On today’s episode of “How can I use mental health to justify my terrible behavior?”
Oh — did that offend you?
Good. Sit down. Let the candlelight flicker while you clutch your amethyst and mutter affirmations about your “boundaries.”
The New Spiritual Practice of Disappearing
When did it become normal to vanish into the night the moment life becomes inconvenient?
When did disappearing become a spiritual practice?
When did silence become the new love language?
We now live in an era where ghosting is marketed as self-care and avoidance is advertised as emotional intelligence. You send a message to someone you consider a friend and it takes them three to seven business days just to open it.
Apparently that’s “healing.”
Apparently you expecting basic communication is “toxic.”
Meanwhile they’re posting online every hour like Victorian ghosts rattling chains for attention.
You start wondering:
What did I do? Why am I being punished? Why am I being exiled to the outer darkness like a biblical pariah?
Let me answer that for you:
Absolutely nothing.
No wait — I’m wrong.
You did do something.
You were too understanding the first time.
Too forgiving the second time.
Too patient the fifteenth time.
You kept giving grace to someone who didn’t deserve that much of your spirit. You wanted to be the compassionate friend because you knew they “shut down” during episodes of depression, anxiety, spiritual crises, lunar cycles, Mercury retrogrades, and whatever else they blamed it on.
But eventually it becomes a pattern.
And God forbid you say anything. Suddenly they have “boundaries.”
My dear children of the night, it’s not boundaries.
It’s guilt-dodging wrapped in therapeutic jargon.
Why They Can Post but Still Not Answer You
Here’s the part nobody talks about:
Avoidants can post online, repost TikToks, dance on Instagram, comment on memes, scroll for hours… and still “not have the capacity” to answer you.
Why?
- Posting online gives them dopamine without vulnerability
- Scrolling requires no accountability
- Public engagement doesn’t force honesty
- Responding to you requires facing guilt and connection
You represent real intimacy. Online, they can stay superficial and safe.
With you, they’d have to be human.
Compassion Isn’t a Coffin
Before the armchair therapists rise from their Instagram altars, let me make something clear:
I am not heartless.
I have held trembling hands at 2 a.m.
I have listened to friends unravel like cheap thread.
I have sat with people whose minds were dim corridors with one flickering lightbulb.
I know suffering.
I’ve lived adjacent to it.
I’ve carried it.
But compassion is not a coffin I’m going to lie down in.
Loving someone doesn’t require self-sacrifice.
I can understand your trauma without letting you use it to avoid accountability.
I can acknowledge your depression without applauding your disappearing act.
Your struggle is real, but so is the wound you left in me.
Suffering explains behavior. It does not sanctify it.
Live, Laugh, Lexapro
Before the whataboutists assemble:
Yes, trauma is real.
Yes, depression is real.
Yes, anxiety is real.
But for the love of Live, Laugh, Lexapro, stop diagnosing every inconvenience as a disorder.
Get evaluated. Get medicated. Get help.
Don’t turn your friends into unpaid therapists.
Not for Nothing — The Leash Remains
Not for nothing, I’ve watched friendship after friendship dissolve under someone’s “bad week that never ends.”
Each time I tried to be patient.
Each time I excused their silence.
Each time, my understanding became a leash.
And that leash dragged me through dark hallways filled with self-doubt, whispering that I was unworthy and disposable.
Suffering does not give anyone the right to carve hollow spaces into the people who love them.
The Culture of Detachment
Why does this keep happening?
I have a theory:
We now live in a culture that worships detachment.
We call it healing.
We call it boundaries.
We call it alignment.
But really, it’s cowardice disguised as enlightenment.
People say:
“I’m busy.”
“I don’t owe anyone anything.”
“If you were a real friend, you’d understand.”
Nobody is that busy. We all carry our phones like rosaries.
We refresh notifications the way monks check prayer hours.
And yes, someone will insist:
“I only use email and I check it once a day.”
They’re lying and ignoring you in advance.
We glamorize detachment because it photographs well on social media.
In real life, it’s just loneliness with a ring light.
A Letter to the Avoidants
To all avoidants:
It takes five seconds — not five hours, not five days — to write:
“I’m alive, but not in the right headspace.”
You can need space and still communicate.
You can be depressed and still apologize.
You can be overwhelmed and still send a sentence.
Healing isn’t a hall pass to abandon people.
Don’t complain about having no friends when we watched you loosen every leash yourself.
The Graveyard of Lost Connections
We cannot build a compassionate world on the corpses of connections we were too anxious to maintain.
When avoidance finally runs out of excuses, what remains isn’t peace. It’s isolation.
Deafening isolation.
The kind that echoes when you realize you pushed away the very people who would have walked through fire for you.
PSA
This piece reflects my opinion and lived experience.
It is not a diagnostic manual.
Mental health is real.
Trauma is real.
Avoidance is real.
So is basic accountability.
If this resonates with you — good.
If it offends you — ask yourself why.
Author’s Note
If you see yourself in these shadows, sit with it.
Light a candle.
Listen for the echo.
Not every disappearance is a mystery. Sometimes it’s a choice.
And sometimes the person you abandoned finally stops waiting at the door.
