Different Times & Different Skins

Staying true to future versions of self

Queen Street Mall | An early foray into street photography many years ago - I was obsessed with the art of street photographers at the time

Reveries Journal #32 | Sunday 25 January 2026

To be honest, I nearly didn’t write this one.

But not writing this one would make it easier not to write the next.
Or the one after that.

And at some point in the future, I know I would regret not continuing through this thing I didn’t feel like doing at the time — because I’ve learned that working through that feeling is often what gets me to the place I’m trying to reach.

The great gift of midlife is that you’ve been here before enough times to recognise yourself. And self-knowledge is incredibly useful.

This week has carried an urge to drop off the planet entirely. To close down my decade-old blog. To give up on this newer thing — Substack. To quietly stop marketing my new book and fade into a life of looking after my grandson, with no opinions more demanding than: why, given a plethora of gelato flavours, would anyone willingly choose vanilla?

Last year was a lot. I keep saying that because when I look back on it — the trips, the people, the places — it feels like a lovely, chaotic blur.

This year, I want to put my energy into something else. I want to plant things. I want to putter around my house. I want to sink into the fabric of my life and routines without being distracted or disturbed by unnecessary shenanigans.

And truthfully, I don’t even feel like writing. I find myself wondering what this journal is even for. It all feels oddly irrelevant. Pointless, even.

But I’ve learned something about these moments.

They pass.

If I sold all my cameras every time my interest in photography waned, I would be permanently regretful when — six months later — I picked one up again and fell completely back in love with it.

I have many interests. I think that’s how a full and satisfying life works. We can’t be interested in everything all the time — that would send us mad — but moving wholeheartedly into one thing, then another, is part of the rhythm.

When I was writing my book, there were weeks of obsessive focus. Then I had to abandon it completely for a while — leave it to toast in the cloud. Which was annoying, because when I came back, I first had to work out where on earth I’d saved it. OneDrive? iCloud? Which file name? Which draft? I would fall out of love with the work, then discover it again, adjust and edit, be delighted and consumed and then ugh - time to put it away again.

The same thing happens with my cameras. After a lull, I have to reacquaint myself with the gear. The buttons. The muscle memory. The drone, too.

It could all look like time-wasting. But over time, knowing yourself changes the calculation. You begin to understand which passions always return, which ones dim to coals and quietly rekindle.

So you don’t dismantle your life during the quiet spells.

You keep the tools.
You keep the places where the work lands.
You keep the structures — not out of pressure, but out of trust and a knowledge of the seasons, both internal and external.

Winter brings hiking, camping, biking — the outdoors that Queensland summers won’t allow this freckle-fair-skinned woman to tolerate in the midday sun.

Summer brings swimming. Writing. Long light at the edges of the day, and lately sauna and yoga.

This isn’t about forcing creativity.
It’s about knowing my seasons well enough not to panic when one of them goes quiet.

And trusting that when the feeling returns — as it always does — there will already be somewhere for it to arrive and settle in again.

So if this week feels a little lullish, remember to keep the structures in place. The doldrums will move along again, and you’ll be glad you didn’t abandon ship, and instead, when the winds come, you can set off for new uncharted places, but with the same vessel that you’ve always relied upon and know how to sail.

Which reminds me of a place I have been before and also how grateful I am to have access to ten years of writing on my blog that shows me more than anything else, that we don’t change all that much on an integral level; instead, we meet up with ourselves down the road again, in different times and with different skins.

And it’s all just practice.

What’s on your read lately list?

I’ve been reading a lot of books by Kristen Hannah, a brilliant storyteller, and also The Other Side of Change by Maya Shankar. Another great summer read was Sandwich by Catherine Newman.