the all-important you version

Last week, my son, Henry, said he liked my new essay, but that all the links I included made me look like an influencer trying to sell you something.Ngl, chat, I low-key fumbled the bag. My aura is negative. See, I thought I was sigma, when I’m mid at best. That’s on me, no cap. Luckily, Henry is a certified rizzler with real ones energy. Bro can clock an NPC from a mile away and knows when someone’s just glazing for clout.Richard Cohen, in Making History, drops a line I’ve been turning over for weeks: “It is the further great irony of writing about the past that any author is the prisoner of their character and circumstances yet often they are the making of him.”Prisoner and making, in the same breath. That’s the part most of us get wrong. We feel the prisoner half (the chances we didn’t get, the mentor who never appeared, the parent who wasn’t a famous novelist, the childhood that just wasn’t interesting enough). We never get around to accepting the second half.Having spent ten…