Vanished.

Sometimes I feel like disappearing.

Sometimes I feel like going away from everything, probably to an abandoned treehouse in the jungles of tomorrow, where I will be at peace, away from all the sharing and over-sharing. It would be good to be disconnected for a while. Ironically enough, I am writing this on a post that will reach a lot of people, and that, sadly enough, a lot of people might be able to relate to.
You see, the side of yourself you share out here, where everyone can see you, is only a fraction of who you really are. You can't distill a whole person into just a particular number of likes they got, or something they've posted, or something they didn't post but that you thought they should. The risk of sharing too much of yourself with people is that after a while, they will come to expect it; but they won't notice if you disappear.

At least I think they wouldn't notice if I disappear.

Sure, they would wonder where I have gone, for a little while, but then they will return to their everyday lives and troubles and problems; people have too many of those anyway. Here I talk only of the part of myself that is a slightly sassier - and some might say cheekier - version of myself: the version that is the most opposite to who I really am, and not the version that stays up at night binge-watching harmonium concerts and my friend's classical music compositions on YouTube, or reading, or writing poetry. Only a few friends of mine know that side of me. Of course, this is assuming that people have only two sides, the good and the bad, the people-pleasing and the cold-hearted, the has-it-all-together and the slowly-falling-apart.

All my life I have struggled with balancing connection and disconnection. Connection eats into my life, while disconnection keeps me awake at night. Connection is necessary for relationships to grow, but too much of it will poison your friendships, and suffocate your friends. Too much disconnection, on the other hand, will suffocate you, and make you feel like you have no friends at all; a feeling I have felt enough times to never let anyone else think the way I once did, which is probably why I, oftentimes, share, and over-share, and never stop, really. (I seldom leave people alone. My friends will testify to that.) The endeavour to balance these scales is a confusing, draining, severely exhausting one. And so I have always been scared to even attempt to balance these two sides of the same (albeit virtual) coin.

I think it would be good to try, though.