i don't think anyone would miss me.

Ajouté : 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]You've thought about it, not out loud, not like something you tell anyone, just quietly in the back of your head at 2:00 a.m. when you can't sleep. You've let yourself imagine it. What happens if you just stop? Stop replying. Stop showing up. Stop being the person who's always kind of there in the background of everyone's life.

[00:00:21]You've wondered whether anyone would notice, whether the group chat would go quiet for a day and then just keep going, whether your name would come up at all, or whether the silence where you used to be would just get filled in without anyone really registering what filled it. And the part that keeps you up, the part you haven't said out loud to anyone, is that you're not sure the answer isn't yes. You're not sure they wouldn't just keep going. I don't I don't know how to say this without it sounding like I'm describing something dark because I'm not. Or not only. It's more like there's a specific kind of loneliness that doesn't look like loneliness from the outside. You're not isolated. You've got people. You've got the group chat and the mutual friends and the coworker you grab lunch with. Sometimes you've got people who would say they know you and you still lie awake at 2:00 a.m.

[00:01:24]running the math on how long it would take for someone to actually notice you were gone. That math is the thing I want to talk about. I had a period a couple of years ago where I was technically fine, like objectively fine. I had people I could call. I had a life. But I remember sitting at my desk one Sunday afternoon. I'd been alone since Friday.

[00:01:47]And realizing I hadn't spoken to another person in 2 and 1/2 days, and nobody had noticed, not one message, not even a meme forwarded in a group chat. And the thing that got me wasn't the loneliness.

[00:02:02]It was how unsurprised I was. Like I'd been quietly expecting it. Like I already knew I was the kind of person that silence settles around without anyone intending it. I didn't tell anyone that. I just closed the laptop and went to bed at 6:00 p.m. Someone messaged me on Instagram a few weeks ago, though, and I think about her message a lot. She said she'd been feeling invisible for months, but the weird part was she was never alone. She had a boyfriend, a best friend, a whole life on paper. She just felt like if you removed her from it, the shape of the life would stay the same. The boyfriend would find someone. The best friend would adjust. The life would just reconfigure around the hole she left.

[00:02:52]She said she didn't know if that made her sad or just realistic. And I read that and went quiet for a while because I'd felt that exact thing. And I still hadn't had words for it. It's not the same as wanting to disappear. It's something quieter and more specific than that. It's the belief, not the fear, the belief that you are the kind of person who is easy to replace. That the connections you have are real but not loadbearing.

[00:03:27]That people like you fine but wouldn't grieve you. That you exist in most people's lives at at a volume they could turn down without really noticing. And I think a lot of people are walking around with that belief running in the background like a tab open that they never close. You go quiet in a group chat for 3 days to see if anyone pings you directly. Not the group, just you specifically. And when they don't, you go quieter. And you tell yourself you're just busy. But you're not busy. You're running an experiment. You're collecting data. Every day that passes without someone saying, "Hey, you've been quiet." is another data point that confirms what you already suspected.

[00:04:17]You've been doing this for longer than you'd admit, probably since you were a teenager, pulling back just enough to see if anyone grabs for you. And they usually don't. Not because they don't care. Or or maybe that's not it. I don't know. Maybe they do care and they're just not wired to chase, but the data doesn't know that. The data just says, "You went quiet. Nobody came. Hypothesis confirmed." And then there's the other version, the one that looks completely different on the surface, but it's the same thing underneath. The person who is never quiet, who is always present, always funny, always the one who remembers everyone's birthday and checks in and shows up. But they're doing it from behind glass. They give a lot. They just never let anyone close enough to give back because if no one really knows you, no one can really confirm your suspicion. You're generous with your surface because your surface is safe.

[00:05:20]the stuff underneath stays protected. I did this for years. I'm I'm still doing it sometimes if I'm honest. Talking about my feelings in front of thousands of people is a very specific way of being open while not actually letting anyone in. I can say everything and still be unreachable. I've thought about that. The internal logic of it goes something like this. If people don't know the real version of you, you can't get the verdict on the real version of you. The person they'd miss isn't actually you. It's the performance of you. And performances can be replaced, but at least the rejection isn't personal. The cost of that is that nothing ever feels real. You get the warmth, but not the weight. People care about you, but you can't feel it landing because you've got the glass up. Someone says something kind and it just bounces.

[00:06:17]You smile and say thank you and inside it doesn't register as evidence.

[00:06:21]Evidence of what? That you matter.

[00:06:25]You've already decided you don't. New data doesn't update the model. I think about this comment I got a while back. A guy said he'd been in the same friend group for 6 years and he still felt like a guest, like someone who'd been accidentally included and had just never corrected the mistake. He said he laughed at their jokes and showed up to their things and they genuinely seemed to like him. But he always had this low hum of waiting. Waiting for them to realize they made an error. waiting for the day someone would go, "Wait, why is he here?" And he'd have no answer. 6 years. And the thing that got me about that was how normal it sounded. He wasn't describing a breakdown. He was describing a Tuesday. A very quiet, very practiced way of being present without ever arriving. You've got your version of that. Maybe not six years. Maybe not a friend group, but there's probably a version of it somewhere in your life. A relationship where you're always slightly braced. A friendship where you work harder than the other person and you know it. A family dynamic where you're loved but not known. And the difference between those two things keeps you awake sometimes. So, where does it come from? I don't I'm not going to give you a clean answer because I don't have one. But I think for a lot of people it starts somewhere small. Some version of reaching and not being reached back. And it could have been nothing. A parent who was distracted. A friend who dropped you in secondary school for someone cooler. A group of people who were kind to your face and forgot you existed the moment you weren't in the room. Something that told you early that your absence was manageable. And uh the brain is very good at finding the pattern and very bad at updating it. So you carry that early data into every room. You walk into a new friendship already calculating how much it would hurt to lose it.

[00:08:38]Which means you've already started losing it cuz you're not actually there.

[00:08:43]You're there with one foot out. You're there in a way that confirms what you believe that you're temporary. It's kind of like when you you know when you start a new job and on the first day you don't put anything personal on your desk because you're not sure it'll work out and then a year later your desk still has nothing on it. Not because it didn't work out, just because you never went back and fixed the first day assumption.

[00:09:14]That's what this is. You made a decision when you were young about how much space you were allowed to take up, and you've just never gone back to question it. A girl replied to one of my Tik Toks a few months ago, and when I read it, I had this specific feeling of being caught out, like she was describing something I'd done without knowing I'd been doing it. She said she'd spent 3 years being the person who organized everything, every birthday dinner, every group trip, every we should all catch up that actually happened was because she made it happen. And she said she did it because it was the only way she felt indispensable. If she stopped organizing, they'd stop seeing each other, which meant she was the glue, which meant she mattered. And then she got sick for 6 weeks. genuinely couldn't do it, couldn't plan, couldn't chase, couldn't be the one holding it together.

[00:10:10]And the group mostly dissolved. People got busy. Nobody picked it up. She said she'd cried for 2 days. And I was going to say, uh, actually, no, it's more like she didn't cry because they stopped. She cried because she'd been right. The fear she'd been organizing against for 3 years turned out to be accurate. She wasn't the glue. She was just doing the gluing and nobody else thought it needed doing. So what did she do with that?

[00:10:42]Nothing. She sat with it for a while and then she started organizing again because she didn't know another way to be. That's the thing about this. The confirmation doesn't fix it. you can get to the data you were dreading and still not change because the behavior was never really about finding out the truth. It was about managing the fear of the truth. And when the truth arrives, the fear doesn't go. It just gets a different shape. I want to say something that might land wrong. But I think it needs saying you are not objective about this. You have never been objective about this.

[00:11:24]the experiment you've been running and the going quiet and the pulling back, the counting how many days before someone texts, it's not a fair test. It was never a fair test cuz you designed it to confirm what you already believe.

[00:11:39]You pull back in a way that looks like you're just busy. You give people an out. You don't say, "I'm struggling. Can someone check in on me?" You just go quiet and wait and then use the silence as evidence. And I'm not saying that to make you feel bad. I'm saying it because I've done the exact same thing. And I know how convincing it feels. It feels like data. It feels like finally knowing. But it's not knowing. It's just a really sophisticated way of staying scared. The people in your life are not running the same experiment. They're just living their lives. They're not thinking, "Let's see if he comes back."

[00:12:21]They're thinking about their own stuff, their own fears, their own version of this exact feeling. Probably they're not failing your test because they don't know there's a test. And that's the part that just sits there or or maybe not just sits there. It's more like it won't leave because if the test is flawed, you have to stop running it. And if you stop running it, you have to actually show up. like actually show up, not managed, not behind glass, not ready to leave at any moment, actually there, actually reachable. And that's terrifying in a way that's hard to explain to someone who hasn't spent years protecting themselves from a verdict that might never even come. I don't know when I started believing I was easy to lose. I genuinely don't. It feels like it's always been there, just at different volumes. Last winter was bad for it. I'd wake up, open my phone, see the notifications, mostly app stuff, nothing personal, and just feel this flat confirmation. I'd go days without talking to anyone and tell myself I was just focused on work, on the channel, on something. I wasn't. I was doing the experiment. I was watching the counter tick up 4 days, 5 days, 6. Refreshing my own life like a page that wasn't loading. Collecting the silence like it was data, like it meant something definitive about who I was. I remember one night specifically. It was maybe 100 a.m. I was sitting on the floor with my back against the bed for some reason.

[00:14:02]Just scrolling, not looking for anything, just scrolling. And I had this thought, completely calm, not panicked, just flat, that if I didn't post anything for a month, I wasn't sure anyone would reach out. Not to check on me, not as a person. maybe to ask where the videos went, but not about me. I didn't do anything with that thought. I just sat there for another hour and then went to sleep. And the thing is, some people did reach out that week. A couple of messages and I found reasons to discount everyone. Too short, probably just bored. Would have sent that to anyone. The brain will work very hard to protect its conclusions. New data that contradicts the model just gets quietly filed under anomaly and the model stays exactly where it was. I'm not fixed on this. I want to be clear about that. I'm not making this video from the other side of something. I still do the pulling back thing. I still catch myself running the experiment. The difference now is I can see it for what it is while it's happening which is not the same as stopping but it's not nothing either thing. So what do you do with this? I can't give you a step by step. I'm not going to do that. But I think the first thing is just to notice when you're running the test. Not to stop, just to notice. To catch the moment where you go quiet and name it. I'm doing the thing.

[00:15:41]That's all. just noticing it without immediately using the results as evidence. And the second thing is harder. It's the showing up thing. Not performing, not managing, not being useful enough that people need you around. Just being actually present, saying the true thing sometimes instead of the smooth thing. Texting someone first, not because you're testing them, but because you actually want to talk to them. letting someone be kind to you without immediately finding a reason it doesn't count.

[00:16:19]You don't have to believe you're worth missing to try that. You just have to be willing to act like you might be even once, even badly, even while the other part of you is running the counter and collecting data. Because the alternative is just more years of the same experiment with the same results. And I think some part of you is tired of that.

[00:16:49]If you weren't, you wouldn't be watching this. Someone commented under one of my videos last month just said, "I've been invisible my whole life, and I think I'm the one who made me invisible." I didn't know what to reply for a long time. I just kept reading it because that's it.

[00:17:06]That's the whole thing in one sentence.

[00:17:09]The invisibility isn't happening to you.

[00:17:12]You built it carefully, brick by brick, for reasons that made complete sense when you started and make less sense now, but the wall is still there, and you can take it down. Not all at once.

[00:17:26]Not by deciding to be a different person overnight, but a brick at a time.

[00:17:30]starting with just letting one person see one true thing about you this week and not immediately taking it back. You don't have to wait until you believe you're worth knowing. You just have to act like you might be and do it again and again after that until the data changes until the model gets updated.

[00:17:50]Until the experiment stops feeling necessary. I believe in you now. Believe in yourself.