There comes a moment in a life when the past and the future both decide to arrive at the same time, uninvited and without warning, and the person in the middle is left to make sense of the collision. For years, I wrote into the void, speaking to no one in particular, building a record of my thinking because it was the only way I knew to stay alive. And then, almost without ceremony, the void began to answer back. Not with applause, not with fanfare, but with the unmistakable hum of attention — the kind that arrives quietly, city by city, IP address by IP address, until you realize you are no longer alone.
Success, when it finally begins to take shape, does not feel like triumph. It feels like exposure. It feels like standing in a doorway with the light behind you, knowing that anyone who ever knew you — or thought they did — can see your silhouette. And so when the analytics spike, when the map lights up in places tied to old wounds, the body reacts first. It remembers the years when attention meant danger, when being noticed meant being diminished. It does not care that I am older now, safer now, steadier now. It only knows that someone from the past is reading a hundred posts in a night, and that the past has never been known for its mercy.
But fear is only half the story. The other half is the quiet astonishment of being read by strangers in places I once traced on maps as abstractions. Netanya. Dublin. Vancouver. Mountain View. Cities that once felt impossibly far away now appear in my analytics like small, steady lanterns. These readers do not come with history attached. They do not arrive with old grievances or half‑remembered versions of who I used to be. They come because the writing speaks to something in them. They come because the work is beginning to matter.
And so I stand in this strange middle place, where the ghosts of my childhood and the strangers of my future both lean in at once. The ghosts read to confirm their old stories. The strangers read to understand the new one. And I, caught between them, feel the old fear rise — the fear of being seen, the fear of being misread, the fear of success itself. Because success is not a destination. It is a reckoning. It forces you to confront the parts of yourself that learned to survive by staying small.
But I am learning, slowly, that the ghosts cannot touch me now. They can read, but they cannot reach. They can observe, but they cannot alter the trajectory. The strangers, on the other hand, are not here to take anything. They are here because something in the writing resonates, because something in the voice feels true.
And so I choose to face forward. I choose the strangers. I choose the future. The ghosts may watch, but they no longer get a vote.
Stories That Are All True 