“like successfully challenging your readers to consider your thoughts”

But I don’t set out to challenge anyone. I set out to express myself. I don’t challenge people because I think it’s not my place to challenge people. I don’t like people challenging me so I would never do that to someone else. I merely state what I think. I have no goal other than that.

“Did you once say that you don’t feel emotions? That you work with knowledge and facts?”

No, I said that I don’t allow my emotions to influence facts. I keep my emotions out of the my when I’m trying to establish a line of reasoning. I’m probably more able than most to do that, because in my struggle for survival, my emotions would have gotten in the way so I suppressed them or kept them in a separate box. I feel very intensely. I just don’t allow them to influence my reasoning. So, I suppose, I can come across as quite stark at times.

I experienced gaslighting throughout my life. It was only towards my late 50s that I started realizing that I wasn’t guilty of things, and it took until I was 62 to realize that people were self-interested and they were competing against me. So they used whatever they could to put me down. I don’t compete with others, so it never occurred to me that that was what people were doing.

I recognize that I have a way with words, but I think whether people read me or not has more to do with Medium and Google and other venues sending me traffic. If they didn’t send traffic to my stream, then, regardless of how good I was with words, I wouldn’t be read. This is what I mean by the element of luck.