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The notification sat there for six days. I watched it go away and felt relieved. Marcus had reached out. Two years, nothing, then: "Hey stranger. Miss you, man." I felt something warm for about three seconds. Then the weight came. The calculation of what replying would cost. The performance of catching up, explaining where I'd been, pretending I was okay. I put my phone face-down. Six days later the notification was gone. And I felt relief, then immediately felt sick about feeling relieved. I told myself I'd become an introvert. That this was just who I was now. Quieter. More internal. That the version of me who showed up for people, who called just to talk, who was genuinely fun at dinner — that guy had run his course. But introverts don't grieve their old selves at 2am. What actually happened: years of running on empty had taught my nervous system that people were expensive. Not bad. Just more than I had. So it started routing around them. Automatically. Protectively. Until solitude wasn't a choice anymore — it was just the default. That's not introversion. That's a system that learned to survive by going small. There's a 3-minute quiz on Liven that helped me understand what my nervous system had actually been doing. First step toward a conversation that didn't feel like a performance. Link is below. Reset Regenerate