“It’s Everything, Everywhere, All At Once:” Rethinking the Check-In Question

July 31, 2025

By Rosie Aquila | Program Manager, ProInspire

These days, when someone asks me, “How are you?” my brain short-circuits. Not because I don’t have feelings, but because I have too many. The question lands fake or out-of-touch, and the only honest answer I can muster is either a deep sigh and “How am I??” à la Broad City, or my new favorite: “I’m everything, everywhere, all at once.” 

I’ve heard so many people—friends, colleagues, strangers I have parasocial relationships with—reference the Oscar-winning 2022 film Everything Everywhere All At Once as shorthand for the state of our lives. Not the literal plotline, but the feeling of it. The relentless, chaotic swirl. The sense that we’re being pulled across the multiverse of timelines, roles, crises, obligations, healing journeys, existential spirals, and occasional dance parties…simultaneously. The movie gave us language and imagery for what it means to be alive right now in the contradictions of an nihilistic Everything Bagel and silly, googly eyes of overstimulated, grief-laden, possibility-rich moments where everything really is happening all at once. 

So what do I mean when I give this answer?

I think it’s my attempt to name the emotional and physical multitasking—across self to system— that’s become second nature. Like, yes, I’m good. I’m drinking my iced coffee and sending my husband a TikTok. But I’m also not good. I’m mourning the world. I’m organizing to stop my government fund a genocide. I’m watching footage of my neighbors get disappeared from the streets. And, I’m a bunch of other things, too. I’m fielding a family group text chain about my mom’s upcoming move. I’m coordinating three work projects. I’m trying to remember if I scheduled my next dermatology appointment. I’m reading a proposal for a consensus-decision making process in my mutual aid network. I’m going to my improv classes and laughing my ass off. It’s the simultaneity of joy and grief. Of making dinner while doomscrolling. Of going to an ICE rapid response community meeting one hour, and watching Love Island the next. It’s the dissonance of being both grateful and overwhelmed, both present and completely disoriented. 

I think it’s also my small resistance to binary thinking and invitation for more complexity and contradiction. I’m not “good” or “bad,” “fine” or “not fine.” I’m a constellation of feelings. A collage of seemingly opposing forces. I’m making sense in a chaos of tabs (please, do not come for me and my emotional security Chrome windows I’m unwilling to close). I’m trying to feel and not dissociate from it all, move through more than my nervous system was ever equipped to metabolize, and still find the human moments of connection, wonder, and joy. 

I recently came across a quote by Dan Savage, who said: “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.” What I take from that quote is both the act of joy as resistance, especially for those experiencing state violence, but also the ways in which joy is a strategy. We need the everything, everywhere, all at once—the contradictions of holding play and grief in the same hand—to sustain ourselves and not fall into despair or nihilism. 

In the third act of the film (spoiler alert), Ke Huy Quan’s ever-positive character, Waymond, explains just that to his wife. He says, “When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It’s how I’ve learned to survive through everything. I know you see yourself as a fighter. Well, I see myself as one too. This is how I fight.” 

I’m fighting by holding onto my hope, my dreams, my joy, my playfulness, my authenticity. By allowing myself to be honest and say I’m NOT ok, and also I AM ok, all at the same time. I’m bedrotting in the morning, but canvassing by the afternoon. I’m fighting by being in everything, everywhere, all at once. The webs of past, present, and future.  

So maybe the question isn’t “How are you?” anymore. Maybe it’s:

• “Where are you directing your energy these days?”
• “What do you need more of? Less of?”
• “How are you in the swirl?”
• “What contradictions or polarities are inside of you?”

Or maybe it’s just saying, “Hey. You’re in the all-of-it. Me too.”Because when we’re living inside everything, everywhere, all at once, maybe the most generous thing we can offer each other is just presence. Not the business as usual, but a slowing down and pause of the multitasking. The recognition that this moment, and all of the moments, is a lot.

So, how am I? I’m multiverse-ing. I’m struggling. I’m living my best life (unironically). I’m in the swirl, I am the swirl, and I’m grateful you asked.