The people who disappear for days at a time aren’t antisocial. They’re recovering from a level of presence that most people never have to sustain.

Withdrawal is usually read as dysfunction. Someone goes quiet for a few days, stops answering texts, declines invitations, and the people around them start constructing narratives about depression, avoidance, or relational failure. But the opposite reading is often more accurate: the person who disappears periodically may be someone who shows up with an intensity most people never attempt, and the disappearance is the cost of that kind of engagement.

This pattern doesn’t map neatly onto...