the things I "believed" were things I thought sounded good, admirable, respectable, courageous. They weren't my things, however-I had stolen them. Most of them I had taken from books. Having "understood" them, abstractly, I presumed I had a right to them-presumed that I could adopt them, as if they were mine: presumed that they were me. My head was stuffed full of the ideas of others; stuffed full of arguments I could not logically refute. I did not know then that an irrefutable argument is not necessarily true, nor that the right to identify with certain ideas had to be earned.
