On hiatus, silence, and discernment
To write, or not to write — in today’s world a hiatus can look like failure: discipline slipped, the will weakened, the direction lost. But does silence always mean collapse? Does the apparent absence of discipline always mean laziness or disorder? And is disorder always only a vice?
The answer, at least for me, is no. There are those who would answer differently: the 5 a.m. club, the influencers, the people who hardly ever stop to rest, whose worth seems to depend on their output. But pauses, even involuntary ones, are not necessarily collapse, vice, or failure. Sometimes they become a means of reflection; sometimes they open a possibility for insight.
By now I have decided that I won’t be telling you why I went quiet, or what exactly the months of silence held. At least not at this point in time. Not because it’s a secret in the dramatic sense, and not because I’m trying to be “mysterious” for effect. It’s simply that the explanation isn’t the point. My page was never a stage and it was never meant to be one. It isn’t aimed at building an audience, and it certainly isn’t built around the anxious religion of follower growth. If a few dozen people read it, fine. If almost nobody does, also fine. This space exists first of all as mine; as a room that happens to have windows and a door. And a room doesn’t owe its visitors a log of why it was locked or where its occupant has been. Nor does the occupant themself.
That distinction changes the meaning of a hiatus. If you write for a crowd, silence has an obvious social cost: absence is noticed, the feed moves on, the algorithm punishes you, the audience forgets. But when writing isn’t a performance, the pause becomes something else entirely: a shift in the relationship between the inner life and the spoken or written word. The real question stops being “am I being forgotten?”, “am I still relevant?”, and becomes “why do I not want to share this? Why do I choose, for now, to close the blinds and lock the door?”
In Valentinian Gnosticism, the beginning is figured as Bythos, the Depth, the unfathomable source; and with him, inseparable, Sige, Silence. From this silent depth the aeonic unfolding begins, and eventually the Word, the Logos, appears. Silence (and depth) is what made words and consequently their meaning possible. Word and Silence have always been complementary in this way. Today, many of us have simply forgotten the significance of Silence.
That’s worth remembering in a culture that turns everything into content. Even when no one is watching, we can slip into a kind of compulsive Logos — treating every thought as material that must be shared, every experience as something to be “processed” into a post, every insight as something that has to be put in an article or a book before it evaporates. As if a phenomenon only becomes real once it is written down and shared with other people. The old occult world knew better than that. Not everything is meant to be spoken, written, or displayed. Words carry power, and power spoken at the wrong time can do as much damage as power withheld at the right one.
On a hiatus like this, you start to hear voices you hadn’t quite noticed before, though they may have been speaking to you for a long time. One of them I’d call the Performer. It doesn’t necessarily need a crowd; it only needs the feeling of being a person who shares their thoughts, someone who matters. It whispers that if you stop publishing, you are losing your edge, that your voice is evaporating, that you are becoming inert and mediocre. It is the same compulsion behind documenting a life in photographs: not always meant (solely) for others, but because the documentation reassures you that you exist, that you are part of the whole, that your life is valuable because it has been witnessed.
There are two other voices worth naming, because they are just as dishonest as the Performer, only quieter. One I’d call the Sanctimonious Mystic. It idealizes withdrawal as inherently superior. It wants your silence to mean you are “too deep” for ordinary speech, too refined for the noise, above the need to be understood (and most others would not understand you anyway – or so it says). It dresses vanity in the robes of transcendence and calls it all humility.
The other voice I’d call the Impostor. It tells you the hiatus was inevitable, that it should simply become your permanent status; because who are you to think your thoughts deserve expression? Neither of these voices can be trusted any more than the Performer can. Whether constantly sharing or compulsively withholding: both miss that the actual task is discernment; learning when words want to be spoken and when they need to stay in the depth a while longer.
This is, I think, where most public writing, mine included at its worst, goes wrong. In both directions. We assume that if something is timely, or clever, or technically true, if it is personal Gnosis, or magical experience, it has automatically earned a place in the world’s feed. But intelligence is not an obligation to perform intelligence. Something can be accurate, well-argued, beautifully written, full of wisdom, and still not be yours to say, not yet, not like that. The discipline isn’t only in writing well; it’s in asking, before you publish anything, what the words are actually for. Or whether they are simply the Performer who is eager to prove relevance before the thought has finished forming.
It works the other way, too; discernment isn’t only the writer’s job. A culture addicted to publishing content is just as addicted to consuming it. But not everything that is shared carries a current; a great deal of what fills a feed is Word without Silence and Depth behind it. It is noise mistaken for Gnosis because it was said with confidence and at volume. The same inner eye that helps a writer know when to stay quiet can help a reader know what’s worth their attention and what is just performance wearing the mask of insight. Read closer. Contemplate. Let the noise go.
A hiatus like mine molds you. When I look back at some of my own old posts now, after a long silence, a few of them feel (partly) dead: things I once felt compelled to explain that now seem obvious, or simply no longer mine. Other posts read deeper than I remembered. Silence doesn’t erase the Work; it reshapes how you see it.
So I won’t be explaining why I have been silent. Not now. I’ll say only this: the fire was never out; it simply was not visible from outside, and that not-showing was its own kind of Work. What I can promise instead of a schedule is discernment — or at least a try at it. I do not owe you, nor myself, consistency for its own sake. When I write here again, it will not be because I need to prove I still exist. It will be because something is ready to be expressed. My page remains what it always was: a personal chamber with windows and a door. I’ll write when it is time — whether it lands with a few of you, or none. And if it is read by exactly the one person who needed to read it, it will not have drowned in the noise.
