Now, and finally, I know what success is. It took me a long time, but I am finally seeing it and beginning to live it.

Success is living my truth, sharing it, and standing up for it.

I won’t lie to myself any longer, or permit others to lie about me. Above all, I will face up to the truth within me and stand up for it.

The man who lies to himself wrote Dostoevsky, and listens to his own lies, is an empty shell, a hollow man.

He comes to a point where he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.

That was where I often landed, at least in my mind.

Without a truth of my own, I was prey for everyone else’s idea of me. If you are false to yourself, you will be false to everyone.

Having no respect from anyone or for myself,  I ceased to love or know peace of mind and spoke only to myself, a helpless echo that bounces on and off walls and fields and purpose.

The man who finds his own truth and stands in it will finally have something to say, something worth listening to. He can find love.

The man or woman who cannot see or find their own truth is a ghost, a ship without sails, a body with no heart.

They are lost, their souls wither and dies, they die inside for the first time, coming back to life when they can find their true voice, not the voices of others.

My treasure is the love in my heart and my thoughts. My thoughts tell me if I am finally free or still caught in the chains of others. I feel free.

Our world is now and always has been full of people who would tell me who I am, what I feel, what I want, what I should feel, what I should want.

There is no end to them, they can’t be put off, reasoned with, or made to go away. They are their own pestilence.

For most of my life, I fought with those people – parents, grownups, bosses, editors, publishers, trolls, uncles and aunts,  smug teachers,   the well-meaning and the intrusive, the arrogant, and the disturbed, the well-meaning and the arrogant.

I thought to have a life meant fighting for it, but standing in my truth is very different than fighting for my life.

Our world has changed and the people who would tell me what to do are legion, they are everywhere and they have miraculous new tools to reach out into the consciousness of helpless victims and turn them dark.

One of the lies in my head was the idea that I could fight them and fend them off, even as I was overwhelmed, and could no longer tell friend from foe.

I tried to reason. I found anger, came rising up in me. I was losing myself in the tortured and angry voices of others, I was living a story written by Edgard Allen Poe, a dream of Kafka.

I saw a beautiful and mystical movie the other night, it was called the Green Knight and it was about a quest undertaken by Sir Gawain, who was to become a knight of the Round Table. He was fighting his fear.

In the movie, he was asked why he was risking his life on his quest. “For honor,” he says, “that is what a knight does.”

I was surprised to find myself thinking that this is why I was living my life as well. For honor, and searching for honor is the only way I know of to find one’s truth and to live it. I am no knight, but Gawain spoke to me.

It was time for a change, to close a door,  to walk away from all those voices in my head telling me I was weak, dishonest, cruel, foolish.

That’s why we keep making movies about King Arthur. Honor calls to us over the ages. And we are missing it in our world today.

I see now that this is not a new thing, not the fault of the Internet. I have been doing this all of my life since I didn’t have a truth to stand on, I had no way of freeing myself from the dark and angry shadows of our fragmented and disconnected world.

Everywhere I went, people were always telling me who I was. Why didn’t I know?

I felt like a big and empty hole that other people were always trying to fill.

My idea of honor was strengthened by my interactions with the Amish people who live near me now.

Whatever else anyone can say about them, they live in their truth, they do not hear or listen or engage with the people who would tell them how to live and who to be.

They do not let other voices into their heads. That is the point of them.

The Amish did not teach me to honor my truth, but my friend Moise did show me that it was possible. You just had to honor yourself with respect and dignity.

This was something an author who had worked alone for decades, an insecure man with monsters stirring inside of him. I was simply not prepared for the life I wanted and was suddenly living.

This exposed my weakness and my anger. I couldn’t hide from it any longer and went to pieces.

Since they are dybbuks and spirits and demons, the legions of the devil,  there was no way to reason with the trolls of social media or make them go away or the countless people who relished telling me what to do and how to be.

They weren’t real, really, they never appeared in the material world. They were spirits. How could they go away?

They simply fed off me and so many others and pulled us into the darkness like sirens from the dark. And I let them, even invited them in.

Wake up, wake up. No one in this world has the right to speak cruelly and dismissively to me or demean my dreams and hopes..

Teachers can do that, parents and brothers and sisters can do that, boyfriends and girlfriends can do that, husbands and wives, pundits and so-called leaders can do it.

A young student of mine in New York came to me in tears some years ago, his parents had given him an ultimatum – give up writing or pay his own tuition. He came to me in tears, asking what he should do?

I remember asking him what his passion was (Joseph Campbell called it bliss). He hesitated, embarrassed. “I love stamps,” he said, “I collect stamps.” Then thank your parents for all they have done for you, and get them out of your head, I suggested. Go follow your truth.

He is now the editor of one of the most prestigious philatelic magazines in the country. He sends me a thank you note every Christmas. He says I saved his life. I didn’t. He did.

When I met Maria, she was also reminding me that I didn’t need to do what she wanted, or honor her requests. “Let’s go out to dinner,” she would say, “but you don’t have to.”

Why I wondered, did she need to reassure me of that?

Over time I saw this pattern, she had been punished for her truth, for saying what she wanted, for making her own decisions. Those were the voices in her head.

She seemed afraid to want something, it was as if she would be punished for it.  You don’t have to do that with me, I said, and she stopped.

Now, when she wants to do something, get out of the way. She has her voice.

A few months ago, a reporter in New York called to interview me and we had mutual friends and experiences. We talked for a long time.

He told me he was unhappy and he needed a change but was frightened to change. He asked my advice.

“What is your thing, your truth?” I asked him. “I love writing about New York City,”  he said. “That was easy,” I said, “go out and find a way to do it the way you want.” He wrote back the next morning, suggesting I had saved his mind and possibly his life.

No, I said, I didn’t. Only you can do that. You just have to find your truth and stand on it.

Once again, I shivered to realize I  had yet to do the same thing. How cheap and easy it is to tell other people what to do.

How honorable and wonderful it is to tell yourself what to do and believe it can be done.

Wasn’t I getting old for change? No, said a voice of my own. Never.

I had to do the same favor for myself, I had to give myself the same talk.

I always listened to the voices outside of me, well before the “send” button gave everyone in the world the chance to get inside of my already confused and uncertain head.

I had no truth to stand behind. This has changed. My life has been full of opportunities to change and grew, and for all of my troubles, I have grabbed every one of them.

A few weeks ago, I woke up in horror to realize that these voices in my head were often stronger than my own, I sat up in bed and told myself this had to change.

I asked myself what is it, that if I believed it down to my very core, would change everything and free me of other voices.

It was right there for me, right under my nose: I went within, came face to face with my truth, it brought me right to where I wanted to and needed to go to. I looked inside, and not outside. I was not confused.

I don’t hear those voices any longer, they mean nothing to me, I will no longer ever be confused listening to other people try to hurt me with being a righteous and honorable thing to do.

They are gone, vanished into the ether. As Sir Gawain realized on his quest, honor comes from cutting all the cords and shutting out the voices, and finding the truth in yourself.

That’s how you get strong and brave.

The only way for me to evolve was to open myself up to life. As long as I am living my truth, I’m on the right track.

Henry Thoreau understood that for him to find his truth, he had to look for it alone. And he found it, even as doting mother brought him dinner.

I find there is a great deal of truth in my head, and some honor as well. I love the feeling of honor, I have been on my own quest for honor for decades, I just thought it was presumptuous to own it in front of others.

I know now that success and failure come and go, but I must never again let them define me. And I hope you good people reading this will never let them define you.

That is perhaps the first and last piece of advice you will ever hear from me.

“Stop buying into the story others coined for you,” Assegid Hableworld told Gawain, “ and also refrain – religiously, from believing in the narrative your circumstance forces you to live.”