A few years ago I decided to let my life speak for me. I don’t need the approval of others. It was one of the best and most important decisions I ever made.

I don’t remember the day, but I do remember the moment of the revelation. I was answering someone who was accused of me of some atrocious thing or another, as happens almost daily online.

We had begun the he-said, she-said, back and forth that resolves nothing, never changes minds, and is most often disturbing. As a book writer, I spent decades writing books and sending them out to fend for themselves.

My readers very rarely got to speak directly to me about them, especially before blogging and e-mail and texts and Facebook messaging. There are, as E.B. White wrote, lots of them and one of me.

Sometimes, that is wonderful. Sometimes it is not. It was a huge change for me. I like hearing from readers, I don’t care to be assaulted regularly as a part of my daily routine.

The anger out there was tapping into the anger in here (me), and one was feeding off of the other.

The problem was not really the poor souls who bring their brokenness to strangers; the problem was me; you get what you put out, their anger at me was a pure reflection of the anger in me.

It was my problem, and I went to work on it. These days, the nasty messages have receded, along with much of my anger and defensiveness.

This decision was a small miracle, as day by day, the anger left me, dribbled, and leaked away until it was so dim a voice and feeling I could hardly hear or remember it. What was left was good – creative energy which is what I am about.

A light went off in my head that day.

Why am I arguing with these people, or enabling them, or spreading more hostility and hatred out into the world, and thus diminishing myself by giving credence and air to the lonely people out there with their hostility and broken souls?

I was doing the very thing I most dislike: I was arguing and hating rather than thinking.

A psychiatrist wrote recently in the New York Times that the mentally ill or disturbed are no longer confined in institutions;  increasingly they turn to social media to vet and express their sometimes troubled minds.

In our cruel and money-driven society, they have nowhere else to go.

People who put themselves out there, she wrote, need to be prepared to speak their truth and stand their ground. They can’t be defending themselves all day instead of working. If you get your head on straight, it can make you stronger, not weaker.

Why not let my life speak for itself, I thought, and not try to explain or defend it to others? By definition, that would make me stronger.

Being a writer online is exhilarating, and for me, the right place. It is a vocation.

But it comes with challenges, one of the, being that the writer has opened him or herself to millions, if not billions of strangers, many of who devote much of their lives to cruelty and nastiness.

For many people, writers, or others, this is a reason to hide their writing from the world. For me, it is just the opposite.

It is essential to put my writing out there in the world and learn to stand my ground without becoming what I hate.

As my readers know, that has not been easy or simple. I am getting there.

Trying to live someone else’s life, or to live by generalities and norms, is to fail, and to cripple my writing in the process.

Those social media assaults turned out to be valuable and important to me, they compelled me to look at myself once more, and do the hard work of getting better and healthier. My life is not about arguing with people or defending myself. It is about living my life.

This work, I see, never ends, and if I ever do think it is over, then I am doomed.

Writing is my vocation and a vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening, to me, to others. Mostly, I have to listen to my life and to understand what it is really and honestly about. A vocation is a calling that I hear.

Before I can know what I want to do, I have to know who I really am.

That process is tough on the ego because who I am is not nearly who I want myself to be. Listening to the true self is not always pleasant or admirable. None of us are perfect.

It took me some years and much hard work and true contemplation to sense the difference between who I was and who I could be, to realize that running beneath the surface of my daily life, there was a deeper and truer life waiting to be acknowledged and set free.

I didn’t know that person, had never met him, I was too busy struggling with other issues.

From the day I was born, at home and in school and at work, I was taught, as most children are taught, to listen to everyone and everything but me, to get my values, clues, and instructions about living from others – parents, teachers, rabbis and priests, grandmothers and cousins,  aunts and uncles, all the powers that be.

I realized late in life the voice I needed to hear was mine.

And that I needed to let my life speak for itself, I am under no obligation to argue about it, defend it or justify it to other people, especially in an age when strangers believe they have to right to tell other people how to live.

I remember coming across a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote that spoke to me: “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

I am achieving that great accomplishment. Every day, someone, most often a stranger I will never meet or know,  suggests I become something other than what I am.

Every day,  I get to be proud of what I am and to accept and be myself.