People compliment me on how vibrant and healthy and healed I look.

*You look well* is one of the most complicated things a person can be told. It is meant kindly every time. It also lands strangely on someone who has had the worst month of their life and simply put a shirt on.

Faces are poor instruments. They report on sleep and daylight and whether you got outside, and they miss almost everything else, in both directions.

Take the compliment as what it is — goodwill from someone with no better tool — and keep your own accounting separate from it. What other people can see was never the measure.