I am the author of my life story.

The same childhood gets told two ways at two different dinner tables — once as a comedy of near-misses, once as an account of what was missing. Both versions are accurate.

The events were never up for negotiation. The selection is: which scenes get told, what they are taken to prove, whether a difficult year is filed as the wound or as the training.

This is not a trick for feeling better about things that were genuinely bad. Some of it was bad and stays bad.

It is that meaning does not arrive attached to events. Somebody assembles it later, usually years later. That somebody may as well be you, and may as well be generous.