Welcome back to Stories from Tina. Or should I say, welcome back to me, considering I probably fell off the face of the Earth for the last three weeks.
If you follow me, know me, or have ever texted me, you’ve probably seen the meme floating around that says: “It’s normal to not hear from me. I just be disappearing from time to time.”
When I saw that, I didn’t just laugh—I felt seen. I felt attacked. I felt like someone had installed a camera in my living room and watched me ignore my phone for 72 hours straight. Because let’s be real: disappearing is my accidental love language.
I know, I know. In this day and age, we are supposed to be “on” 24/7. We’re supposed to reply to texts within three minutes, like Instagram posts instantly, and generally be available to everyone, everywhere, all at once. But honestly? I’m tired.
Here is the truth about why I disappear, and I have a feeling a lot of you are nodding your heads right now.
My social battery doesn’t just drain; it crashes. It’s like an old iPhone that says it has 40% battery left, and then you open the camera app and boom—black screen. Dead.
One minute, I’m the life of the party. I’m cracking jokes, I’m making plans, I’m promising to come to your cousin’s baby shower. Then, I cross the threshold of my front door, and my operating system shuts down. I look at my phone, seeing the texts rolling in, and physically cannot bring my thumbs to type the words, “LOL, totally.”
It’s not that I don’t love my friends. It’s not that I don’t want to talk. It’s just that my brain has hung a “Closed for Renovations” sign on the door, and the contractor is on a lunch break.
Here is the cycle of the disappearance:
1. I see your text. I read it. I smile!
2. I say to myself, “I need to give this a good response, not a rushed one. I’ll reply in five minutes when I sit down.”
3. Three to five business days pass.
4. I suddenly remember the text in a cold sweat at 11:30 PM.
5. Now it’s too late to reply, so I decide to wait until morning.
6. Two more weeks pass.
At this point, responding feels like I need to write a formal apology letter explaining my absence. It becomes a Thing™. The guilt builds up, which makes me avoid my phone even more. It’s a vicious cycle of anxiety and avoidance, fueled entirely by the fact that I just wanted to take a nap on a Tuesday.
People always assume that when you disappear, you’re doing something mysterious or grand. Like I’m off in Bali finding myself, or I’ve started a secret double life.
Let me humble myself real quick. When I disappear, I am usually doing one of the following:
• Wearing the same sweatpants for the third day in a row.
• Dissociating while staring at the ceiling fan.
• Doom-scrolling TikToks about cleaning hacks I will never use.
• Having a full argument with myself in the shower and winning.
• Eating cereal for dinner because cooking requires “perceiving reality,” and I’m not doing that today.
I’m not ignoring you because I’m cool. I’m ignoring you because I am currently a goblin in my goblin cave, and I need to recharge my humanity before I can present it to the public again.
If you are friends with a “disappear-er” like me, I just want to say: Thank you. Thank you for not taking it personally when the group chat goes silent on my end. Thank you for understanding that my silence isn’t an absence of love; it’s an abundance of overwhelm.
And if you are the one who disappears? Babe, own it. Stop apologizing for needing space. The world is loud. Your peace is quiet. Sometimes you have to unplug the router to get the connection to work again, and the same goes for your brain.
So, if I owe you a text… I’m getting to it. Eventually. Probably. But right now, I’m going to go disappear for a bit. Don’t send a search party; just send memes.
— Tina
This is hilarious, honest, and so painfully relatable 😄
Your voice is warm, self-aware, and effortlessly funny, but beneath the humor there’s real emotional truth. You’ve captured the modern exhaustion of always being “on” with such clarity that it feels like a collective sigh of relief for anyone who’s ever stared at a text and thought, I’ll reply later—and then accidentally time-traveled two weeks into the future.