THE LETTER

January 2026

She built the thing. And then she left the room where people clap.

Not in crisis. Not in burnout. She left the way you leave a party that has gone on too long — coat already on, standing near the door, realizing no one will notice if you slip out. So she slipped out.

Her grid went quiet sometime last year. No announcement. She just stopped, and the thing she had spent years building — the audience, the presence, the proof of herself — sat there, untended, and did not collapse.

I used to think this kind of departure was about exhaustion. It is not. Exhaustion is when you cannot keep going. This is when you can keep going, easily, and you feel the particular emptiness of that. The machine runs fine. You could feed it forever. That is why you stop.

Here is what happens, somewhere around thirty-seven or forty-one: you look at the thing you have been maintaining and realize it is not a door. It is a window. On the other side are people you do not know, watching you, waiting for you to do something they can react to. You have been performing for them. You did not notice when it started.

So you stop. The phone goes in the other room. A week passes. Then a month. The people who matter reach you through older methods, and those conversations are different — slower, less performed. The watchers do not send search parties. They scroll past the space where you used to be. They forget the window was ever there.

And here is the part that could break you: the discovery that your visibility was mostly a story you were telling yourself. That the audience was never as invested as you were. That the whole apparatus of being seen was a weight you picked up voluntarily and carried until your arms ached, and no one asked you to carry it, and no one needed you to.

You could have set it down at any time.

She does not miss it. That is the part I cannot stop thinking about. All those years, all that presence — and then nothing, and she does not miss it. She could walk back in. She does not want to.

Her life is real without a witness.

I keep circling that sentence because it implicates me. I am still in the room. Still performing, still feeding the thing, still half-believing the visibility means something. And when I imagine leaving — really leaving, no announcement, no essay about why — I feel something that is not quite fear. It is closer to vertigo. The question of who I am if no one is watching. Whether I have been building a life, or an image.

She answered that question. I am not sure I want to know my answer yet.

The feed continues without her. New voices, new faces, the endless scroll. Somewhere she is not watching. Her phone is in a drawer. The hours belong to her. She is at the party she actually wanted to be at — smaller, quieter, no one clapping.

She is not coming back to tell us what it is like.

She does not owe us that.

—Adrienne

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