that you were not self-made, because there is no such thing as a self-made human. It places you in the context of an ecosystem. It confesses that you are a creature—simply, someone created by forces beyond you—which is to say reared and scarred and sanded and formed. It admits that you are not some nebula floating in the ether but that you have roots and are inescapably interdependent with the world around you.
