Missing

We started watching Murder Mountain on Netflix last night. Only a few episodes in, so not sure I’d recommend it yet, but so far so good.
One of the central themes is the large number of missing persons from this one county in California, which also happens to the the same county that supposedly produces 60% of the weed in the US (not sure how this is determined…). As I was watching last night, I started to ponder what it means to me “missing”. It seems to me that it wouldn’t make sense for someone to describe themselves as missing. The closest they might come that would make sense is to describe themselves as hiding, but that’s not the same as missing.
Missing is not a property of a person, but rather of a person’s relationship with other people placed on them by those other people. The only people considered missing are in that category because someone is missing them. Someone else wants to know where they are but doesn’t.
That got me to thinking about how many other labels are applied to us by those we are in relationship with rather than that we choose ourselves. That seems like a long list.