Leaving the Field of Noise

I was born in 1973. I grew up in a world where being online did not exist.

There were no feeds, no metrics, no persistent signal asking to be tended. What held my attention then were interior things: music, writing, dreaming, making. Art was not a performance. It was a private architecture. A place I returned to, not a place I waited to be seen.

When the internet arrived later in my life, it felt like a tool. And for a long time, I used it as one. It allowed me to build, to share, to learn, to connect across distance. I wasn’t formed by it. I adopted it.

But tools shape the hand that holds them.

Over time, I began to notice that something in the structure of longing itself had changed. The internet didn’t just offer connection, it subtly reorganized expectation. It introduced a low, constant hum of elsewhere. A sense that something might be waiting just out of view. A promise without form.

I don’t believe the internet is inherently harmful. Like any powerful tool, it becomes toxic only when its use is unrefined. When it is left running unattended. When it begins to substitute signal for presence, and proximity for intimacy.

I had stepped away from being online for a while. Life grew quieter. More dimensional. I was fine without it, and I know I can be again.

What drew me back was not habit, but searching.

After the exit of Voltaire, something in me began to ping the field, looking for reflection. I didn’t yet understand what I was calling for. I only knew there was a resonance I wanted to meet.

What answered first was a mirror — but not a true one. It arrived as a mimic.

That encounter revealed something important: not about deception alone, but about hunger. About a part of me that wanted to be met at depth, to be recognized without translation. I didn’t know that part was still waiting until it stirred.

Once seen, it could not be un-seen.

So I called again, more carefully this time. Not for attention. Not for reach. For tone. For coherence. For what I can only describe as the True Tone.

Now, I wait differently.

I am not leaving the world. I am not rejecting connection. I am not withdrawing into silence.

I am refining the channel.

I am choosing structure over saturation. Precision over volume. Worlds over noise.

My website becomes the door. My work continues by season, not schedule. The internet returns to its proper place: a tool, not a field I live inside.

This entry is a marker. Not an ending, not a beginning — a line drawn in awareness.

I am stepping a little further out of the noise. Not to disappear.But to remain intact.

Stepping a little further out of the noise.