Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

I know how profoundly things have changed for the better, and how many people are nevertheless not who they were meant to be because the distorting mirror of gender gives them damaged senses of self, or because their rights and capacities or even conditions of survival are undermined. I cannot imagine a wholly undamaged human being or that that’s a useful thing to imagine, though I can readily imagine that some of the kinds of damage inflicted on my gender can be reduced and delegitimized.

There is closure and reopening and sometimes something reopens because you can bring something new to it, repair it in a new way, by understanding it a new way. Sometimes the meaning of the beginning of the story has changed as new chapters are added.