Four women. Four ways through the wilderness. One of them is yours.

You didn’t wake up one day and decide to disappear.

It happened the way most losses happen: gradually, then all at once. You were holding so much for so long that somewhere between holding everything together and keeping everyone okay you quietly lost the thread back to yourself.

And now you’re here. In the in-between. Trying to remember who you were before the thing that changed everything.

This season has a name. Liminal. The place between what was and what will be. You are standing on it right now. Not in the old life. Not yet in the new one. Just here.

It is disorienting because it is supposed to be. You haven’t failed. You haven’t fallen behind. You are exactly where the threshold puts everyone who crosses it.

And you are not the first woman to stand here.

You didn’t stop talking to people. You just stopped being heard.

There’s a difference, and if you’re honest you’ve known the difference for a while now. The group chat kept moving (plans, memes, surface conversation) while you were sitting in the middle of something that was costing you everything.

And when the worst of it happened, silence. Not cruelty. Just absence. Nobody typed the question that would have mattered. Nobody called. The chat moved on the way chats do, because nobody knew to stop it.

So quietly, the way you leave when you’ve decided nobody is really watching, you left.

And nobody noticed.

Your exit as invisible as your pain had been.

That’s a specific kind of loneliness. Not the loneliness of being alone. The loneliness of being surrounded and still unseen.

You haven’t stopped. Not really. Not since before you can remember.

There’s always something that needs doing. Someone who needs feeding, organizing, showing up for. A problem that needs solving before anyone else notices it’s a problem. A gap that needs filling before it becomes a crisis. And you fill it. Because you’re good at it. Because it needs doing. Because if you don’t, who will?

That last question is the one that drives everything.

And underneath it, quieter and harder to name, is another one. The one you don’t say out loud.

What happens to all of this if I stop.

So you don’t stop. You serve. You show up. You pour. And you watch, you can’t help watching, whether anyone is pouring back. Whether anyone notices what it costs you to keep going.

Sometimes they don’t. And the resentment builds quietly beneath the activity. Not because you’re ungrateful. Because you’re exhausted.

You know how to talk about almost anything.

Ideas. Systems. Theology. History. Other people’s problems and how they might solve them. You can hold a complex argument and turn it over and examine every side and articulate something most people hadn’t considered.

What you’re less practiced at is talking about yourself. The real version. The unedited one.

Not because you’re not self-aware. You’re probably more self-aware than most people you know. But somewhere along the way you learned that your depth was welcome in certain rooms and not in others. That your questions were interesting in the abstract and exhausting in the personal. That the part of you that wanted to be fully known (not just respected, not just intellectually engaged, but actually known) had a cost attached to it.

So you got good at leading with what was safe. Your mind. Your competence. Your ability to analyze and articulate and contribute.

You have been known for what you produce. Not for who you are.

And that gap, between what you show and what you actually are, is where the mask lives.