How Are You Doing?

When someone asks me, “how are you doing?”, that is, with the genuine desire to know how I am actually doing, how do I answer?  

When the mind is at peace while the heart is at war, how do I truly feel? Is it exclusively the former, the latter, or a combination of the two? From the perspective of my mind, are those feelings truly mine?  

Often, I find myself feeling ashamed to feel a certain way, as if I am enduring an ailment or some embarrassing condition induced by some external source. Insofar as I seek to live my life with a rational clarity and emotional sobriety, there is little doubt in whether I need to quell these feelings. But—and there always seems to be a but when it comes to how I feel—the truth is that how I feel is not induced externally, but completely internally; it is fundamentally who I am. The question then becomes—is it worth embracing every aspect of myself? Have I been far too strict in extricating every facet of the mind from the heart? What is the purpose of this ambivalence that persists in my consciousness?  

But yes, I’m doing just fine.