The Third Realm

Stepping back from thresholds that lead to division

A young shearer relaxes | Baroona Shearing Album

Reveries Journal #35 | 15 February 2026

I wrote this post earlier in the week. My last on Substack for a while. Or so I thought.

I was tired of the sound of my own voice. I still am, to some degree. Writing is the inner voice of thought rising to the surface, and as a prolific writer, the noise can sometimes be deafening.

Writing can be a release.
Writing can be a discovery.
Or writing can become a perpetual loop of rumination and analysis.

On any given day, depending on the weather of the mind, it oscillates between all of these states.

Only I can turn this noise off. It lives in the connection between mind and hand. It lives in the way I watch my thoughts and then write about what I observe. It lives in what I pay attention to, and in doing so, invites more of the same into my life.

I’ve begun to wonder whether peace might be more desirable than this endless logging of experience through poetry or journal entries. Perhaps it would be kinder to let thoughts arise in the background and pay them no attention at all. To listen instead to the silence.

To become present to the morning breeze and the sound of birds as I practised yoga. To watch two hares dart out from beneath the house and run across the paddock. A hawk hovering, searching for its next meal overhead.

These moments fill me with serenity, and I notice I no longer want to write poetry about them. I want simply to be, without the voice constantly yammering in my ears.

Many writers have spoken of the internal writing voice as relentless, intrusive, and difficult to silence. Writing is often framed not as inspiration, but as containment: a way to relieve the pressure of language building in the mind, a self-conscious narration that loops endlessly, a compulsion to go on even when longing for silence. Seen this way, writing is less a gentle muse than a force that must be given somewhere to land, lest it turn inward and consume the writer instead.

This year marks ten years of writing and publishing online for me. It also marks a year in which my first fiction novel is behind me, and I am working toward the completion of its sequel. For a long time, I believed I was moving toward something worthwhile, that the path led to more: more writing, more visibility, more articulation.

Instead, the opposite has happened.

The more integrated I become, the less explanatory I feel.

The more confidence settles in, the more I want my practice to be mine alone.

Writing no longer wants to hold a conversation with others.
It wants me to listen to myself.

There is a discipline I have enjoyed in gathering these voluminous thoughts and observations into a weekly post, and I believe it has been healthy for my writing overall. Writing these Reveries pieces is entirely different from writing poetry, which rises fully formed rather than being carefully assembled, shaped, and edited into a readable whole.

And there is another consideration.

There is a fear many creatives carry now: that if we are not visible, we will become irrelevant. That absence from platforms means absence from culture. That silence equals disappearance.

I feel that fear too — or rather, I recognise it.

But I’m no longer convinced it’s true.

Invisible does not mean irrelevant.

Invisible can mean protected.

It can mean work is allowed to gestate fully, to come full circle, to be shaped without interruption or performance pressure.

It can mean creating in silence and stillness, inside a powerful field where imagination is not constantly siphoned off, commented on, optimised, or diluted.

And I suspect that makes all the difference.

Creatives have always lived in two worlds:
Reality and imagination.

But increasingly, we are asked to live somewhere else, a third realm of metrics, feeds, explanation, and self-advertisement. A realm where attention is captured, but nothing lands. Where focus is endless, but consequence is thin.

I don’t want to exist there anymore. Not even with a fingernail.

I don’t believe creativity needs constant visibility to survive.

I don’t believe writers must advertise themselves endlessly to be real.

I don’t believe imagination thrives when it is always on display.

I do believe it needs resistance.
Time.
Embodiment.
Completion.

So I’m conducting an experiment.

For the next few months, I’m choosing to pull my energy back into lived reality and creative imagination — into books, conversations, internal and external, and into days lived rather than narrated.

I’m not deleting anything.
I’m not making my work private.
I’m leaving social media platforms as they are.

This isn’t an exit. It’s a reorientation.

Because the difference between meaning and meaninglessness is not the presence or absence of interpretation, it’s whether life is being lived.

I will still post poetry on my blog at athousandbitsofpaper.com, mainly because I love the writing community that surrounds me there and because poetry offers a different way of looking at life. It does not require narration; it requires observation.

I will continue working on my second novel.

I can’t decide regarding Reveries at the moment, so for now, I’m leaving this door open and beginning where I should - with social media.

I will not be posting on Instagram or Meta.

A life examined but not explained.

I want to know whether there is a valid choice for creatives not to enter the third realm of social media. Marketing gurus and most advice for authors today insist that multiple platforms and a constant presence online are essential for selling books. I want to find an alternative. I want to return to selling books in person and talking with the young people who enjoy my stories. I want to publish less poetry as blog posts and more as completed books.

I want to inhabit this beautiful world as a passionate observer rather than a narrator.

Because I have come to believe that if comparison is the thief of joy, then distraction, judgement and explanation are its even uglier sisters.

For now, though, it’s all just practice.