this: 

Someone asks how work is going. It's a simple question from a friendly face with zero malicious intent.

And somewhere between your ears receiving it and your body processing it, it detonates.

You feel it inside in that split-second where your jaw tightens, your words slow down, your brain starts running through 17 possible answers and dismissing all of them.

Because none of them are clean and clear, and you sense the other person won’t handle the murky answer well.

Maybe you're leaving a job but haven't left yet.

Maybe you're launching something that isn't quite live.

Maybe you're applying for positions you haven't told anyone about,  closing a business, exiting a partnership that cost you more than you'll say out loud, or starting something new that's so alive inside you that you can't quite find words for it yet.

Maybe you've been in the middle of all of the above at once — and your whole life feels like a construction zone with the scaffolding still up.

This is where the question lands in real time inside your system. So if it feels familiar, you’re not doing anything wrong.

The common thread across all of it is that you're in the wobbly middle. 

You're not fully closed on the old thing and not fully open in the new one. 

And the middle — that liminal, unfinished, not-quite-anywhere space — is deeply uncomfortable for any human being.

Why the middle feels unbearable and why this is normal if you happen to identify as a human

Identity, in the way I mean it here, is how you see and define yourself in relationship to the world — both your internal and external world.  

Belonging is how you see yourself in relationship to other people — and also how they see you.

The two are intricately intertwined. You can't have one operating without the other, because you can't fully know who you are until it is mirrored back to you.

This is why it hurts so much when people don't get you. When they ask a question and the answer you give lands with a blank stare, or a pivot, or a well-meaning but completely off-base response. 

It doesn't just feel awkward. It threatens both your sense of identity and sense of belonging at the same time.

When either one is unsettled, your nervous system registers it as an actual, physiological threat response.

Internally, there are parts of you hard at work, furiously screaming – I don't know who I am right now. I don't know where I belong. And someone is asking me to explain myself in the middle of a crowded room and I don’t know how to land this plane.

So your system does what it's designed to do. It looks for a way out. It reaches to have a clean answer, a clear identity, a sentence or one-liner that fits on a name tag and gets that person smiling in recognition.

This is why – before you go to an event or experience where you know you might have to answer questions, you find yourself writing and rewriting elevator pitches in your notes app at 11pm.

It’s why you secretly pray for an excuse so you can conveniently skip the next event.

It’s why you might decide to stay home instead of stumbling through an explanation of something that doesn't have a name yet.

My husband and I went through this at the same time a couple of years ago — both of us mid-career transition, neither of us with clean answers. 

We would go to dinner or a brewery with friends – laugh, eat good food, talk about everything and nothing all at once.

And then we'd come home, get into our pajamas, brush our teeth side by side, and just exhale — sighing with relief to each other that nobody brought up work.

We were so grateful to have friends who saw us as more than our jobs.

Imposter syndrome lives in this messy middle too. Most of us might recognize imposter syndrom as that murky feeling where you just don’t feel good enough yet. You haven’t grown fully into your own identity or skill level. 

But imposter syndrome is not always because of skill. 

You could be perfectly competent and still feel like the new kid on the block in an environment whose social rules you haven't learned yet. 

In this case identity and belonging play a huge role, and you cannot have one without the other.

None of this means you're in the wrong place.

It means you're in the middle.

Your nervous system is operating as a loyal soldier to you right now 

Here's where it gets interesting — and where I see a lot of my clients get really hard on themselves.

Remember what I said about identity and belonging being threatened when you're in the middle? 

Your nervous system is trying to protect both of those things in real time. 

And for women who are empathetic, helper-brained, and were raised to be the Good Girl before they grew up to become the Good Provider, one of the most common ways that protection shows up is not as fight, flight, or freeze.

It shows up as fawning.

You over-explain.

You give people more than they asked for.

You make sure everyone feels okay about your transition or identity before you've even decided how you feel about it yourself.

You find yourself in a conversation that was supposed to be light — just catching up, just a coffee — and you've somehow ended up delivering a full deposition about your career and life decisions to someone who asked a casual question.

And then you walk away feeling like you said too much.

Again.

What's happening is the fawn response — one of the four primary nervous system responses alongside fight, flight, and freeze. 

It gets less airtime than the others, but it shows up constantly in the women I work with, precisely because it is wired to show up in loyal service to your inherent need and desire for belonging. 

People of all genders are wired to tend and befriend and belong – but this is particularly strong in women.

And here is what I want you to know about it: fawning is not a character flaw. 

It is an intelligent, brilliant response. It will show up whether you ask it to or not, and most of the time, it’s something that works in loyal service to your sense of belonging and connection. 

But like all nervous system responses – it can take on conflated and confused programming it picks up along the way, and work overtime in such a way that it actually backfires.

Chances are that your system learned, somewhere along the way, that maintaining connection and belonging required managing other people's discomfort with your own self expression. 

And that was probably true at some point – you learned to shift the way you explain something, to soften or make things more palatable, swallow your rage, to shrink or water down your “too much”-ness so that people wouldn’t feel uncomfortable with the honest truth of who you are, how you felt, or what you needed. 

It worked – you were able to maintain belonging, even if it cost you parts of yourself. 

Your nervous system and fawn response is doing exactly what it was built to do in these experiences – in loyal service to this need to belong.

But then you learned there’s the self help world’s endless pressure to pathologize this process — to call it people-pleasing, performing, perfectionism, and tell yourself to just stop — which misses the point entirely.

In this case, your system learns that you’re damned if you fawn (because you’re not spiritually or personally “evolved” or “strong enough” to stop yourself), and you’re damned if you don’t (because your sense of belonging is threatened if you don’t fawn).

Fawning isn't a choice you're making consciously. It's your system saying: I don't feel safe enough to be myself in the wobbly middle out loud. Not with this person. Not right now. 

At its root, fawning is a bid for belonging. It is your system trying to stay seen and connected — to protect your identity from going unmirrored — in the only way it knows how in that moment.

That is useful information. It is not a diagnosis. It is normal. It is healthy. It is your system doing its job.

And here's the thing I want to add, because I think it matters: you don't have to be in the middle of a career transition or a life upheaval for any of this response to apply.

Women are cyclical beings. We are inherently, perpetually, and beautifully in flux. And therefore always in some messy middle.

Which means you might feel your jaw tighten behind a smile when the cashier at Target asks how you are — and you say “I’m great” — but you've been bleeding heavier than normal for three days, your pants feel tighter than they did a month ago, your kid has been having a hard time at school, and you feel very much not great.

But you're in the Target checkout line. And you're not going to spring all of that on the kind woman in front of you who is scanning your tampons and the candle and throw pillow you didn’t come to buy but couldn’t say no to..

So even though your heart rate quickens and you know the truthiest truth inside, you say you’re great. You smile. You ask how she is.

That is a fawn response. And it is not lying. It is an incredibly healthy way of your system reading the room and attempting to maintain connection and belonging in real time.

The wobbly middle isn't always a season or great unraveling or crisis in your life. 

Sometimes it's a Tuesday at Target.

And this is exactly why the confusion about honesty runs so deep. Because for women especially, telling the truth has long been tangled up with being seen, being loved, and belonging. 

You  might wonder – If I don't give you the full picture, will you still accept me? If I hold something back, does that mean I'm not really letting you in?

Those questions are valid. 

And they deserve a better answer than the ones most of us were given.

A note, because I want to be mindful of the nuance here: what I'm describing in this blog is the fawn response as a normal, healthy nervous system function that lives in all of us. For some people, fawning shows up more intensely, more frequently, or in ways that feel harder to move through — and that is sometimes connected to deeper patterns worth exploring with the right support, and that would be far too outside the scope of this blog to address.

 If any of this is resonating in a way that feels bigger than a Tuesday, or an awkward moment at a networking event or family reunion that gives you pause and makes you question what to say — if it's showing up across the landscape of your life in ways that feel heavy or hard to shift — a licensed therapist skilled in trauma, somatic experiencing, or somatic psychotherapy can be a beautiful resource. Not because something is wrong with you. But because you deserve someone in your corner who really knows this terrain and can help you suss out what's "human going through a messy middle" and "a human with a complex tapestry of experiences and wiring worth exploring deeper."

Being authentic and transparent is not the same as telling everyone everything you know

If you're reading this and you genuinely value honesty — if authenticity is something you take seriously, not just something you put in your bio — you might bristle here.

Stay with me.

Being transparent, being honest, and being authentic does not mean revealing every layer of your truth to every person who asks.

Some things need to be held sacred, not as secrets, but as things that are still metabolizing inside you. 

They’re still being processed, still tender enough that exposing them before they're ready doesn't serve you or the person you're talking to.

Oversharing in this case can become a dysregulated stress response dressed up as honesty and transparency.

But true transparency is intentionally chosen. Oversharing is reactive and often unintentional. 

There is a real difference between the two, even when your conditioning and programming around honesty, integrity, lying, and truth telling has trained you otherwise.

So where did you learn that full disclosure equals integrity? Well, only you know the real answer to that.

Some of it could be from childhood, some of it could be from culture or religion, and for a lot of the women I work with, there's a layer underneath both of those — a deeply professional layer that got fused to their personal identity somewhere along the way.

For those of us in healthcare — and many of my clients are clinicians — full disclosure is an ethical and possibly legal obligation in clinical settings. 

Informed consent depends on complete information shared in a reciprocating therapeutic relationship.

The Good Provider doesn't withhold.

The Good Patient tells you everything.

The accomplished, poised professional doesn't make people uncomfortable by being unclear or ambiguous or mid-process.

That conditioning and training is real. It's been reinforced by years of training, professional culture, and being rewarded for having a clean answer and penalized — even subtly — for not having one.

And because identity and belonging are so intertwined, it got baked into something deeper than a professional norm. 

It got baked into how worthy of connection you feel. Full disclosure became the price of admission for being truly known and having a positive reputation.

That's where the fawn response and the confusion about what honesty truly is can merge together in a very confusing soup that shows up when you’re in the messy middle.

Your system is trying to protect your belonging, and it has learned that full disclosure – especially when talking about your professional work and identity –  is how you do that. 

So withholding a layer doesn't just feel awkward — it feels like a betrayal of who you are and your professional reputation.

But these are someone else's rules living in your body. 

Withholding a layer is not a moral failure. Sometimes it is the wisest, kindest thing you can do — for your system and for theirs.

You don't have to tell everything you know.

I'm still figuring it out is a complete sentence. It is also, often, the truest one. 

And in the interest of being as truthful as possible – maybe that’s paradoxically the answer with the highest integrity.

How you might have handled loaded questions in the past 

When things are murky and unsettled, most people land in one of two places.

The first is sharing nothing — deflecting, pivoting, not going. 

Sometimes this is genuinely the right call, especially when you truly don't know yet and saying something would mean opening a door you or the other person is not ready to walk through. 

But when saying nothing or avoiding the conversation entirely becomes the default, it cuts you off from the co-regulation and connection your system is actually craving. 

You end up isolated in the middle, which is the hardest place to be alone when your system so desperately is craving someone to hold you so you feel you belong.

But then there’s another extreme, which is oversharing everything — the whole story, the full context, the emotional processing in real time.

This is often handed to someone who didn't ask for it and isn't necessarily equipped to hold it. 

You share a lot, the other person's system gets flooded, they lean in because you've opened the door, and now you're both in something you didn't plan for. 

Some people can absolutely handle the whole enchilada. You know who these people are. 

Other people might not handle it as well.

In those situations, you regret it later.  

The answer to both extremes is that the truth is not an all-or-none.

The truth exists in layers. 

And learning to identify those layers is how you stay in the world — belonging  to people, belonging to yourself — without having to choose between belonging and the truth.

Truth Lasagna

This is where the metaphor of Truth Lasagna comes in. If this makes you hungry, you’re welcome.

Picture a lasagna. The real kind — several layers of pasta, gooey things in between, the edges a little crispy where they've been exposed to heat.

Your inner truth, identity, and belonging works the same way.

The deepest layer is the whole truth — unfiltered, unprocessed, still raw at the edges. This is the version where nothing's been cleaned up, where the emotion is still present and the story isn't finished yet.

This layer belongs to very few people. These are the people who have earned access to your interior, who can hold you in it without judgment, who have the capacity for it on this subject, on this day.

This is the person who truly wants and can hold the long version of the story when she asks “So, how are you, really?”

For most people, that list is one to maybe five people maximum depending on the topic or circumstance.

But sometimes the people you assume belong there — family, old friends, long-term colleagues — actually can't hold your deepest layers on a given subject. 

Their own stuff gets activated, they question, they push back, they try and fix it. It becomes about them and their discomfort.

That's can sometimes feel like a betrayal of the relationship. It lands as shock, sadness, or grief when you realize the person you thought could hold you just…cannot. 

This can really hurt. That is completely valid.

AND – it doesn’t always need to mean anything bad about you. It is really crucial information about where the relationship can hold you, especially as you’re evolving, and where it simply can’t.

I tell clients all time (and I have learned this lesson and been in this place over and over) – your closest people didn’t consent when you embarked on the road to personal growth and evolution. You didn’t ask for people to sign on the dotted line to come along on your healing journey.

When you realize that they simply can’t hold you – it can feel like friction, aggression, rudeness coming from them. And it can trigger you feeling angry, wanting to cut them off, wanting to question if they should stay in your life, or wanting to avoid them.

Sometimes – this does need to happen. The relationship needs to end. 

Sometimes, you might need to recalibrate the relationship to how it can serve you now. 

This is the part nobody talks about when you embark on moving from “what once was” to “what you’re becoming.” The grief, sadness, and anger that can arise between your closest relationships.

So if you are there right now, I see you. I’ve been there. It is the absolute hardest part.

But sometimes you’re not losing people or cutting them off. This, too, is not an all-or-none. 

Sometimes you might simply need to recalibrate which level of truth and depth of intimacy you let these people in on. 

Which is where the next two layers of the lasagna are often incredibly useful.

The middle layer is the real version of the story, but not the raw and super vulnerable one. 

It’s where you’ve processed enough of it that you're not going to regret saying it. 

You're giving someone the actual truth of where you are — not the whole backstory, not the unfiltered version — but something honest and real.

I'm leaving a situation that wasn't right for me. I'm starting something new and I'm genuinely excited about it, even though I can't fully describe it yet.

There’s a little bit more nuance here, a bit more gray area revealed. 

You get to use discretion with this layer. If your mother in law is going to prod and ask you the explain more when her spidey senses pick up on the fact that “something wasn’t right”  – then this layer may not be the story you reach for when she asks how your work is going.

But if you have a hunch that the friend you’re meeting for coffee or cousin you’re chatting with at the 4th of July family gathering can handle the nuance and hold you in it, then give them a little more from this layer.

But if your system is like “Uhhhhh I don’t want to get into this with this person,” I offer you the outer layer.”

The outer layer is brief, diplomatic, true, and usually appealing. It answers the question and often signals “that’s as far as I’m willing to talk about this.” 

Nothing uncertain is shared here. Nothing still-in-process is offered up.

This is discernment. When in doubt, move a layer outward. Better yet, start with the outermost layer, feel it out, and then proceed deeper.

If something in you hesitates, that's your signal to stay at this layer. 

Let's go back to that networking event — the one where someone asks what you do and your jaw tightens and your brain starts cycling through seventeen answers.

Here's what each layer actually sounds like in that room:

Outer layer: 

If you’re officially stepping into something new and truly right in the middle:

"I'm in a bit of a transition right now — exploring some new directions in my work. It's an exciting time." Smile. Ask them what they do. The door is open but you haven't walked anyone through it yet. And you’ve turned it back onto them.

If things are tough in your current situation – 

“Hey, work’s really challenging me right now, but I’m handling it ok. Thanks for asking. How’s work going for you?”

Or if you need to answer the “What do you do?” question and just don’t know how to respond because you’re actually stepping into something new, I typically recommend you answer with what is actually certain at the moment, even if it’s a little vague. This one often works for clinicians moving into non-clinical work, coaching work, or out of the clinic entirely: 

“I’m a <insert clinical title> and I’m passionate about helping people feel the most healthy in their bodies and lives.” And then ask the other person – what do you do?

They may ask about what setting you work in, what types of clients you support – and this is where you can still keep it really superficial.

“I’ve worked in outpatient and inpatient settings with athletic people of various ages and stages of life, but I’m truly passionate about working with women who are postpartum.”

Keep it present tense and generally about you and your passions, not your work specifically.

What I also love to advise here – for a way to pivot the conversation – is to shift toward why you’re passionate about your work. Share the story behind your passions, not the actual form of what you do. 

That’s what people will remember anyway.

Middle layer: 

"I've been doing physical therapy for seventeen years and I'm in the process of shifting into coaching — working with clinicians who are navigating the same kind of crossroads I'm in. It's still taking shape but I'm really energized by it." 

This is real. It's honest. It gives them something to hold. You've processed enough of it that you're not going to regret saying it.

And then I also recommend shifting into the “why” of the shift, the why of the story. This lets it be more about you, your identity, your heart and personality – and less about the form and structure of your actual work.

This is what people will relate to! 

Deepest layer: 

This one doesn't usually come out at a networking event or family gathering unless you’ve identified that your people are there and can really hold it.

This is the version with the full backstory — the years of feeling like something was off, the identity crisis underneath the career question, the grief and the fear and the thing you almost didn't let yourself want. 

This layer usually belongs on your couch, with someone who has earned it, with a glass of wine or a tea and coffee and nowhere else to be.

Notice that none of those versions are lies. They are all true. They are just different depths of the same truth — and you get to choose which one fits the container you're standing in.

The Truth Platter — a second sorting tool – the place for the lasagna to land

Now here's the part people sometimes miss when I teach this concept: Truth Lasagna has a companion.

The lasagna is about the message itself — the layer of truth you're crafting, the version of the story you're telling.

The Truth Platter is about the person you're serving it to.

Think of it this way: you might have your three layers of lasagna beautifully prepared. 

But which platter you choose and where you choose to set the platter changes everything. 

Some people at the table can hold the deep, gooey middle layer. Some people only get the top — the appealing, melty, ready-for-company version.

The Platter is how you pre-sort people based on their level of intimacy and trust with you, their capacity to hold you, and their need to know.

You need both tools. The layers without the platter-sorting means you've crafted good messaging and handed it to the wrong person. The platter without the layers means you know who your people are but you're still fumbling for what to actually say when you get there.

Some people find it easier to start with the layers — draft the versions of the story first, then decide who gets which one.

Some people find it easier to start with the platter — sort the people first, then figure out what each group actually needs to hear.

Either way, keep it to three layers maximum. More than that and you'll confuse yourself — and you need to be able to access this when your nervous system is already activated and you're standing in the middle of a party trying to answer a question about your job.

A note on how to actually use this

I want to say something clearly: you do not necessarily need to turn this into a lengthy homework assignment. Unless that’s your thing of course.

Truth Lasagna is not a system to master before you're allowed to go back out into the world. 

If you tend to lean into rule-following, it definitely is not a set of rules or standards to adopt.

For a lot of people, simply knowing the concept exists — knowing that you don't have to reveal every layer, that you get to choose, that withholding is not lying — is enough to let your shoulders drop a little before you walk into a sticky conversation.

Think of it like the life raft hanging at the edge of the pool. You might not need to grab it. You might trust yourself to swim. But knowing it's there changes how relaxed you feel in the water and how willing you are to take risks.

For some people, really listening in to the body is the entry point. 

Before a conversation you're dreading, you picture the person, picture telling them the whole unfiltered truth, and you notice what happens — not what you think, but what you feel. Does your stomach settle or tighten? Does your breath come easily or get shallow? Does something in you go yes or does it go wait? That response tells you which layer belongs to them and which platter they’re on, and you walk in already knowing.

I find that for my clients who identify as neurodivergent, ADHD, or AuDHD, who have experienced complex PTSD or trauma or who are moving through postpartum or perimenopause with shifting hormones and changing executive function, whose sensitive systems can move from zero to flooded in a single exchange — that actually sorting the layers in advance is genuinely resourcing. 

It gives you and your system something concrete to reach for when your brain has temporarily left the building and your mouth is still going.

And this doesn’t just apply to in-person interactions, though these can be harder to navigate, especially if you tend to wear your emotions on your sleeve. 

This also applies to text and electronic communication too.

Picture that you’re texting a friend back and forth about what’s going on at your kids’ sports tournament this weekend, and suddenly she asks how your business is doing.

You think “ooof this is a loaded answer, I should probably send her a voice memo” and you hit record — because honestly, it’s easier to just say it than to type it.

Yet somewhere in the middle of recording you stop, delete, start over, delete again, re-record, and forty minutes later you've finally sent something that spiraled from a business update into your entire existential landscape.

Some friends can hold that. They love it. They send one right back. Those friendships are a gift and you know exactly who they are.

But sometimes you stop recording — and feel the dread settle in. Especially when she leaves it un-listened to for days.

Your mind immediately starts spinning and says “Too much. I said too much.”

And then you spend the next two days checking to see if she's responded, noticing she hasn't, wondering if you've made her feel like she needs to solve something she didn't ask to solve — and quietly worrying you're a bad friend.

You are not a bad friend. Your system felt asked, felt obligated to explain, felt the pull to stay connected — and answered in the only way it knew how in that moment. That is the fawn response doing its thing. There is nothing wrong with you and there is nothing wrong with the voice memo.

What Truth Lasagna and its Platters offer is a different option – a gentle palace for your brain to land and organize and develop an internal sense of safety and anchoring –  before you hit record. 

It offers a moment to check in with yourself. 

Which layer of truth am I working with today? What feels right to me to share? 

Does this person have the capacity for the deep layer right now, or would the middle layer actually feel better for both of us? That's it. No shame either way.

None of this needs to be elaborate. 

It can be three sentences in your notes app.

 It can be a body check in the car before you walk in to Mahjang night or a soccer practice.

It can be a quiet internal agreement with yourself: I’m sharing the outer layer only today, and I'll go deeper when I sense I'm ready.

That's it. The practice is that simple.

A word for people who hate small talk

Before we go any further, I want to address something — because I know who's reading this.

If the idea of starting with a surface-level answer makes you feel like you're hiding yourself, like you're performing, like you're doing the thing you promised yourself you'd stop doing — stay with me.

When someone asks how work is going at a networking event, they are not necessarily consenting to the full drawn-out story. 

For a lot of people, that question is the social equivalent of how's the weather — they're not internally prepared for the real answer, and that's not because they don't care about you or can’t actually hold it at all. It's because the safety of the interaction hasn't been established yet.

Going deep without consent isn't radical honesty. It's a boundary crossing — even if it's unintentional, even if it comes from the most genuine place in you.

And that’s not to say you need to obtain explicit consent every time you feel compelled to share more. Although sometimes, simply saying “Hey, how much time and energy do you have? Can I share a little more?” can go a long way. 

It’s also sometimes a great idea to simply illuminate the truth of the share “Hey, this is a little vulnerable for me right now. Is it ok to talk about that?”

But – starting with the one-liner, the surface truth, the brief and positive version — is not only reading the room. It's also taking it one step at a time for your system and for theirs, and a more subtle and implicit way to obtain consent.

So if you hate small talk – just know it's only small talk if it stays there forever and you only talk about the surface layer of everything. 

And even then – sometimes those conversations are simply part of life. You don’t have to love them. I certainly don’t. It can just be information to point you toward the people who can hold your depth and multidimensionality. 

The good news is – if you start with the outer layer and the other person leans in — asks a follow-up, shows you the door is open, creates the container for something more real — then you get to go deeper. You're leaving the door open. 

The one-liner is the entry point, not the whole story.

And starting superficially also gives you something invaluable: a moment to gauge. You get to watch how someone receives even the outer layer before you decide whether to hand them the next one.

When it goes sideways — and it will sometimes no matter how much you’ve prepared

Even when you've thought it through, even when you've sorted your layers and your platters and you felt pretty good going in, sometimes it still misfires.

Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud: you only control 50% of any interaction. 

You can do everything right on your half of the street and the other person is still bringing their own nervous system, their own history, their own triggers, and their own agenda to the table. And they are probably not reading this blog.

(Though, bonus points if you send it to them.)

You cannot control everything and everyone. 

There are so many reasons things go sideways that have nothing to do with you.

Some people don't have the capacity on a given day — not because they don't care about you, but because their own system is full and they have nothing left to give.

Some people get triggered by what you share and it becomes about them before either of you realizes it.

Some people ask prodding questions simply because they’re curious. 

And honestly, some people will ask prodding questions no matter how little you give them — the colleague who always needs more detail, the parent who is still a little too emotionally invested in your income or job security even though you are a fully grown adult human who has been managing your own life for decades. 

That is their pattern, not a reflection of how much you shared or how well you sorted your layers.

Sometimes the other person isn't even trying to hold you. They're gathering information, or managing their own anxiety, or doing something with your truth that has everything to do with them and nothing to do with you.

And then there are the conversations that are just — let's be honest — transactional. The person who uses your vulnerability as a springboard to tell you how much worse their life is, what they can sell you, how they can help you. 

There’s the one who is clearly fishing for something to one-up you with. The one who has been talking about themselves for twenty solid minutes and is now asking about you, and you can already feel that your answer is just going to be the setup for their next story.

These are actually great places to practice using your big girl voice and discernment. 

You share your outer layer only and only respond to their outer layers too. Keep it brief. 

And if you need an exit — you need to go home and walk your dog, you have an early morning, you just remembered you left something on the stove — interrupt them and use the exit ramp without guilt.

You get to just leave.  

And here's the flip side of this whole concept that I want you to sit with for a second: cutting it off, setting a boundary, staging your exit — that is your subtle and clever way of making yourself a first-layer person for them. 

This goes both ways. Just because you are empathetic and good at holding space does not mean you are obligated to be the container for someone else's deepest layer. 

When you sense someone is going a little too deep than you are willing or able to hold, it’s ok to put yourself on the shallow platter, be polite, change the subject, kindly redirect, and/or get out of there. You are allowed to do that. You are allowed to be the outer layer for someone who has not earned or asked for your depth.

You cannot control the unsolicited sharing of someone else's stuff. What you can do is take care of your half of the street — show up with intention, start with the layer that feels right, notice when it's going sideways, and give yourself permission to redirect or change course.

When you feel it going sideways and it’s really stinging, you have options.

You can walk away from the conversation gracefully. You can turn it back on them and ask them a question. You can change the subject, create a diversion, or simply say I'm still figuring that out and let the sentence land.

And always — you are allowed to say no or “I’d rather not get into that any further.”

You don't owe anyone information that isn't theirs to hold. If something in you says this person doesn't get this layer, that instinct is worth honoring. Setting a boundary mid-conversation isn't rude. It's self-stewardship.

What a misfire actually means

I want to stay here for a minute, because I think this is where a lot of people spiral.

Something went sideways or felt awkward or was overshared by you or the other person. 

This is information. It is not proof that you did something wrong, that the relationship is broken, or that you should have stayed home.

A few years ago I was on a walk with a friend —a  lovely human who exists in a completely different professional world from mine. I was talking about something in my business that felt totally normal to me. The ordinary uncertainty of entrepreneurship. I watched her get anxious on my behalf. She started asking rapid-fire questions, trying hard to understand, but what I was describing scared her in ways it simply didn't scare me.

The conversation pulled away from the thing I was trying to share and into reassuring her, and I walked away feeling unseen.

But here's what I had to remind myself: that experience said nothing bad about our friendship. If anything, it reminded me that people live in genuinely different worlds — and what feels commonplace to me might be completely foreign, even frightening, to someone whose life has looked different from mine.

Her anxiety wasn't wrong. Her questions weren't an attack. She was trying. The intention was there.

What it meant was that I had overestimated what that particular container could hold on that particular subject on that particular day. I got to reset my own expectations. I got to take responsibility for placing her on a platter that didn't fit, rather than making her wrong for not being able to hold what I brought.

She can still support me. She does support me. Just maybe not on that subject, in that way, on a Tuesday morning walk.

You adjust the platter. You don't have to adjust the friendship.

Why this is actually the more ethical move

Those friends who can hold your deepest, most unfiltered truth — the ones who have sat with you in the messiest versions of your middle and never once flinched — those are your third-layer people. What happens in those relationships is deep co-regulation. It is not a problem to manage. It is the whole point.

And every layer is co-regulatory, by the way. Even the outer layer. Even the brief, diplomatic, appealing version you give at the networking event — that is still two nervous systems making contact. It’s still belonging happening in real time. It’s still connection. It's just connection at a different depth.

But not every person, in every moment, in every container, has the capacity for every layer. Especially you! 

And when someone receives more than they can hold – you included — even with the best intentions on both sides — it can shift the dynamic in ways neither of you planned for.

Choosing the right layer isn't about withholding yourself. It's about reading the container. It honors the relationship. And it keeps you from saying things you can't take back before your system is actually ready to say them.

Taking it one layer at a time

I want to bring this all the way back to where we started — because everything I've laid out here, the lasagna, the platter, the body check, the encouragement to start on a superficial layer without pathologizing it — all of it is pointing toward one thing.

You get to exist in the world as your messy, mid-process, not-yet-finished self.

You don't have to have it all sorted before you show up somewhere. You don't have to have a clean answer before you go to the event, take the meeting, or call the friend. You just have to know, roughly, which layer you're working with today, and who you're setting it in front of.

That's it. That's the whole practice.

The discomfort of the wobbly middle — the not-knowing, the awkward halting answers, the frozen moment when someone asks a simple question and your whole body says I don't know how to answer this — is not a sign you made a wrong decision.

It is a sign you are in the middle.

The middle is supposed to feel like this. You’re still going to stumble. There’s no way to get this 100 percent right every time. 

None of the behaviors that come up here are bad. Oversharing, over-explaining, freezing, hiding, retreating — they're all your system doing its job, trying to maintain connection and find safety while you're between one thing and the next.

If you're sitting here wondering whether you made a mistake, you probably didn't. Your nervous system is just doing what it was built to do.

You are not meant to navigate the middle alone. Co-regulation is how you settle into feeling unsettled. Choose the person or people you want in your deepest layer and let them walk with you through it — not to give you answers, but to be present while you find your own.

Because that is ultimately what this whole concept is protecting: your ability to stay in relationship with people and with yourself at the same time. To keep your identity from going unmirrored while you're still becoming the next version of it. To belong somewhere — even imperfectly, even mid-process — while you figure out where you're going.

And in the meantime: take it one layer at a time.

My grandma was right. You don't have to tell everything you know.

Thanks for being here and reading along. Would love to hear how you navigate these experiences!

If something in here named what you've been feeling and you want support navigating your own wobbly middle, a Soul Story Mapping session might be the right place to start. It's a private 90-minute space to map what's true for you right now — a space to hear yourself clearly, and get clarity and direction on what’s next. If you’re interested in exploring that further, reach out!