Have you ever gone quiet on everyone, not because anything dramatic happened, but because you just couldn’t do the talking anymore?
That’s what this is about. When things get overwhelming, I disappear. Days, sometimes longer. Social media, people, conversations, anyone trying to reach me, I stop the exchange of thoughts and energies with all of it.
I don’t explain first. I don’t warn anyone I’m going. I just go quiet, and I let people assume whatever they assume. It’s not really a choice in the moment. I stop feeling like doing things, and I stop doing them. It’s the only way I know how to cope.
I know how that looks from the outside, and I know it isn’t fair. If I have a friendship, a relationship, someone who actually cares about me, and I just stop showing up because my brain has decided it needs to, that’s selfish, technically. I’m not trying to argue myself out of that. But I’m not doing it to hurt anyone. I’m doing it because it’s the only way I know to keep myself sane. To keep myself alive, some days, honestly.
Here’s the part that never stops confusing me: withdrawing doesn’t actually make me feel better. When I was still interacting, at least I had something going, some noise, some contact, something outside my own head. The second I cut everyone off, it’s just me and my thoughts, and my thoughts are not kind company. So the thing I do to protect myself from the stress hands me straight into a worse version of it. I don’t have a way to fix that. It’s just true, every time.
I think I know where it comes from, though. There have been times I needed help and the people around me chose themselves over me. So at some point I made peace with the idea that only I can help myself, that my suffering is mine to carry, not something to hand to the people who love me, because loving me doesn’t mean they owe me the weight of it. I choose myself before I choose anyone else now. Maybe that’s selfish too. But I’d rather do what keeps me here long-term than perform okay-ness so other people stay comfortable.
And this is where it all connects, I think, the withdrawing, the guilt, the distance it puts between me and everyone else. Coming back is its own kind of hard. If I act normal, it’s like the whole disappearance meant nothing, like I was pretending to be someone I wasn’t. If I actually talk about how I’ve been for the last ten or twenty days, I already know how that lands, people get tired of hearing it. I used to talk about my emotions openly, never hesitated. But I’ve learned, slowly, that most people don’t actually carry it with you, not in a way that costs them anything. So now I hold back. And holding back has its own cost. It’s made it harder to let anyone get close since.
That’s usually what triggers the next disappearing act, too. Small things pile up quietly, and nobody sees the piling. Say something’s bothering you and people think it’s trivial, so why does it matter. Don’t say it, and it just sits there, stacking. Ten trivial things collect and eventually there’s a meltdown I don’t have a plan for, and the only thing I know to do is stop everything, the shows, the apps, the people. Just me, alone with it.
Here’s the thing underneath all of it, the part I don’t say out loud much: nobody notices when I’m gone. I’m not saying that for anyone to rush in and prove me wrong. I’m not expecting to be chased after. But it sits with me, if I disappeared for a long time, even for good, nothing would really change. The world would keep going. Minus me. Exactly as it was, just without me in it.
If any of this sounds familiar, I don’t have a fix to hand you. I’m not writing this as a recovery story. Even the things that help me survive a day come with some cost attached, that’s just how it works when nothing fully works. You find something that gets you through, and it still takes something from you. That’s the whole truth, not a lesson dressed up as one.
I’d want a world where I didn’t have to disappear at all, where my brain could hold ordinary life the way it looks like everyone else’s does. I know everyone struggles, some more than me. That doesn’t make what I feel less real. If something small is triggering me, it’s triggering me, whether or not it should be. And to be fair, I don’t check on people when they go quiet either. I don’t hold that against them any more than I’d want it held against me. That’s just how it goes, I think, for most of us, quietly.
I’m not writing this to be understood. I’m writing it because it needed to be said once, out loud, without cleaning it up. If you’ve felt any part of this, you’re not the only one going quiet.
Here Is What Happens When I Disappear!
