He said he needed to work on himself, or figure himself out, or get his head straight, and since then you have been living inside one question, will he come back after working on himself, and inside the smaller one underneath it, which is whether the sentence was a reason or an exit. I cannot answer the first one, and nobody can, and I would rather say that in the opening paragraph than let you read nine hundred words hoping I change my mind. What I can do instead is take the phrase apart, say what working on himself looks like from the outside when it is real, and then spend most of the page on what you are doing in the meantime, which is the part that is yours.
The meantime is the whole article, really. The thing this particular goodbye does, more than most, is put your life on pause while his supposedly gets better, and I would like to take the pause off if I can.
What working on himself can mean
The phrase covers a lot of ground and I would not assume the worst or the best of it. Sometimes it means exactly what it says: a person who knows he has been hard to be with and wants to be different before he tries again with anyone. Sometimes it is the gentlest available way of saying he is done and does not want to say why. And sometimes, honestly, he does not know which it is either, and is using the words because they were the ones available.
You cannot tell these apart from where you are standing, and that is not a failure of attention. It is that the difference lives in the next six months of his ordinary days rather than in the sentence, and the sentence is all you have been given. What I would gently say is that the version of the phrase that is about you, that he is fixing himself so that he can come back to you, is the version he did not actually say, and it is worth noticing who added it.
What it looks like from outside, if it is real
Real change is slow and it is boring and it does not send updates. From outside, a person who is genuinely working on something looks mostly like a person living quietly: keeping appointments, seeing the same friends, going to bed at a sensible hour, being a little less available rather than more. It does not usually come with a message every few weeks saying how much progress is being made, because the progress is not for an audience.
So if what you are receiving is the occasional warm message with news of how well he is doing, I would read that as contact rather than as evidence, and I would notice what it does to your week. And if what you are receiving is nothing, that is compatible with real change and with no change at all, which is the frustrating truth of the thing, and the reason the question cannot be answered from the outside.
Will he come back after working on himself, and the trap in the question
The trap is the word after. It puts a finishing line in a place where there is not one. People do not finish working on themselves on a Friday and come back on the Monday; they carry on being people, and any return happens for reasons that are mixed and mostly invisible. So the question is really asking you to wait for an event that does not have a date, and that kind of waiting is the most expensive kind there is, because it cannot end on its own.
The will he come back page draws cards for your side of this and refuses the yes, the no and the timeline, and I would rather send you there than pretend a spread can see his spring. If the pattern of leaving to sort himself out is one you have met before, in him or in somebody else, attachment styles explained, kindly will make the shape of it recognizable, which helps more than it sounds.
What you are doing meanwhile
Here is the thing I most want to say. There is a flyer for a pottery class on your fridge, or something like it, that you did not sign up for because you might be busy in October, and October is the month he might be back. Look at the phrasing of that. You have handed a month of your own life to a decision another person has not made yet, and you would not do that for anyone else in the world.
Meanwhile is not the waiting room before your life restarts. It is your life, the same one, and the weeks in it count exactly as much as the weeks that might come after. If he is working on himself, the kindest thing you can do for both of you is to be somebody with a full October when he is done, rather than somebody who kept it clear. And if he is not working on anything, the October is still yours either way.
If he does come back
Then you will have something to decide rather than something to know, and I would want you to have spent the meantime becoming somebody who can decide it. You are allowed not to have waited, and to say so. You are allowed to want to see the change in the days rather than hear about it in a speech, to take a month to look, and to find at the end of the month that you want something different from what you had.
That is the useful version of this question, and it is answerable now: not will he come back after working on himself, but what would I need to see, and would I still want it. The leave him alone version of this question goes further into what the quiet is for while you are finding out.
What is worth doing today
Today, sign up for one thing in the next six weeks that you have been leaving open in case. It could be the class, or the trip with the friend who asked, or the dinner with a date on it. Put it in the calendar before you go to bed, and write it in pen if the calendar is on paper. It will take you ten minutes, and it will be the first date in your October that he did not put there.
Come back and tell me what went in the calendar.
Clara